November 2011
We’ve just come home from a wonderful five weeks away to be confronted with a scene of vernal chaos.
Weeds wave at me insolently as they daily grow higher and higher, smothering the plants that are supposed to be growing; they are asserting control and they know it.
It’s not only those five weeks that have caused the chaos I have to admit.
For the first half of the year I was heavily committed to other projects and then a damaged shoulder severely limited my movement.
Excuses, excuses I know, but now the results must be dealt with.
I actually like chaos, to a certain extent, just not quite as much as I currently have.
I prefer a garden that is naturally wild or an integrated melee of colour and size as is found in a cottage garden. Structured flower beds and over-manicured lawns are not my cup of tea, nor are plants like the architecturally imposing bloomers such as Birds of Paradise and Gymea Lilies (except where they occur naturally in the bush) or even roses, unless they’re of a climbing or bramble variety.
Waving mists of pastel colours that open and close to reveal further hidden treasures are far more my scene, as long as the waves aren’t created by weeds.
The bush isn’t manicured; the rainforest in particular is a wild, tangled mass of trees and vines and creepers, there is nothing neat or planned there. It beckons you and encloses you, without confronting or attempting to make a dramatic statement.
It isn’t chaotic, but nor is it very ordered.
In the same way that I love the unpredictability of the bush I like the wild chaos and colour of Asia.
I feel claustrophobic in the neat countryside of Britain and much of Europe, where everything seems to have its ordered place and there are relatively few areas to escape into the wilds of nature.
Everything is so predictable. Asia is even more crowded but it could never be called predictable, other than Japan, which prides itself on its structured neatness and order and for that reason I have absolutely no desire to go there.
None of this sits with my profession of librarian, which was all about order.
In a library everything has its place and the entire system would collapse if that order were not kept. In that world I was perfectly happy in the knowledge that I could find any book at any time.
That was the order and structure of the library, but it was probably the following of sometimes tortuous paths through the fabric, unearthing and discovering the often hidden treasures of information, that satisfied my need for the unpredictable.
My desk certainly allowed my character to express itself. It was the one place in the library where chaos reigned. Is all this an indication of a split personality?
I could never be happy in a minimalist house, although I fully appreciate the attraction of such homes to others.
Glen Murcutt and I do not belong together. I would go mad and an architecturally recognized masterpiece would be destroyed.
Wordsworth and the Romantics eulogized their love of nature as a force that was uncontrolled by human intervention. Unsurprisingly, I feel strongly attracted to the Romantic view.
As much as possible the bush around our house is uncontrolled by any human intervention. However, that cannot apply to my garden. After all, it is something that I planted to create even more beauty, or at least, a different style of beauty. At the present it looks a neglected tangle and it is hard to find any beauty anywhere. Now it is up to me to restore it. There is only one way to do that: roll up the sleeves and pull out the spades and the secateurs and the mattock and get to work. I need to restore some order into my chaos.