Category: things i saw out walking

mycology walk

Last weekend I had a yearning to go on a mushroom/toadstool hunt in the bush. I took my family out for a ramble around a bush track on the Woodville end of the Manawatu Gorge, looking out for autumnal fungi. I was not disappointed!

There were some wonderful red toadstools.

Bright orange fungus:

Tiny ethereal mushrooms (hard to photograph! This one was not much bigger than a pea and I liked the way it was growing upwards towards the light from underneath a log.)

Warty armies of toadstools:

Odd phallic looking ones with speckles:

I don’t know enough about wild mushrooms to know if any of these are edible, so I let them be and just took photographs.

After our walk, we stopped for a simple picnic of pikelets and feijoas.

Back home in the fridge was a package of field mushrooms a friend had picked from her farm. I cooked them in garlic, onions and lots of green herbs, stirred in cream right at the end of cooking and ate it on pasta. Amazing.

April 20, 2013
picking up what the wind drops

I took a walk to a nearby section where an old house had recently been demolished. They are building shops there. I dug up a wormwood plant and rescued an iron gate from a skip which I’ll use as a frame for beans in the vegetable garden.

When I walk I am looking for stray plants and clues of what other humans are doing, their leavings, their signs.

So many gardens are neglected and full of mistakes – odd plantings, strange schemes gone wrong. It’s a lexicon of thwarted plans, migration, human error. But I love all the gardens, all of them. I love where weeds come in and grow where no one thought there was any dirt. I love the twee tidy gardens around the brick units where the widows live – all pansies and polyanthus and tight little roses. I love the student flat gardens with the crushed comfrey and the gnarled old lemon trees. There is a place deep in my heart for the gardens inside the gates of kindergartens – old tractor tyres full of marigolds and strawberry plants, glitter and matchbox cars.

These dahlias were planted behind a tin-shed, hard up against a damp bank…..in entirely the wrong place and where no one can see them (except me, because I creep and snoop) so I pick them and drop them at a friend’s door.

I pick up windfall apples from the house across from the supermarket. They are a bit bruised but will do for pie. At another house someone has left ice-cream containers of passionfruit for $2 each on their fence. I take one and leave a coin in the letterbox.

I don’t fully understand my own instinct for gleaning. It’s more than acquisition. It’s something to do with control, and side-stepping capitalism and burrowing into a universe where people trade in fruit and the urban environment is one big shared playground. I like my own company but I spend too much time in it and then I read the street and try to draw meaning from the random and the incidental.

Occasionally a garden is stunning and special and makes perfect sense, but these gardens are rare:

Right now, there is an American oil company doing exploratory drilling in the hills near Dannevirke. If they find enough, they have plans to frack for oil. Local farmers and Iwi have been protesting there this week and it is getting almost no media coverage. There are similar exploratory tests going on near Whangarei, but for gold.

I have been following the effects of fracking in Pennsylvania, USA where fracking for natural gas has been happening for some years now. None of the news is good. Profound pollution, deformities and stillbirths in animal stock, rising cancer rates and the tap water is flammable.

Hold a lighter to your running tap and it lights up. Imagine.

Parts of the Manawatu River are so polluted from intensive dairy farming and factory run-off IT SPONTANEOUSLY CATCHES FIRE.

Water on fire. Water on fire.

On the way to pick the youngest up from school I pass a house with a big walnut tree. There are walnuts all over the path, so I pick them up. I always carry a cloth bag in my hand bag for spontaneous foraging. It’s like maybe if I notice the trees enough, maybe if I honour the fruit enough, maybe if I pick up enough windfalls and rescue enough plants….maybe then…? Maybe then.

April 9, 2013
abandoned mattresses

Some neighbours moved out and left two mattresses on their front verge. (Where they then stayed for some weeks, until finally the real estate agent selling the house hauled them away. Isn’t it funny how people think if they leave something on the curb it suddenly counts as ‘rubbish’ and will magically disappear….?)

I love the painterly quality of the first mattress. Classic sixties.

And the second one is interesting how it has a geometric design behind the floral.

I think I’m slowly getting a reputation as the street’s dotty woman who a) walks up and down the road collecting all the leaves from the communal trees (I make leaf mold from them) with my wheelbarrow b) harvests the comfrey from the front garden of the student flats for fertiliser (I wouldn’t nick someone else’s comfrey if they were using it, but these folk aren’t & the plants regularly get run over by resident’s cars – maybe I should just dig them up and transplant them into my garden? When does ‘foraging’ turn into ‘theft’? I am not beyond nicking plants if I know they are destined for destruction c) grows vegetables in her front garden & along her drive and now d) takes photographs of trash.

