Belthar’s Garden

Martin HatchuelOctober 2004 © Martin Hatchuel -  martin@barefootclients.co.zaMobile: +27(0)84 951 0574 -  PO Box 2690 Knysna, 6570 South Africa For T C McL. Student. Teacher. Friend

 1. Acacia melanoxylon 22. Cupressus sempervirens ‘Stricta’ 63. Senecio elegans 124. Buxus macowanii 155. Araucaria cookii 186. Chrysanthemoides monilifera 217. Helianthus anuus 248. Sideroxylon inerme 279. Carissa bispinosa 3110. Virgilia oroboides 3411. Calodendrum capense 3612. Chondropetalum tectorum 3913. Rhumora adiantiformis 4114. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 4515. Cynodon dactylon 4716. Citrus aurantium 5117. Rosmarinus officionalis 5618. Olea europea subsp. Africana 5919. Marigold F1 Hybrids 6420. Betula alba 7421. Parthenocissus tricuspidata 7922. Salix babylonica 8223. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis 8624. Sideroxylon inerme 9025. Celtis africana 9726. Lavendula dentata 10027. Nymphaea capensis 10428. Zantedeschia aethiopica 11029. Platanus acerifolia 11530. Podocarpus henkelii 117  

1. Acacia melanoxylon

 When Belthar stepped out of his door on that first morning, the ground was cold beneath his naked feet. Yesterday he’d stepped out of his job in much the same way and found, in much the same way, that the ground had been cold beneath him then, too. But this was a different kind of cold. This cold he relished without even allowing himself the comfort of his old and favourite slippers. This cold came up at him from the clay and the mud of his garden and smelled faintly of citrus. This cold sat on the leaves of his tree like a silk scarf on a delicate neck. This cold shivered and shook in the clean, clear air. This cold was alive, unlike yesterday’s cold, which was dead and smelled of must and dried up documents and long-closed files.He looked around, squinting into the rising sun. His little three-roomed house stood above its landscape and his land sloped away towards a forest which he kept behind a fence fixed a hundred times with planks and poles, chicken wire and diamond mesh. The house itself was surrounded by a severely cut lawn, neat and green. Precisely one half of the way down the garden path, and precisely one meter to the right of it, stood an Australian blackwood. The tree had always chaffed Belthar, dropping its long, lance-like leaves every Sunday at noon, just after he’d finished raking the previous week’s crop, and dropping them with precision, equally on the lawn to one side and on the black-tarred, brick-edged path to the other.There were no other plants on Belthar’s land. In all his years at the office he’d never had time for them, their need for water or their demands for fertiliser and compost. It was enough that he mowed the lawn and raked the leaves. ‘I am not,’ he thought, a little bitterly after years at a desk in an air-conditioned room, ‘my Earth’s keeper.’The house had a varnished wooden stable door and two large, cottage-paned windows. It glimmered prim and white under its low-pitched black roof, its neat porch arranged with a swing seat hanging from a naked and creeper-less wooden pergola.It looked like a drawing by a child, or, more correctly, like an adult’s version of drawing by a child, with all the blocks neatly coloured in and all the colours trimmed inside their lines.‘What a mess,’ he thought. This first week of his retirement stretched before him uncluttered by schedule. No need to get up at 6:15, to bathe at 6:21 and to breakfast at 6:34. No catching the bus at 7:03 to bring him to the coffee bar nearby his office at 7:28. No talking with strangers who thought they’d become friends because they’d shared the same counter from 7:31 to 7:43 each workday morning for years and years. No clocking in at 7:59, nor clocking out at 4:31 each afternoon. No Saturday morning shopping.Nothing. Just the leaves to be raked on Sunday before noon. “I am not,” he said, aloud, “ever going to rake your leaves again. I won’t do it. Never again.” And he walked around the side of the house to his laundry and tool store. He found his axe and his bow saw, inherited from his father and oiled and hanging precisely where they should, ready for the fires of winter, and