Risky Business in the Garden

I did a terrible, brutal thing to a couple of trees just recently.  It wasn't their fault - it was mine.  I had not allowed as well as I should have for the likely growth of a larger neighbour, in root or branch, and put two little apple trees in a spot that seemed perfect - until the Alnus Jorullensis grew faster than anticipated.

 The White Cockatoos like the Alders, despite the lack of food.

It stretched its leafy limbs out to cut off too much of the summer sun that the apples needed, and its larger roots intertwined themselves through the roots of the smaller trees.  Four or five years passed before I was certain of my mistake, and a couple more before I found myself with the time and enthusiasm to attept a remedy.

After a fairly mild winter, the frost finally bit hard, the trees all fell dormant, and I struck; first with the heavy pruning shears, then the handsaw, and, finally, the mattock and the big spud bar.  When levered up and onto their sides, they were far to heavy to move on my own - each root ball and tree combined weighed well over a hundred kilos.  After considering how much more damage they could sustain and still survive, I went for the hydraulic option, and spent half an hour or so using the hose on the roots of each tree.

It was a good choice, as it happens - as the soil and stones fell away from the apple tree roots, it revealed a tangle of alder, kikuyu and couch grass roots that were threaded through the mass.  Soon after, they were in their new home, close to some other apple trees, and well clear of the Alders.

They stood forlorn, almost completely bare of twig or bud, for a month or so, as I poured water at their feet every day, and begged their forgiveness - and then the first spring heatwave struck, followed closely by the second.

The few remaining twigs and small branches produced a few tentative green sprouts, and my hopes rose.  Not too far, as the new growth was sparse, but there seemed to be a chance.  More warm days arrived, and the undisturbed trees around the two new arrivals were flourishing.  I tried to ignore them, not wanting to invest too much hope after the brutality I had inflicted, and that's why I did not immediately notice the miracle.

Tiny buds, pink at first, but greening as they stretched and thickened, had appeared near the stubs of the branches that had been cut away before the move.  Soon, more buds appeared at other spots along the previously smooth, grey-green bark, and within days they were opening out into rosettes of beautiful, soft, luscious pink and green leaves.  A few of the surviving twigs even produced flowers, some of which appear to be setting fruit.

Why was I surprised, I ask myself now - after all, I have lived and worked in the bush of eastern Australia for quite a few years, and have often observed the miracle that occurs after bushfires have seared the forest and blackened or vaporised everything above ground.  For while, all is white, grey, or black, but within weeks, those first tiny buds push through charred bark, or rise from hidden ligno-tubers, and soon the pink, red, orange and green rainbow of new growth in the eucalyptus and angophora forsts is everywhere.

The trees of the dry sclerophyll forest are so tough that I have seen trees with new shoots up to a couple of feet long fall over as long as three months after the fire attacked - victims of a hidden, smouldering cancerous spark that had entered through a crack and slowly, and persistently grown, as it chewed away at the timber between the bark and the termite-created hollow where the heartwood should have been.  In an opposite fashion, the wind-shattered new growth of the willows along the creek, that were hurled down to their doom when roofs and windows were being rattled a few weeks ago, did not complain, but lay there in the damp fringes of the pools and rapids, putting out green leaves and tangles of white and pink roots.

While the bushman side of me understood that toughness, it thinks of the pampered and over nurtured trees and shrubs of the fruit and vegetable garden as too soft to withstand harsh treatment.  But, of course, they are not as weak as we think - though plenty of water, seaweed solution, and dilute fertilizer all probably aided their recovery - and they remind us of just how persistent life is.

After all, everything now alive is descended from stock that somehow made it through massive ice ages, asteroid impacts, tectonic turmoil, and constant attacks from other life that desired to eat it.

Life, I have often said, is Persistent Organisation in Opposition to Entropy, and what a beautiful, wonderful thing it can be, and how sad that the one thing so much life on Earth seems unable to survive is the onset of Humankind.