Night Creatures: Possums

The paperbark tree up front is the residence of the ringtail possums (meet one in today’s picture). They are marsupials smaller than a cat, with pearly eyes, and two little satellite dish-like ears able to intercept hungry tawny frogmouths (my most favorite Australian bird ). The tip of the tail is white and visible when the possums curl it up around the electric wires they use to travel among houses and trees. (I can imagine the glory on the face of the first possum inaugurating the first electric wire freeway in Australia a hundred years or so ago. What a serendipitous discovery!) Somewhere in the back reside the brushtail possums. They are larger in size and with a more dignifying tail. It’s thick, black and long. Along with the protruding front teeth on this animal, the tail sends me warning signals. “Stay away!” I can hear the loud hissing of the possums in the middle of the night, but it makes me laugh because it sounds like the rhythmic cough of the engine of an old truck climbing a steep road. Cats are more feared enemies for the possums than night prey birds, so often times we wake up in the middle of the night with loud hissing, meowing and running footsteps on the roof. A horse galloping on the roof would make less noise, but I love this rumble. When I hear it I know I am in Australia, trying to sleep in a place where nature completely surrounds me. Just a while ago, I was in Manhattan, covering my ears to stop the honking of way too many cars from polluting my brain even in the middle of the night…

Sunny Rain Down Under

It just occurred to me that I forgot to mention one of the most fascinating things about Melbourne that fits perfectly into my blog theme, sunnyrain. I am not sure if the climate here is a meteorologist’s nightmare or delight, but weather’s variety undoubtedly entitles Melbournians to claim that they have “four seasons in one day” as much as the Angelinos are entitled to say they have “one year-long season”. Northerly winds blow hot air from the Outback and the Southerly winds blow chilled air from Antarctica. Best recipe for sunnyrain! It’s a beautiful autumn now. I leave the house wearing a heavy jacket, a scarf, a sweater, and a thin top. Onion—I know! I open the umbrella to go outside, while on my arm the purse is loaded, among other things, with sunscreen, sunglasses and sunhat. Most likely, I will use them all, because the temperature will rise like in a broken refrigerator, the rain will vanish bullied out by the forceful winds, and one rainbow later, the sun will lounge lazily atop my head. The many times I got sunburnt or drenched taught me to travel with this arsenal of suddenly-changing-weather-coping tools, and if you see me decorated with sunglasses and umbrella in the same time, it’s nothing extreme. It’s just another day in Melbourne!

Watering my garden

(I am reading back yesterday's post and it sounds way too scientific and rigid for the blog I wanted to write. I will try to change my voice and be less of a surveyor and more of the storyteller I promised to be. You all know I am a scientist by training, and I tend to write in boring, brown words. I report, I don’t recount. It’s time to change this style now.) So let me tell you about my first wave of awareness that water is indeed a scarce, constantly evaporating resource in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Talking about the water crisis here is like speaking of the peace crisis to a Palestinian. Plenty of disputes, sharp turns in approaches to the crisis (political, too!), and no viable solution in sight yet... After a fifteen-year long draught, rain started to pour in during the winter of 2009, which coincided with the time when we moved to Melbourne from another baking-oven dry area, Los Angeles. We felt tricked by the weather, but at least we didn't have to water the garden with a hose, walking from the rose bush to the magnolia, the fuchsia and so on, like my father still does in rural Romania. Because all we had in the garden was a hose, no modern watering system. But by the time summer came, which is in early December Down Under, my plants and trees got thirsty and droopy. So I did what my father does when he comes home in the late afternoon from work: I watered the garden until small streams of surplus water rushed into the sidewalk and street. A few weeks and a satisfying garden revival later, my neighbour asked me if I heard of the water restriction rules. My face turned green, same shade as the perked up rose leaves, and I learnt that I was supposed to water only between 6 and 8AM or 8 and 10PM on alternate days (odd numbered days, as I live at an odd street number). All that winter's rain had already drained off, and I could only help my garden with a trickle from an obsolete hose... Today's picture is that of a flower from an Australian native eucalyptus tree, which drinks droplets of water in comparison with the non-native trees.

