A glimpse at my garden

We live in a house tucked in a cul-de-sac, which Aussies call court. The lawn in the front is delineated by small rocks behind which lie pergolas with roses, some freesias and fuchsias, a prolific bird-of-paradise plant and two bushes that make pin-point pink flowers (today’s picture). One of these bushes carries the tight hug of a passion fruit plant, whose shoots squeeze it with octopus arms. The passion fruit flowers (picture from two days ago) have a magical three dimensional elegance, with different symmetries, almost a mathematical matrix born by nature. A magnolia tree and the kangaroo paw (native Australian plant) also reside in the pergolas, turning the house front into a miniature, but random, botanic collection. A few more trees and shrubs mark the border between our property and the next, and a dense Australian paperbark tree rules over the sidewalk in front of the house and hosts nests of possums and wattle birds. The garden in the back yard completes the collection with a plum tree, a fig tree, a few ferns, a grevillea (native Australian plant), a giant bird-of-paradise, some oleanders and a purple hibiscus. They spread like a wreath around the house and the fence and almost all compete for the sunrays filtering through the majestic golden ash tree. But something else dominates the back garden: the Hills Hoist. At first, we thought it was a retired garden umbrella, or the skeleton of a primitive satellite antenna. But the blue, red and yellow plastic pegs decorating its squarely stretched wires gave us the revealing clue. To this day, on sunny days, I hang the laundry on the clotheslines of the Hills Hoist, and like an industrious housewife of the nineteen fifties, I transform the Hills Hoist in a sail boat I never dreamed of having moored in my backyard. Staying on the same boating theme, just across from the Hills Hoist there is the hose for watering the plants, a blue snake curled in a hundred circles around a metal wheel just like the one you see on small boats holding the thick, long metal chord attached to the anchor. But, as in most classical plots, it's not the destination, but the journey to the destination that is more appealing. The hoist and the hose are nothing more than a signature of the Australian suburbia. I perceive them as characters that I encountered at the end of my trip from the apartment buildings in Macin, Bucharest, and Philadelphia, to the skyscraper in sleepless New York and the condo on a quiet street in the suburbs of Los Angeles. I will talk more about native Australian plants tomorrow and since the subject touches directly on water usage, I will follow with that subject the day after.