Sunday…
WE STAND AND DEBATE AS THE DRIZZLE STARTS AGAIN… go or stay? Remain dry or get a little wet? The comfort of home or the chilly feeling as moisture evaporates from wet clothes? Despite the doubts, the likely discomfort, the cloudy sky and drizzle, we decide to take a walk this morning… down the hill we go towards Coogee Beach, towards the grey sea we see merging with sea mist towards the horizon, then over to Clovelly.
It was on the way back that the interesting encounters happen.
Feral bananas make their escape through a rickety paling fence.
Walking past a deserted house, its once prim garden now overgrown, we notice a few young banana saplings making their escape through the decaying fence of aged, grey palings. In doing this they are being quite stealthy, never impeding passers-by so as to invite removal and making their quiet escape in the deep shade of an overhanging tree.
Have we come across some vegetative conspiracy to turn the quiet streets of lower Coogee into a plantation of the long yellow fruit, their bright green fronds to wave gently in the late afternoon sea breeze? More than one of us hopes so. We leave this new generation to continue its furtive propagation in the shadows.
At the start of the climb towards Howard Street our second encounter of the morning is about to take place. Here, from the front garden of a modest block of apartments, a spindly tree with elongated, sage-green leaves thrusts its fruit-laden branch over the footpath, threatening passers-by with clusters of the shiny green things at just above eye level height. The branch is one of many sagging under the weight of the the olives.
“Wonder if anyone actually harvests this”, I ask in speculation, savouring the imaginary taste of fresh crusty bread dipped into a bowl of the oil, reinforced with balsamic vinegar.
We move on just a few metres up the road to encounter number three of that morning. Here, we find a woman who has done some of Fiona’s council workshops. We stop to talk. She lives in an adjacent apartment, an early example of a brick, 1960s walkup of the type so ubiquitous throughout this city. Beckoning us towards the street verge, she proudly shows us where she has taken over a bare patch in the footpath, where council has planted a young tree around which she had established a patch of spider lillies with their bright white tracery of flowers. It provides a flourishing contrast to nearby derelict verge that supports nothing more than a scatty growth of gravel and weeds.
She invites us into the back garden of her apartment block where she shows us this huge lillypilly tree — we guess that it’s a fine, mature example of magenta lillypilly, Syzygium paniculatum — and a ‘tree of heaven’, a nitrogenous species considered a weed in the Sydney region. They grow from the neighbouring property but in front of them, on her apartment’s land, I notice a row of council recycling wheelies and a number of those common, black plastic composting bins that are used by the apartment’s residents.
Apartment dwellers composting their kitchen wastes is not a new phenomenon to us — Fiona has provided training in composting for apartment residents elsewhere in the area — but what is less common, though no longer quite so rare, is the small vegetable garden over by the fence.
“The people living upstairs started it”, she tells us. “This is the only sunny space in the backyard, so it was put here”.
Sited in this sunny area (though no sun this drizzly morning) is a small patch of productivity… tomatoes bearing a modest crop of smallish crimson fruit, a sprawling pumpkin vine, Italian parsley, eggplant and more.. And in pots, capsicum, rosemary, the edible herb purple pirilla (possibly Perilla frutescens, family Lamiaceae) with its leaves shaped like those of the stinging nettle, more Italian parsley, an olive tree, a couple citrus including a lime tree and more.
We talk for awhile and soon it’s time to leave. As we walk out to the footpath, Fiona mentioned the olive tree down the road.
Olives that threatened passers-by with a CLUNK! on the head.
“Oh, yes”, the woman responds.
“Last year I spoke to some men there, on the footpath. They had a ladder to reach the higher parts of the tree and they were picking the olives. When I approached them, they assured me that they had permission to collect the fruit.”
So, a walk to the beach for a little exercise and a coffee has ended in serendipitous encounters with an escape of feral bananas, a woman living in an apartment block with its own composting system and its own small food garden and a overhanging olive tree harvested by urban gleaners. These, I think, are signs of hope in this area of medium density living.
Apartment block food production and urban gleaning… not a bad discovery for a Sunday morning walk.
