The Year of the Water Dragon 2012

I have many areas of interest as an artist, designer and grubby gardener including the gentle art of wabi sabi and feng shui. I have some depth of experience and study in chinese astrology so offer this those of you who share this interest - even if its only passing......

Only a fool would offer predictions in a year known for being unpredictable. Yet I'll try. This is the first principle of any Dragon year – you cannot see the head and the tail at the same time and so to ride the dragon is to not know where you are going, but to hold on, relax and open one’s eyes to the big picture, the panorama of life’s possibilities.

For those who have dragons in their astrological charts, or wish to discover the dragon within, you now have the license to be unapologetically you. Dragons are strong, healthy, powerful personalities, playing the human experience to the hilt, always there for their friends but quick to point out when errors have been made.

These are firm but fair people who understand the twin horns of power and duty, and great to have on your side. To make an enemy of the dragon is a most foolish thing to do. They will unapologetically swat you, claw you, or eat you for breakfast if you upset them enough. If you don’t like what they are up to, get out of their way and out of their sight and do your own thing, and if you are compelled to question their quest, do it diplomatically – the year of the Rabbit has honed our diplomacy skills so don’t lose them in the excitement of the Dragon year.

Famous dragon people include St Joan of Arc, Mae West, Salvador Dali, Che Guevara, John Lennon and Frank Sinatra. To get yourself in the dragon year mood I suggest you start dropping a few Mae West quotes like:

 “When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.” 

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.”

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!”

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” 

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/259666.Mae_West

Or try singing your favourite Frank Sinatra or John Lennon songs like:

‘I did my way’, ‘Whatever gets you through the night’, ‘Imagine’, ‘Power to the People’,  

or ‘Give peace a chance’ – when Lennon saw footage of nearly half a million anti Vietnam protestors singing this song outside the Whitehouse in 1969, he considered it to be ‘one of the moments of my life’. Now that is what we call a dragon moment!

http://www.songfacts.com/artist-john_lennon.php

The concepts in Feng Shui and Tibetan Astrology are manifestations of a time where people had a deeper more coherent understanding of land and seasons and their patterns. A water dragon in a landscape is a lake. For those of us living in the Yarra Valley and especially in the Upper Yarra we are living close to some of the largest (man made) water dragons around – the Upper Yarra and Thompson Dams. Before they existed, local aboriginal history suggests that the valley would experience regular flooding – so we would have had that water moving into the valley creating billabongs and wetlands – smaller water dragons. This is the right year to get up there and visit or camp at the Upper Yarra Dam and feel the power of all that water, and take the opportunity to reflect on how lucky we are to be drinking some of the best water in the world.  

http://www.melbourneplaygrounds.com.au/melbourneplaygrounds-info.php?id=21381

What makes a water dragon year different from other dragons is that the water has a calming effect, enabling us to know how to act wisely and to do only what is essential to one’s progress. Far less conspicuous than other dragons (the great dividing range), one is able to be less opinionated and able to take and wait and see approach. While it is important to be true to oneself, this allows for others to go their own way, and defeat and rejection can be accepted without bitterness. 

Enjoy 2012 and remember you’ll only be doing it once in this lifetime.

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” 

This piece is dedicated to my friend Robb Venn, a Dr. Feelgood and one of the best Shiatsu practitioners around, and has been informed and inspired by the books by Susan Leavitt, Suzanne White and Theodora Lau. If you wish to deepen your understanding of these concepts I suggest you purchase one of their books or even better, experience a shiatsu by Robb (o431 4o1 438).

firescaping, fire - escaping and the red envelope

Every garden is a garden of ideas. Whether you start from scratch or inherit someone else’s inspirations we all get out and into it because we’re inspired by trees, flowers, veges or perhaps our architecture.

I live on a bush block surrounded by big gums and look out onto mountains and into a green gully full of tree ferns and today in the mail we’ve just received a red CFA envelope that reminds us that the fire season is coming and we need to be prepared.

How do I turn this threat into an inspiration? I know that given the severity of the bushfires in 2009, the deaths, the greater possibility of more extreme weather conditions that this fear is every year now. Instead of looking forward to walking down and swimming in the river on really hot days, I understand that if its a code red day we need to have the car packed and most likely have left the night before. Damn! There is nothing better than our river on a seriously hot day…..

So do we get into the garden and feel the fear and start clearing and cutting as much as we can? Of course we do. But in the end it all feels so futile as you realise that if a big enough fire comes through it wont matter a toss how much clearing you’ve done, but we all need to give our homes and gardens the best chance of survival so we do it. It’s all a bit grim but we do it.

As someone who has been to community fireguard meetings, has the neighbourhood telephone tree at hand and has experienced the call to leave the house on three different occasions, I have had the experience of having to leave my home and garden understanding that it might not be there when I get back.

Many of my friends and family have shared experiences of stupid things that they did on Black Saturday and thank our lucky stars that the fire didn’t reach us. I have had a number of experiences of going into shock due to fire threat – once when I should have left the house I was madly cleaning it instead and luckily had friends ringing me reminding me to leave - who kept interrupting my work - but it was only when a friend turned up in his ute and insisted, that I got in the car with not a lot and left – my partner was at work and my son at school at the time.

I remember in 2009 being up all night semi sleeping and listening to the radio and hearing ‘Marysville has gone’ and going into shock ‘how can it be gone’…. I kept thinking. I remember hearing someone reporting from the Kinglake Fire Station saying how everybody was just running off the street and into the station for safety and not knowing what was happening. For some reason I cried the most of all weeks later on hearing the call for second hand suits for the men of Marysville as they wanted something decent to wear to funerals.

