Helen Lehndorf

Category: yet another photograph of a plant

  • recent reading, ongoing thinking

    readinggirl

    I noticed a theme in my reading recently – lots of books with ‘Wild’ in the title! I am reading and writing about nature/bioregionalism/ecology/contemporary spirituality….so I guess ‘wildness’ is a thread through all of these things.

    The Wild Places, by Robert McFarlane

    Wild, by Jay Griffiths (This book remains my favourite book IN THE WORLD EVER.) 

    Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

    Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg

    Maybe I would read anything with WILD in the title?

    Robert McFarlane’s book led me to…

    Waterlog, by Roger Deakin – a remarkable account of Deakin’s desire to swim in as many wild waterways as he could across the UK. (Roger Deakin was an incredible person who seemed to live almost in an alternate universe where he was part-tree himself. )

    In fact, this is the trajectory so much of contemporary nature writing takes – a person leaves the urban environment and takes off to the waterways or the wilds, the forests, the mountains and then experiences the edges of their pathetic humanity and learns a pile of stuff about themselves. It’s compelling stuff! Escape, edge-dwelling, deep nature….

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    As inspiring and firing as these books are, though, I cannot write this kind of book. I am a mother of two children, tethered by family to a small suburban piece of land in a medium-sized, unsensational city. So my challenge is how to extrapolate a compelling narrative from my own situation.

    To my rescue (to some extent) comes bioregionalism, Urban Resilience movements and Transition Towns giving me a steadfast political framework to staying put in the urban environment and making the best of it, or making it better more to the point.

    I am on the hunt for any books which address the URBAN ‘wilds’, or ‘domestic’ nature narratives, so please do suggest some if you know of any.

    One I read and thoroughly loved recently was ‘Feeding Orchids to The Slugs’, a book about a woman becoming a Zen Retreat cook.

    How do you write a compelling nature-based narrative when you live in suburbia and can’t stray very far? This question is at the heart of my project.

    So far, I’m finding it’s all about ATTENTION, rather than literal travel. That the ‘wild’ is as much within as without.

    ‘To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.’ -Mary Oliver

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  • The Rope Walk is launched!

    Before I blather on about the launch of this fine, artisanally-produced book THIS IS WHERE YOU CAN ORDER ONE. GO ON. SUPPORT NZ POETRY AND INDIE-PUBLISHING. 

    On the weekend, I attended my darling friend Maria McMillan’s (I wrote a bit about Maria HERE) book launch at the Aro Community Hall. This is her first book and it’s with Seraph Press. It was a wonderfully warm-hearted event. The large turn-out and delightful people who attended were testament to Maria’s standing in the community.

    TI associate Maria with tea and then another round of tea and then maybe some more tea but perhaps some toast this time, too….more butter please! I think I would like a giant ‘community-hall’ teapot for one-fill afternoon teas with all my mates.

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    Maria’s partner Joe Buchanan designed and letter-pressed the cover of the book, including the drawing of the ship on the cover. It is indeed a beautiful artefact with great attention played to paper, card, pressing, stitching. Book as objects d’art. But it is not all style over substance….the poems, an invented family history across multiple generations, starting with the first settlers are rich, detailed and poignant. For a chapbook, this collection is dense and satisfying. It has the heft of a full collection in a chapbook size.

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    Here writer Pip Adam (right) pulls her characteristic making-a-joke face and Maria displays her new shaved undercut…

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    Given our long writing history together, I felt all puffed up with pride during the launch…getting misty-of-eye during Maria’s speech, and feeling outright joy to see her signing books at the sale-table. This is the moment every writer longs for! (I remember how wonderful and weird it felt for me at my launch.)

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    There were flowers everywhere – gifts from her friends. These ones on the piano were just a few of the gorgeous bouquets everywhere. Here is Maria giving her speech.

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    Here is Maria with Kirsten McDougall who launched the book and gave a thoughtful and celebratory speech.

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    Here is Maria talking while Seraph Press Editor Helen Rickerby looks on…I liked this shot because you can see HR’s trademark stripey tights:

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    Here is Helen Rickerby again with writer Helen Heath who is doing a bit of unsubtle product placement:

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    Congratulations, Maria and Helen, on a wonderful book and a delightful launch. x

    (Maria blogs HERE. )

    Finally, writer Janis Freegard bidding me (and now you!) farewell in her fantastic panda-with-paws hat/mitten ensemble. Janis always has the best accessories!

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  • 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.

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    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:

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    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.

  • warm autumn

    Here is how the big vegetable bed looks right now….because it has been such a warm autumn, everything has grown quickly and lushly, which you might think is a good thing, but it isn’t really. It means that everything will be read to eat soon, and then when the really cold weather hits, the garden will be empty. Aah, well. Not much I can do about the weather!

    (Go HERE FOR A REMINDER OF HOW IT LOOKED IN MARCH.)

    I’m growing lots of Kale, green and purple, now that I’ve learned the best ways to cook it – it’s a great crop that grows throughout winter, much like silverbeet does.

