War of the Roses

Dick’s
Toolbox cont.
I normally don’t look after roses, relying on their sturdy ancestry to
see them through the seasons. My theory has always been that if a rose has been
around for a few centuries it must have a reasonably rugged disposition but,
in truth, some have survived because they are so dammed beautiful that I, and
others, have protected the more delicate of the genus against the vicissitudes
of reality.
Also in these globally warmed times I do not wish to be environmentally incorrect
through frivolous watering – an irony when we have rice farms in NSW –
so they have been hard done by. This time, with the drought, some of the roses
were not strong enough and have turned into low maintenance sticks.
Our outlying suburb, mud brick jumper territory with scattered tooth and painted
claw, is really only suitable for indigenous plants. Five centimetres of clay
above rock is what we laughingly call soil. The task of fostering the bush has
willingly fallen to my wife so she has the majority of the acre that is remnant
bush. This scrappy detritus falls steeply towards the Yarra and is therefore
difficult to look after. The only success over the past 20 years has been the
elimination of onion weed and the removal of the feral pine trees. When it eventually
goes up in flames it will be spectacular and not unexpected: two houses standing
where we are now burnt down in 1937 and 1961 respectively. 150 years ago these
were barren hills clear-felled to provide timber for the stamping mills at the
gold fields. Then an orchard struggled, then the bush struggled to regrow –
then we arrived.
The area around the house now looks quite elegant; a combination of cottage
garden, permaculture and wishful thinking. It is flat, accessible, and has had
the expensive ministrations of a real landscape architect with a predilection
for rocks. From some quadrants the garden looks like it has been subject to
a large freakishly geographically limited meteor shower. These will soon be
cunningly concealed with vegetation so people can drive into them in the small
hours of the morning.
Alongside the northern boundary is a two metre high trellis fence along which
I have grown climbing roses – the hardiest of the hardy; plants that don’t
care about you, that loop, swoop and maim with thorns up to an two centimetres
long. Magnificent one-time bloomers of ancient heritage. Over time the sheer
weight of biomass interweaving through the trellis has caused the fence to sag
and collapse to the point that I have become sufficiently depressed to start
to fix it.
This required access to the fence, clear felling and hacking to find where the
fence might once have been. The roses fought back penetrating flesh through
heavy leather gloves, skewering legs, arms, and head with an intent that would
have been human if humans were that clever and well armed.
I’m no longer exactly sure without reference to the book what fence roses
I have left but I know that there are two Albertines (1921) named after one
of the female characters in ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Vicious
and indifferent they left me in pain for several days, Proust’s protagonist
suffered reluctantly for years and several volumes. One Albertine was bought
under the mislabelled impression it was an Aviateur Bleriot, named after the
first man to fly the English Channel in 1909 from Calais to Dover in his small
wood and fabric Model XI aeroplane, travelling at just over 40 miles per hour,
and at an altitude of about 250 feet.
But why bother to grow roses in this inhospitable environment? Because I want
to, and I want to because they remind me of a conjectured past. I am European,
via New Zealand, and will always be a stranger in a strange land, the perpetual
exile where the only permanence is that of memory. The roses are temporary markers
for, although they could live for many generations, I suspect that they will
not out-live me by very much. European occupancy of this land has a temporary
quality, intimidated by a landscape eroded by millions of years, and a culture
far older than ours or any that we know. We cluster around the coast seeking
a solace in a horizon from whence our boat, any boat, may eventually come in.

Most of us are modern nomads, willingly or unwillingly, seeking our fortune
or our fate on whatever shores will have us. We pack our memories in our suitcases,
along with fading photographs and a packet of seeds. We camp and then we move
on. Especially here in Australia the land of perpetual Diaspora, a country like
Ireland more easily loved in absentia. Does impermanence matter? Monet’s
garden has lasted 150 years. It is part of a village, which is hundreds of years
old, with stone houses and stone walls, all built to last. But this is Australia.
This house unlike the houses of Giverny will not endure; termites, fire and
cheap construction will see to that. One day someone will dig up a fragment
of a tea-glazed pot, a shard of Villeroy and Boch, and a melted transistor and
wonder, for a few seconds, who lived there previously.
There is a memorable line in the film ‘Funeral in Berlin’ where
Colonel Ross is speaking to the bespectacled Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). Ross,
played by the late Guy Doleman (yet another New Zealander) is pulling out the
roses in order, as he explains, to protect the strong from the weak. Some of
us are here to look after the roses – which is why I have joined Amnesty International.