My car-less wilderness starts twenty metres beyond my front entrance …
It festures long vistas of bounteous greenery, exotics mixed with native trees …
Impenetrable matted jungles of grasses flow over the contours of Bulimba Creek’s floodway …
The creek itself is almost hidden between the overgrown banks where ducks, dusky moorhens and waterdragons make themselves at home
I’m pretty sure I have the name right this time. This cheery overgrowth of wild colour would’ve been a weed in most other places, but here and now in the wilderness of abandoned gardens, it’s a joy to see.
Interestingly, its seeding habit reminds me of the seed habit of the plant all bush-walkers and probably most farmers love to hate. I’m talking of the Australian weed, Farmers’ Friends.
It only needs one knee high plant to catch on your clothes, and you’re picking clingy seeds off for the next three weeks.
One old farmer I once knew, used to have to spend quite a bit of time picking seeds off his socks, since he nearly always forgot to wear his ‘shock absorbers’.
I’ve forgotten the punchline of the joke or pun this name referred to, but they are the little elasticized “skirts” people wear around their ankles, over their socks and tops of their boots. Let me know why they are called shock absorbers?
The old man, when he’d collected a 1 litre yoghurt container full of Farmers’ Friends seeds would throw them in the stove fire. The seeds hang together like velcro, so its easy to pick them up in one bunch.
However, these are Cosmos seeds heads. But if you know what Farmers Friends look like, you’ll see the likeness.
PS, that’s a shockingly bad photo, so out of focus it’s not funny. That’s one problem with composing a post on the mobile, with the photo merely being edited with the Apple editing software. I don’t like it. Probably I’ll go through the whole rigmarole of emailing the photo to myself, editing it using decent software and re-posting it.
When I was out the other day, after I had sat down in the civilized new-ness of the one year old addition to the village and found it too structured for my mood, I walked into the old section.
This village started in the the 1980s with a field of little villas surrounding a community facility. About half the villas remain along with the old communal areas.
So I crossed the vacant block along the concrete path. Weed central but with more flowers than the sculptural resort style gardens in the newer sections …
There’s even a lone fungal fruiting body. Further on, as I come into the streets, the vacancies and their bewildered gardens become obvious. (A pun there)
Can barely see the villas for the overgrown gardens. A riot of flowers though. More varieties of hibiscus that I’ve seen in one small area.
There are some beautiful trees and shrubs, five to ten metres tall. I can’t imagine they’ll be kept when the building program continues.
Finally, in a derelict corner I see a clump of fungi. I had been wondering whether these gardens were maintained by the establishment or cultivated by the residents themselves. The fungi speak for the latter.
Three, possibly four species I make that. What do you think, mycophiles?
Rita de Heer 