he took his worn whetstone out from under its oily canvas cloth. He sat on the step outside his laundry and sharpened his tools and the weak, early sun of spring warmed him as he warmed to his work.Belthar had lived alone almost for ever. Once this had been his mother’s house and then they’d sometimes had visitors, but when she died the visitors came less and less until entire seasons went by when Belthar had been the only person who’d entered his door. And it had become a cold and unlovely place and he had become a cold and unloved man.Belthar didn’t think of his tree as his last link with the outside world, his only connection to the forest which surrounded his garden. And as to the world of men – well, he’d become detached from that already. And from now on he knew that his pension would be paid into his bank account every month and that he’d draw the money he needed to pay the shopkeepers every week. But his conversations with his bankers and his grocerers, his butchers and his tailors had always been short and sudden and businesslike, and none of them had warmed to him, this strange and silent man.No, to Belthar the tree was something sinister; it was a symbol that needed to be struck down and removed from his land and his life. He pulled on a pair of thick leather gloves, and, still barefoot, took aim and swung at the trunk of the tree. The axe bounced away but he persisted, stripping the layers one by one to form a wedge to direct how the tree would fall.By ten, when he’d been working for almost an hour, he needed to rest and he went into his kitchen to drink some water and then he rinsed the glass and stood it upside down to dry in the middle of his draining board.By eleven he had to rest once more for he was an old man and his body was soft and white.At three he began to thwack, thwack, thwack again and he worked longer in the gathering cool of the afternoon.At four thirty he stepped back and looked at what he’d done and he was happy that the wedge was ready and he knew that the tree would fall tomorrow. And before he went inside to cook his supper, he carefully raked all the wood chips into a pile and wiped and oiled his axe and returned it, together with his unused bow saw, to their allotted places in the laundry.He slept undreaming that night, and creaked out of bed the next day. But by nine he’d loosened up enough to fetch his axe and start to swing at the tree again. This morning he began to cut a little higher than yesterday, chopping at the opposite side of the trunk and working his way downwards to the open wound of the oozing wedge. The sap was thick and red and during the night it had formed a necklace of bright, glistening beads around the dark of the heartwood.It seemed to Belthar that he’d caught a second wind, because today he worked on into the heat of the morning, until, unresting, he saw that the beast would fall before lunchtime.It started to creek at noon, and to sway in the light, early-spring wind comes up about this time of the morning at this time of year. At 12:30 the swaying had become a pendulum. ‘What if I’ve miscalculated?’ he thought. ‘And what if it falls on my house?’Thwack, thwack, thwack… It swung for the last time at 12:38 precisely, and Belthar stepped back quick as he could when the tree came crashing down, and he watched as it hit the ground and bounced once and shuddered mightily and lay still. It had fallen towards the forest, just where he’d wanted it to lie; but it had also fallen across his fence and the torn wire and broken posts left the old man uncomfortably with an unease he couldn’t understand.Still, he was satisfied. Over the coming weeks he would cut the tree into logs and chop the logs into faggots and split them and stack them neatly ready for his fireplace in winter; then when that was done he would patch the fence and restore the grass where the tree had scarred the ground and then his life would be simple because he wouldn’t have to rake the leaves every Sunday at noon. But as he approached the fence to check the damage, he couldn’t help himself and he began to cry. Belthar, cold-hearted, lonely Belthar, began to weep.      He hadn’t cried in forty-seven years. 

