For Whom The Does The Garden Grow?

     It’s summer again. I have been in Alex for almost three years now. The fruits that are in abundance in my garden this year are – peaches, mulberries, apples, plumcots, and pears. There have been a few apricots and cherries. Lemons have been plentiful throughout the year. As usual the birds, particularly the sulphur-crested cockatoos, have been busy and well-fed. The others take their turns too. It is interesting – even bees come to drink the sweet nectar off the ripening fruits and berries. When there is competition, most animals and insects yield to others who are more aggressive, or higher on the food chain. Humans seem to rank at the top. The same bee will sting me if I go near its hive, but when I put my hands over a fruit it is on the other side of, it simply moves away. The birds too fly away, most without demur, but the cockatoos go away with a scream that sounds like an expletive. Often, they sit on the clothesline on one leg, hold one fruit up with the other foot (that becomes a hand!) and eat looking like a little kid. Sometimes it is hilarious to see another cockatoo come up, sit next to it and take bite of the held up fruit, much to the annoyance of the one holding it.

     It has been good that my kids have at various times picked a few fruits off the trees and eaten them, on the days they spend with me. The mulberries have been the most popular with them. They do not have much of the other fruits, but for some occasional peaches, which have made a good ‘smoothie’ in yoghurt. They make a good liquid diet for my son when he cannot chew much due to mouth ulcers. The apples and pears will ripen in the next couple of months – their season is later. We have been getting plums from the trees on the side of the road when walking around town. So many of them just fallen down to the ground, looks like they are wasted, but are not – ants and other insects get them.

     There are, however, days when I look around my yard. The ripened fruits have fallen to the ground in heaps, around the trees, the boughs bending over. I realise there are at least seven varieties of roses, of different colours in my yard. There are other flowers too, a riot of colours. They have flowered and bloomed all year. There is no one else around. It then seems like a sad and lonely garden - not a child around to pick the fruits, not a girl to pick flowers for. I miss my kids. Then I notice that the birds and the bees doing their stuff - eating and drinking, I mean! I bet they are partying too in this late spring and summer months!! Nature never leaves anyone lonely. It seems to tell me that if I look around and make up my mind, the garden is actually, busy with my friends of the non-human variety. It makes me feel good to think they are part of my family too.

    I invite some kids in the neighbourhood to come and pick some berries if they want. They come one day and ask for permission in a polite, well-mannered way. I cannot but help feel I am the one who is privileged. I have made an effort to pick and give away the fruits and flowers to friends and neighbours. From what I learned last year, I realise that the more I give away, the more likely it is that I will get something in return. I need to find a way to use those, so as not to waste them. I can either use them or pass them on. It will go on in a self-driving cycle until the end of summer and then peter out. I got zucchinis from Col yesterday.

Cockatoo Eating Peaches Off The Tree

Around Alexandra In Late Spring

Now in summer, the grass in the foreground, the fields and on the hill slopes is all brown, becoming lighter in colour, the trees seem a darker shade of green.


Photos credit and Copyright  (c) Kannan Narayanamurthy 2012
All rights reserved