When I was married
I lived for sixteen years in a suburban forest.
We separated,
and it took me sixteen years
to acquire another garden of my own.
It is a metre and a half wide
and the length of my flat,
but there is the 100% ground cover
needed in climates where there are thunderstorms.
The ground cover means
there is also zero loss of soil moisture,
so it is still green in summer.
When I first saw it,
it looked sad and neglected.
I appreciated it,
and within two days
it ‘came to life’.
The next day
New Holland Honeyeaters
visited to drink nectar
from morning glory flowers.
So I now live in a flat
with a ‘wilderness garden’.
I am on the road to recovery
from the state of
‘divorciado’.

Image via Wikipedia

Psychiatrists believe mental illness is incurable, but controllable, so people diagnosed with it are put on medication for life.

The result of this attitude of theirs has been a bonanza of profits for pharmaceutical companies that it almost beyond comprehension.

I have a different view. “If the medicine doesn’t cure you, then it is not worth a cracker!!!”

Many more articles will follow over the next few weeks.

The “Greening of Adelaide” policy carried out for about 20 years in Adelaide was so successful it transformed the city and suburbs into an ecosystem.

I think Adelaide would be the home of more birds than any other city in the world. This is due to the sheer number of trees and the very sensible decision to keep easily repairable overhead wires. It is a city the is very bird friendly due to the large number of flowering street trees that provide plentiful nectar for honeyeaters.

A wide range of wildlife now co-exists with people here. Many suburbs have possums, and an increasing number have resident koalas. Blue tongue lizards now inhabit most gardens. Brown snakes are plentiful in many outer suburbs, a blessing for people who keep chooks, as the problem of rats and mice going after chook feed ceases to exist.

One year after marital separation, my ex-wife phoned me and said she had found a crushed eggshell in the cook house. She was very pleased the Permaculture System she lived in was now complete as it had it’s own resident predator, a brown snake.

A crushed eggshell was found about once very six weeks, and as she put it, “To survive there indefinitely, all it needed was access to a ‘ground dwelling bird’s egg’ to be available to tide it over when it temporarily reduced the supply of mice too far.”

In addition the ‘Greening of Adelaide’ has made Adelaide the most fire retardant piece of real estate in Australia.

Some years ago, my wife Lynette, my daughters Helena and Nicola, and I asked a question. “We see around us a vibrant beautiful living ecosystem. How does it all work here and now in the present day? “. I think we were the only family here who was even interested.

Everyone else was still studying how it all worked in 1836, and still are…

So I am going to write a series of articles about our observations and conclusions. I’ll start by saying that the Adelaide Ecosystem is a ‘miracle of adaptation’.

Few of the imported plants that have found a niche here play a role that bears even the remotest resemblance to the niche and roles they were in in their original environment.

Let’s finish the opening article by talking about soursobs.

Thanks to the soursobs, Adelaide would be the only city in the world that is full of seasonal wildflowers. They are in bloom at the moment and looking beautiful. Tourists love them, but sadly many Australian people regard them as wild flowers, and hate them as foreign because they weren’t here in 1836. I think the tourists are right.

The next article will discuss deciduous trees.

I’ll let the poem tell the rest of the story.

A Spider Poem
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Each Wednesday night
I sing at the Daniel O’Connell pub
at North Adelaide.
Recently, I was on second.
Kris, the lad who plays
classical and flamenco guitar,
was on first.
I thought his complicated finger work
was eversomuch like
a huntsman spider
running up and down
the fretboard.

My poem is simply called, ‘Reversable Poem’.

Reversable Poem
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Long morning.
Car windows misted-up.
Crows call from stobie pole.
T.V. is on, but the program is off the mark.
Mailman brings no letters.
Waiting for change of fortune.
Listlessly listening to music.
Beer or wine?
Winter day.
Rain squalls.

Rain squalls.
Winter day.
Beer or wine?
Listlessly listening to music.
Waiting for a change of fortune.
Mailman brings no letters.
T.V. is on, but the program is off the mark.
Crows call from stobie pole.
Car windows are misted-up.

We were given a dozen pieces of paper of varying sizes and shapes, and had to write a line of poetry on each of them. Then we had to shuffle the pieces of paper into a heap, draw them out at random, and however they came out was the poem.

The result of my effort is simply called ‘Collage’

Collage
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Reflected light from a rock pool.
In Kansas it is easy to believe the world is flat.
‘Centre of a triangle’ written at the centre of a triangle.
Daybreak rises.
Trip on kerbing and nearly break wrist.
Cold wind whistles around drainpipe.
Friends come back from McDonnell Ranges, three days early,
rained out in July.
Icelandic volcano closes down Europe’s airways.
Hooray! Coopers Creek flood reaches Lake Eyre.
The River Torrens is trying to stay calm
in the wind. The waves are reduced to ripples.
If I lock my screen door at night,
I’d never get out in an earthquake.
White gum blossom/ lots of honeyeaters/ too cold for bees.

Hope you like it…

Window
© Garth Dutton, 2010

Window pane is cracked.
Paint peels from weatherboard.
Mining town
when mines have been closed.
Even the pub is run-down.

The white-flowering gum tree
over my back fence
is in full bloom
in early June.

On sunny winter days
it is full of noisy birds
busy eating nectar.
Lorikeets, wattle birds,
New Holland honeyeaters,
and more.

As I type this poem,
the sounds of birds
drift through an open window.
Natural background music.