    My olive tree, which was about one foot high when I bought it, is now about six feet high and after seven years, has finally fruited! Maybe moving it from from the old garden to the new garden was ‘motivating’ for it?

    There are lots of these dandelion-clocks about in the garden – I used to see them as a weed-enemy before I learned all the wonderful properties of the dandelion plant. Now I can blow them with abandon, like I used to when I was a kid.

    Make a wish!

  • 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

  • golden sunflowers inside

    I didn’t have much luck with sunflowers last summer – I planted a whole packet in the corn bed but only three came all the way up and one of those got blown over and snapped in a storm.

    Still, the two that made it were glorious in the way that sunflowers are.

    There’s nothing like a sunflower to be a measure of spring/summer/autumn…green and growing up, up, up all through spring and most of summer….then finally the flower head opens and never fails to impress – such a heavy head, such a strong stalk…then you know autumn is here when the petals fall and the seeds start to dry on the head.

    Sunflower’s point-of-view…chasing that sun:

    A bee visits:

    I love Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Sunflower Sutra’ (I nearly chose this excerpt to go at the front of my book, but then I changed my mind at the last minute and felt the other one summed up the book more) – if you care to, you can read the whole thing HERE, there are also great clips on youtube of Allen Ginsberg reading the poem, otherwise here is my favourite part of the poem, which I repeat to myself like a mantra in challenging times:

    ‘We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread

    bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all

    beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed

    by our own seed & golden hairy naked

    accomplishment.’

  • In the garden…

    The tomatoes are ripening by the bowlful every day and we are eating lovely pasta sauces and soups which taste of the sun and make me realise how insipid tinned tomatoes are! The chillies are starting to fruit – just in time for the cold of autumn, which will stunt their growth in no time. Every year I try to grow chillies – every year I get about two weeks worth of fruit before the autumn shrivel. You’d think I’d learn, right? Hope springs eternal. One day I’ll build a little glasshouse for year-round chillies.

    I love these lush little gem lettuces, so much nicer than ice-berg and I eat one a day. They grow very quickly – from seedling to edible head in about three/four weeks.

    The corn is nearly there – it seems like only yesterday I was pushing corn seeds into the warm earth…there are lots of pumpkins growing around the corn’s ‘feet’ too – we are going to have an abundant autumn!

    This is going to sound like such a cliche – but I swear, when I started growing my own vegetables, aged around 28 when I had my first baby, time seemed a lot slower and I was aware of my plants growing and can remember waiting patiently for crops to appear.

    Twelve years on, time seems to go a lot faster -I’m not sure if it is because of getting older, or because life is busier – and the seasons romp around. I feel like I turn my back for a second and the garden changes, vegetables appear, or plants die before I realised they were ailing.

  • What the garden was doing at the turn of the new year…

    Happy New Year! I’m starting my year on the blog as I mean to go on – with excessive photographs of plants.

    Here is a snapshot of the garden on January 1 2012.

    There are new peas everyday – they never make it inside because we always eat them right there, standing beside the garden. It is my personal garden snack bar…

    The corn is getting taller…

    The apples we will enjoy in autumn are starting to look like apples, rather than little swollen buds….

    The herb garden is running riot: oregano, marjorum, sage, borage, mint, parsley, chives…

    The hydrangeas are doing their purple-pom-pom thing to the fullest…

    & the poppies continue to pop, then flop…

     

  • green bean serene

    Summer = season of green.

    Broad beans until we can’t face another broad bean.

    I divided up my monster stinging nettle plant and now I have baby nettles thriving away. (Anyone local want a nettle plant?) Nettles are a wonder herb and are seriously good for you – very high in iron, it also builds healthy blood cells and clears chest congestion, among other things. It also tastes great in soup – very savoury and iron-rich tasting.

    Green polka dot sundress with my green roman sandals. Welcome in summer, you’ve been a long time coming this year!

  • the poppies live on

    A few years ago, I rescued a whole lot of plants from a garden in my old neighbourhood which was about to be demolished.

    When I moved to my new house, just over a year ago, I was careful to shift a lot of the tiny poppy baby plants from the legacy of that garden-save. (At the time, with a whole household to move, faffing about digging up tiny seedlings seemed kind of mad – but I now I am glad I took the trouble to do it!) I am happy to report they are doing well, and doing what poppies do in their second year, which is ‘pop’ up in all kinds of places which are often not garden beds.

    As well as the red poppies from the old house, this year I also planted big pink poppies. Alas, on the verge of flowering magnificently – they got blown over in last week’s winds. I will leave them in anyway, in the hope they still go to seed, so I can at least have them next year.

    (Photo one above is the pink poppies about to pop. Photos two and three are rununculas, in lieu of the (now horizontal) pink poppies. The rununculas are being the pink poppies ‘stand-in’ for this post – lol.

    I also planted yellow californian poppies. These are lovely, elegant plants. In New Zealand you often see them around lakes and rivers. There are lots of bright orange ones around Lake Taupo, for example.

    As well as poppies, I’m planting as many self-seeding flowers as possible so that after a few years, I will have a low-labour, self-sustaining flower garden.

    Viva la poppies!