Having been through the 1983 bushfire I was always encouraging people to leave at our community fireguard meetings. I realised that getting organised to go is no mean feat. Firstly you’re pretty lucky if you and partner agree on the go or stay strategy – generally someone feels the need to stay and defend and this is the first challenge. Secondly if you have animals this can prove a major logistic challenge. Thirdly is the encouraging of other people you care for to leave too. There is nothing worse that driving out of your street and out of your town knowing that there are people who have decided to stay. I know that if I came back to funerals it would profoundly impact on my ability to start again. I remember  after weeks of fires burning all around us having the final discussion with my partner saying that I realised that I could not convince him to leave but I was choosing to take our son and go – I hope we never have to go though that again – that’s why I’m grateful for the red envelope.

So how do I stay inspired about my home and garden given that I’ve accepted that it could all go? I’ve accepted the transience of it all. I call it my grateful garden. I’m grateful for the life I have here and the wonderful experiences and memories I always take with me. I’m grateful to the friends and family who make constant offers of a place to stay. Our insurance is up to date always, and while we now drive away with our important stuff and our camping gear, I believe we’ll invest in a small caravan just to enhance our ability to take away some of the smaller precious things that anchor us to home – a bit more nana crockery than I can presently take. Any renovations we do to our house now consider fire resistance and I’m trying to get rid of as much plastic as I can – if we have to come back to a smoking mound I’d like to be as non toxic as possible so I can start my garden again.

That’s what being a gardener gives you – an understanding that there are cycles in growth and death and in every season you have the opportunity to grow something again. We’re also planning a few weekends in Marysville and day trips in the Yarra Valley because we know about hope and the fragility of small local towns, and that’s the least we can do for the people who have gone through the experience and have bravely decided to start again.

ruby jane stormer

wild gardener in warburton, victoria

                 

Mowing the Murnong: a tribute to Doris Pozzi & her book on edible weeds

An exploration of weeds and the useful plants that they often are…

Its been a relatively wet year so many of our plants are experiencing growth we haven’t seen for a while, and while we gardeners are rejoicing on one hand, on the other we are watching with dismay the growth of those ‘other’ plants, those unwanted plants we call ‘weeds’.

Weeding as an activity brings out the black and white in us, the right or wrong – there are no shades of grey in weeding. They generally are the successfully competitive plants – they are outgrowing, overshading and/or smothering the other plants around them and we must intervene to bring our plant community back into balance.

It is useful to keep finding new inspirations for getting in and weeding out so it is worth asking whether you can actually identify what that plant is that you are pulling and digging out so vehemently, so righteously.

Gardening practices are a constant process of inclusion and exclusion in the way we work with our plants. You can come in, you can stay, and you can go. I’m happy to admit that my preference is for including plants that I have declared are both beautiful and useful.

Living on a partially cleared bush block has turned my eye to indigenous plants and their possibilities. I realised I knew nothing about the greenery that was growing around me and so have started to learn about and identify different plants. While it’s easy to decide what is beautiful, it’s a little harder to find out what plants might be edible or useful in some other way.

Some research into ‘bush’ and ‘wild’ foods has led to some interesting revelations about what groundcovers, herbaceous plants, shrubs and trees around us are edible. All of these understandings spring initially from European recordings of indigenous usage of plants and then what early settlers discovered that they could harvest and eat.

It has been startling to realise that some of the things I have been weeding and feeding to the chooks  – I could have been harvesting – the teas I could have been drinking, the salads I could have been eating after a good days gardening!

As I researched ‘bush’ foods I kept reading about this plant called Murnong or Yam daisy Microseris ssp. lanceolata which was well recorded as a staple food of many Aboriginal communities and was grazed out. I got such a shock when I googled an image for it – was this was the daisy Mum and Dad spent hours pulling out of our 60’s manicured lawn when I was a child?

While roaming around my childhood garden, climbing and eating out of fruit trees I was quite possibly walking over a very useful plant and we just didn’t know it. Then I looked into edible plants just from the daisy family and I discovered Dandelion, Catsears, Prickly Lettuce, Chicory, Salsify, Cow Thistle – and realised that Murnong is very like Catsears Hypochoeris radicata,  – I’ll have to get out there and have another look at all my daisies….

When discovering and harvesting weeds careful identification is needed, as some plants are toxic with overuse, or require further preparation. Also many need to be harvested at the right time.  Leaves are often best early, tubers need to be left to grow, seeds need to drop from their trees.

I was truly disappointed on trying Angled Onion Allium triquetrum – which had been suggested as a substitute for Spring Onion – it was so bitter. As its one of the most prolific weeds in my broader landscape I had been hoping to start a campaign to get people weeding and eating but alas I’m assuming that unless you get it really early it’s not coming to your table as a salad soon.

This is the challenge with many of these plants – they don’t really stand a chance against many of our cultivar vegetables and herbs (which I guess started out as spontaneous weeds) – but if you see them as a free, low input addition to your culinary options then its worth learning about. Some though, for example Dandelion  Taraxacum officinale have long histories of medicinal usage as both tea and coffee and are worth developing an eye for and an ability to differentiate from other daisies.

I encourage you to do some research into edible weeds and plants, and if nothing else you may have the opportunity to munch on something nutritious as you take them out…..the feed and weed principle of fun gardening.