2. Cupressus sempervirens ‘Stricta’

 On the third morning of his retirement, Belthar visited a nursery. He’d slept badly, woken again and again by guilt and pain. Every time he’d tried to turn in the night his arms had screamed and he’d felt the thwack, thwack, thwack and to him it was like when he’d been seasick and the sickness hadn’t gone away even when he’d stepped back onto solid ground.It was quite unlike him to leave a mess and the dead tree lay across his lawn and his fence like an accusing finger but Belthar was tired and he felt a powerful need to make amends. The chopping could wait.He’d never visited a nursery before and he didn’t know what to expect or even what to wear for the occasion. All his life he’d had dressed according to a code prescribed by others. At school there was the grey serge uniform, with its silly round cap and its heavy blazer and short pants even on the coldest, wettest days of winter. In the army the uniform was khaki and green with stiff boots and scratchy trousers which he ironed to a sheen. And when he started working he wore his suits in the colours of yesterday, and the suits and the ties and the short-sleeved shirts said “office clerk” and they were a uniform no less.But today he was going to visit a nursery, a plant nursery, and Belthar had never been to a nursery before and so he chose a clean white shirt with a red paisley tie and a pair of grey slack and his tweed sports blazer because tweed seemed like the fabric of gardens (before he’d cut it down, he’d been in the habit of ironing his clothes on Sunday evenings while his tree dropped its leaves on his pathway. Now, he supposed, he’d have to think of other times to do his chores). And his shoes and his wide-brimmed grass hat (the one he used for mowing his lawn) he chose for comfort because the nursery was an hour’s walk away.Dragging his wheeled wicker shopping basket behind him, Belthar set out precisely at nine thirty. His house stood at the end of the road in one of the older suburbs, elevated and north-facing and it was hidden by a saddle of land and a patch of forest from those famous views of the lagoon and the mountains which attracted visitors from around the world.And being in one of the older suburbs, the gardens which surrounded Belthar’s were leafy and tree-lined and well tended, opulent in their manicured rows of white daisies, pink roses and red hibiscus. Some of them had neatly clipped hedges and others were peopled by dogs which barked excited as he passed.The morning was blue and green and as he walked he was soon comfortably warm. His was a well-heeled suburb and most of his neighbours had old money and the luxury of hired gardeners, and he nodded stiffly to them as they stood smoking on the sidewalk, leaning on their rakes and watching him without expression but cheerily waving and smiling at him when at last he nodded his formal, don’t-talk-to-me hellos.He walked past the golf course and the veterinary and the holiday resort, touching his hat stiffly to passing drivers who knew him to wave to him, people who had known him all his life, all of them surprised to see him out walking on a Wednesday, weekday morning. At the Main Road he turned left and walked past the supermarket whose bread he preferred (their loaves were square: bread from the other bakeries was always rounded on top and he was forced to cut off part of every slice so that it would fit his toaster), past the greengrocer to whom he hadn’t spoken in years (some argument about a split watermelon) and past the department store where his mother had bought their heavy stinkwood furniture (which he continued to oil on the first Saturday of every month as she had always have him do).At Church Street he turned right and there, just before the road started to run up the hill to the high school and the big of colonial houses of Upper Town, and on the left hand side and under the shade of an ancient, spreading oak, was the nursery.To enter you passed through a little shop with seeds and bulbs, books and tools. It smelled strongly of lavender. He went inside and waited, but no one was seated at the desk and the till was unattended. He was tired and wished for a glass of water, but he thought ‘I’ll treat myself to tea when this is over.’At last a smiling, heavily pregnant woman came in and, wiping her forehead with the back of a muddy hand, said “Oh, hello. I didn’t know you were there. You should’ve rang,” and she picked up a long-handled school bell and set it tinkling.“Yes, well…”“What can I do for you?” she said, returning the bell to the desk. “Looking for something special? Or do you just want to browse?”“I, er…” “Oh, no hurry. Take your time. You want to sit down for a while?. There’s a bench out there under the tree, if you want to sit down. Sure I can’t help you with anything?”She was infuriatingly breezy, and Belthar wondered if her husband knew that she was out and working in her condition. He’d never had any experience of pregnant women, but shouldn’t they be kept at home?Belthar stared at her. “Think I’ll just look around,” he said and blushed. He wanted to escape her swollen stomach; he wanted to keep himself from looking at it.The plants were ranked in neat, labelled rows, arranged according to type and height. The pathways out under the tree were marked with rough wooden battens and filled with bark chips and radiated like spokes from a hub. He enjoyed walking on them, soft and springy and comfortable. He read each label carefully, surprised to find that every plant had different names in English and Afrikaans and some foreign language. ‘German,’ he supposed, ‘or French, maybe. Must be done that way for the tourists.’ Most plants bothered Belthar. They were untidy. They pushed out of their pots and plastic growing bags in unruly display. They tumbled. They were bewilderingly unfamiliar and it was clear that they had no self discipline whatsoever. But still he continued along the paths, discovering them methodically and examining each label meticulously.He read all the herbs but he didn’t like any of them. And besides, the herbs he used on Tuesdays when he cooked his Tomato Pasta With Italian Herb Seasoning came in a bottle which would have been sterilised at the factory. No, herbs weren’t for him; you didn’t want to eat herbs out of your garden, all splashed with mud and dirtied.He read all the shrubs but he didn’t like any of them, with their spreading habits.He read all the climbers but he didn’t like any of them: he wasn’t going to be fooled by a red trumpet-shaped flower or a white deeply fragrant. He knew how creepers took over if you gave them the chance.He read all the trees, but he had made up his mind before he even got near them that he wouldn’t like any of the trees. They’d want to litter his lawn and his pathway, just like his Australian blackwood had done.He’d been in the nursery for more than an hour when he began to read the conifers. He’d never heard of conifers before, but there was something precise about them with their compact growth habit and neat appearance. Of course there were the scramblers and the spreading habits here, too, but one plant in particular caught his eye:  

