In this valley we have a warmhearted but haphazard barter exchange system going for food produce. Sometimes it works well and sometimes it doesn’t, but it means that we have food in the house when there is no money in the bank.
Right now I have rows of jars of quince jelly and a truly unspeakable sticky peach jam in a tall cannister. A handful of spring onions, some mint, two oxheart tomatoes. In return I have given over portions of lamb casserole in tupperware and bunches of fresh herbs (parsley, coriander, origanum), the last of the figs and some lemons. In addition, a bonus, I have half a large white organic pumpkin and some clean tripe in a tin basin. Oh yes, the joy of dealing with offal in the country.
Because the terms of the barter are fairly open-ended to allow poorer people to participate, we have to work with what is there. Over the last four years I have come to understand how to cook through gluts of certain produce (peaches, butternut, large brown-skinned onions) and shortages and how to simply cook and eat what may not appeal to me that particular day. If I have lemons and garlic and black pepper in the kitchen, I can cook almost anything.
I live in a part of the world that suffers terrific water shortages, so I do square-foot gardening in a raised wooden slatted fruit pallet, lined with hessian and filled with compost and good nutrient-rich soil. Intensive gardening of Swiss chard (hugely rewarding) and herbs and bush tomatoes and small compact shrubs of chillies. Right now I am more interested in a very pretty mottled small snail that has eaten a seeding basil plant, waving and gesturing with its viridian horns. A beauty.
The key function of the (unwatered, drought-tolerant) garden is as a wildlife habitat along with being a kitchen garden. It is a refuge for chameleons and spiders and cobras and dozens of bird species. A place for rare medicinal herbs and threatened fynbos species and waterwise stoics that will carry the green space through a severe drought.
I love wilderness. Not in a sentimental or romantic way, because my small garden’s wilder aspects are not going to change the destruction of my local landscape, the sprawl of invasive species, the extinction of insects and wildlife, the hazards of monocropping with GM.
But in amongst the grey olives underplanted with restios, the elders and tulip trees (Halleria lucida), the polygalas and plumbago, the salvias and daylilies, the tumbling fragrant cistus, lavender, rosemary and viburnums, there is space for anything to happen. That is the delight and the mystery. My agapanthus has rooted deeply and the roots retain banks of earth against walls thrown up by neighbours. There are lizards and geckos and ant colonies and dragonflies. Bulbs that throw up delicate stems and scarlet or mauve flowers, grey and weaving helichrysum, durable succulents. It is a companionable garden and a place of learning for me. I can sit and watch the golden moles at the far corner aerate the earth with savvy tunnels, I can listen to white-eyes chirping in the lemon tree, I can see fennel’s umbellifer seedheads drying in the sunshine. Nature is not utilitarian, nature is Herself, abundant or raging or struggling or fighting back, diminished or depleted or driven out, to revive again elsewhere. And these years are blessed, to be able to live here and let my garden become a sanctuary.
This is the first space in which I have been able to hand the garden back to Nature, to dig up water-guzzling lawn, throw out stiff formal roses, plant trees and berry-bearing bushes. If I am the only one changed by the experience, challenged and renewed, it will still be worth it. Deep eco-magick takes time and experience.
In previous years I created hanging gardens on balconies, passionflower climbers on bamboo trellises that gave me armfuls of dark purple grenadillas, a wilful courgette that overran its barrel, pots of juicy nasturtiums, pelargoniums and a sedate bay tree. I have crowded kitchen and bathroom window sills with pots of tarragon, Italian flat-leaf parsley and banana chillies. Shared bedroom spaces with lush birdsnest ferns or damp-loving orchids, allowed plump rambling blue-grey succulents to monopolise bookshelves and fireplace mantels.
And in the evenings I sit by the fire and look at light reflected in a bowlful of autumn-red apples, and want to throw open doors and windows to the garden, allow creepers to edge along dada rails and across ceilings, share the bath with jewelled African violets or sheets of Spanish moss and be greeted in the mornings by air plants, the enchanting tillandia, tangling with door jambs.
Re-entering the forest, the recurring paleo dream of womanpower before civilisation. O such mytho-poetic joy! Now I must go and scrub tripe with a little nail brush.
Recent Comments