Australian flora (with sunnyrain touches)

Most plant species of Australia are found nowhere else because the continent has been in geographic isolation for the past 140 million years, when it separated from Gondwana, the parent continent that also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. I hope this is not too much information, but it’s related to what I want to say about today’s gardens in Australia. Here is an element for my sunnyrain theme: Antarctica drifted off from Australia 50 million years ago, one twin (Australia) settling into a warm and dry climate, which selected plants needing little water, and the other twin (Antarctica) settling into a cold and dry climate. Australia is the driest inhabitable continent and Antarctica the driest uninhabitable continent… Australia has over 1000 species of acacia, which Australians call wattle trees, and around 2800 species of Myrtaceae, a family that includes eucalyptus (gum trees) and melaleucas (like the paperbark tree I talked about yesterday). Not surprisingly, the green and yellow colors that Australian athletes wear at sports events represent the yellow fluffy flowers and bright green leaves of the wattle trees. Acacias thrive in drier inland parts of the continent (sunny element again!), while gum trees dominate wetter parts (rain element!). Some plants I fell in love with and I have never seen in my life before are banksia, dryandra, grevillea, hakea and waratah. The flowers of these plants sport porcupine, punk looks or show curly faces, almost like clustered butterfly proboscises. I will populate the week-end blog with more pictures from our collection that show, rather than tell, the beauty of these flowers! Homesick settlers brought with them from England countless types of trees and plants that turned coastal Australian land into miniature lush green parks. It took a lot of water to maintain them for over a hundred years, but water has never been an abundant resource in this land. So the environment prevailed and the “imported” trees are slowly dying. The most common vegetation types today are those that have adapted to arid conditions. Water needy trees and shrubs are dying off and native trees and plants, less thirsty, are replacing them in most cities and suburbs. In today’s picture there is a gum tree that I think stands as ultimate proof for the millions of years of adaptation to a dry climate. I don’t want to obsess now over my sunnyrain theme, but I look at this picture and remain forever mesmerized by life (sunny) which thrives in the driest place I could imagine (rock, not even sand) (rain). Enjoy!

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.

Blogging for writing!

I do not suffer of writer’s block and therefore I cannot use it as an excuse, but I do struggle with finding a quiet corner in which to ostracize myself from the daily hurly-burly and write. I am also a fast writer but a slow “re-writer"; the equivalent of a construction worker putting up a house in a week and finishing the interior walls in five years. I believe that a daily blog helps me commit to finding and using my “writer’s corner” every day and adds to my general writing experience, which in turn invigorates my book writing skill. It remains to be seen... My quiet corner is sometimes the car seat, because my daily commute to work of 20 km takes me through 30-40 unsynchronized traffic lights and a few areas of LA-like traffic. I am my iPad’s car seat and as soon as I see a yellow light turning in the distance and a wave of paired, small red lights flashing in front of me, I start typing down. Many other times my quiet corner is the hour between 5AM and 6AM during the work week. It’s not a physical corner, I know, but the silence solidifies the time and I can sit down anywhere in the house and write. More recently, re-write. On week-ends I reach the peak of productivity, with 5-6 hours of writing and re-writing, often in one long stretch. I sit on the sofa in the 6m x 6m living room facing the golden ash tree that hugs the room and the two walls of windows of the living room. Somewhere in the middle of an arching branch we hang a block of bird seeds, and the only things that interrupt my writing other than Chloe’s chirp are the hullabaloo of the rainbow lorikeets eating the seeds and the barking of the dogs playing in the park behind our golden ash filled garden. I am lucky, I know… I will blog about our garden in suburban Melbourne, Australia tomorrow, but for now, this is a picture of a lorikeet. I am not sure if he’s eyeballing the food or my blog!