Graveyard CypressItaliaanse SipressCupressus sempervirens ‘Stricta’ DESCRIPTION: Deep green leaves; specimen tree with straight growth habit almost military in its precision.SIZE: 5 – 8 metres; maximum spread 1 metreEVERGREEN; EXOTICR19.95

       “Sure I can’t help you?” asked the pregnant woman. She’d been watching him as she’d worked at the potting bench. She liked old people and he amused her and she thought of an old dog, a Labrador perhaps, half blind but still curious, out for its walk and sniffing around gingerly and carefully. “You really have been looking very closely at everything. Keen gardener are you?”      Belthar flustered “No, I’m not a gardener. I’m just looking for a tree.”“And you haven’t found anything yet? How tall should it be? Do you want it for shade?”He tried to answer her but she spoke too quickly and he was getting irritated.      The woman looked at him with a smile. Her head was tilted slightly, and she looked to him like a willing puppy that wanted to understand what its master was saying. And although Belthar didn’t like dogs much, he found himself warming to her a little. She was sweet and she really was trying to help.      “No, I’m not a gardener. I cut down my tree. Need to replace it. This one looks interesting.”“Oh, you like that, do you? Rather a severe looking tree, the cypress. And of course there are those who are superstitious. You’re not superstitious, are you?” and her smile cracked and her teeth were perfect and white. And then she laughed a little. “Don’t be shy. Are you superstitious?”
      “Superstitious?”      “Superstitious. Of cypresses. They grow them in graveyards, sometimes.”      “Not in our graveyard. Our graveyard’s got those messy things with the big leaves.”      “Yes, London planes. I don’t know why they planted plane trees there. Like this oak. Why’d they plant this oak right here? Not that I’m complaining, of course, but oaks and planes aren’t indigenous, are they? You’d think they’d plant something indigenous, wouldn’t you?”      “Indigenous?”“Yeah, indigenous. You really aren’t a gardener, are you?”“I’ll take this one.” It was all he could think of to get rid of her and her mountainous stomach. It had begun to bother him again.He bent down to pick up the first plant in the row, but she stopped him. “That’s not such a good one,” she said, moving into the lines to select a better specimen, straighter and more compact. “Here, take this one rather,” she said, lifting it and passing it to him.He hesitated: surely she shouldn’t be lifting like that? But she held it out and he had no choice, so he took the cypress and fitted it into his basket. “Will that be all? What about some colourful annuals? And do you have enough compost?”“No annuals. No compost.”“No compost? You have to have compost when you plant it? Or do you have compost at home? And you really ought to put some colour into your garden for the summer. Don’t you want something for colour for summer?”She was leading him towards the office now, his basket bobbing along behind him, the cypress nodding and swaying as he walked.Suddenly she stopped and turned to him. “You really aren’t a gardener, are you? Do you know how to plant that? Should I tell you? Our advice is free, you know.”“No.”“We’ve got a handout about planting trees, if you want one,” and she smiled again and turned and continued walking towards the office.

Inside, she sat down heavily behind her desk and started rummaging through its drawers. At last she came up with a page of dull green paper, which she handed to him. He read it carefully while she watched him.