April 3, 2013
a southwards weekend, in pictures

I nipped southwards to visit Emma last weekend. The trip began with a southwards train trip at dawn and ended with bus journey through the Manawatu Gorge at dusk. I met Emma in Wellington for some city rambles before we went over the Rimutakas to Featherston. Here is a photo essay of the weekend:

November 13, 2012
there is no cure for curiosity

A friend sent me a little card with this quotation on it:

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

-Dorothy Parker

I am an eternally curious (nosey?) person. I often follow the path of curious things, which sometimes leads to adventures and happy accidents…and sometimes to wasted time and dead ends.

Here are some things I saw out walking recently:

A boat called ‘Romance’…

A bear-face in a beam – do you see it, too?

Never forget to look UP! Look what I saw on a cafe ceiling, recently…wheat and coloured discs…

And, in my idea of heaven…a tiny secret garden in the middle of a big city…bursting with vegetables and herbs…

How do I know it was a secret garden? Well, firstly because it was tucked away in a corner you are unlikely to stumble on…and secondly, because the sign said so:

I hope you find some interesting things out walking this week. X

May 8, 2012
i am back in town – do you hear me

The new chair sits next to the older chair and it looks like they are having a conversation. (Maybe I have been reading THIS book too much?)

*

I find this slid under my door. How intriguing!

Except it isn’t. It turns out to be from a religious zealot, just letting me know if I don’t confess my sins I will burn in hell forever.

How much more interesting if it had been from an old friend who wanted my attention….or a musician who really, really wanted me to come to his gig….or anything else, really. Still, great title!

*

When I took the kids to the museum, I experienced what I would look like with skinny legs in the hall of mirrors. I stood lookiing at my illusory skinny legs for far too long:

*

Then I became a giant on the new Museum carpet:

*

Finally, with the colder weather – the monsters return for hibernation. They leave their feet at our back door:

April 27, 2012
leaf water stone sky

I visited the creek.

The stones hosted the leaves.

The leaves bathed in the water.

The water held the sky.

February 27, 2012
open heart

(Life is)

“…a slow, elated, awed recovery

from humiliation.”

-Geoff Cochrane

On New Year’s Eve we climbed the hill behind the house and drank wine until the sun had gone. I gnawed on grass stems because they tasted like peas. When clouds crossed the moon, I couldn’t see your face and you talked about the ways next year would be ‘awesome’. I say ‘I can’t remember much about this year except that most days I felt tired and thought it would get better tomorrow.’

We talk for a long time about ‘isms’. You are giving them up. I am keeping a couple. ‘Why can’t you just do Helenism?’ you say. The isms start to cause schisms. I switch to home-decorating. I tell you that a warm colour would be better for you in winter – Indian spice colours to warm you up, but you are set on hot pink, ‘1977 punk-rock pink’ you call it.

Then it’s midnight and the countryside doesn’t care. We wait for the clouds to clear so we can find our way down again. The dog has come to find us, and the two cats, their bells tinkling in the long grass. Sheep are nestled under the ridge and don’t stir as we walk past. Around the north side of the hill we cast long moon-shadows.

‘Look’ I say ‘We have moon-shadows, like the Cat Stevens song! And there I was thinking that was a load of hippy bollocks all these years.’

I make tea for drinking on the porch because the wine is making my gut sour, but then it feels very late and too cold to be outside. I have so much to tell you but I can’t think where to begin so I talk about the band playing in the Square on Waitangi Day and how long it takes to drive to Paekakariki from here.

I start to shiver. ‘I need some sleepism’ I say. You swallow down a handful of vitamins with the last of your wine. The animals bolt off inside to avoid being shut out.

I go into dark rooms to check that my children are still breathing. I notice how the quieter I want to be, the more the floorboards creak. The microwave casts a dim light across the kitchen, it’s LCD screen says ‘Err’.

January 31, 2012
this is a post about the rugby world cup (kind of)

There’s a Rugby World Cup on.

I’ve noticed it more than I might usually because in my new job at the Palmerston North City Library, we are hosting public screenings of many of the matches which means I’ve been tying up flag bunting and making party food. (Who would have thought I could feel ambivalent about bunting? but the flag bunting is kind of cheap, synthetic and nasty…& probably made in China.) Up goes the Argentinian flags, down they come, up goes Samoan flags, down they come, up goes French flags…etc.

Anyway…rugby isn’t really my thing, but I was really moved to see this when I was walking the boys to school the other day….a house with a Tonga connection draped their entire front fence with beautiful Tapa cloth. It was quite a sight and made the boys stop and stare.

It beats that cheap nylon flag bunting any day.

October 4, 2011