30 November 2019

The sun isn’t up yet but its already warm enough to sit outside and write.  I just heard the distinctive wingbeat of the kereru, our native wood pigeon, and looked up in time to see it it sail from one side of the garden to the other. 

In front of our house is a big lawn (currently home to the grass labyrinth) and because the property is ringed with pine, cypress and macrocarpa trees, it creates the feeling of an ampitheatre. It’s the reason birdsong is so loud here compared to when I walk out in the valley. And it’s part of what creates the extraordinary dusk chorus I wrote about a couple of years ago.

In our second summer here I sat on the back steps looking out over the lawn and watched a kereru do his display dives. These dives are a beautiful sight, made all the more impressive by their incongruous size. 

Kereru are about the size of chickens. They have huge white bellies that are out of proportion to their small heads, and which seem impossible for their wings to carry. Much like a B-52 bomber, they are a feat of engineering, stately and impressive in flight.  They don’t so much take off from trees as fall out them, using the momentum of the drop to get them started. When moving between trees they don’t fly direct, but swoop heavily. But oh, their display dives! Such grace!

They begin by climbing straight up to a great height, heavily beating their wings. At the top they simply stop as if they have run out of gas. They teeter for a moment as if on an invisible fulcrum, then tip and fall. Wings outstretched, they drop like a stone. Toward the ground they plummet, wings held out, with all the grace and nerve of a ballet dancer. Straight down they fly, pulling up and away only at the last moment, to retreat to a nearby tree, or perhaps repeat the dive over to hammer home the point—I’m the one you want.

There was a pair of kereru here this Spring. They flew across the garden together, sitting in the eucalyptus or the macrocarpa, or eating the poplar buds. A few times I was pushing the kids on the swing under the elm tree and noticed leaves falling—a kereru was above us stripping branches, eating the buds and discarding whatever it didn’t want. But for quite a few weeks there’s only been one bird. Maybe mating season is over. Maybe the eggs have been laid, chicks fledged and they’ve parted ways. But I fear it was something else. 

A few weeks ago there was an almighty crash and my son came tearing down the stairs to get me. A window in a room upstairs had smashed. When I asked my son what happened he couldn’t really tell me. He said he was working at the desk on the computer and felt like he was in a bit of a trance, like being in a bubble. Then the window smashed and the bubble popped and the next thing he knew there was glass everywhere—everywhere. The room was littered with glass, including large shards that flew across the room and scratched the wall and door behind him. Everything was hit except for my son, sitting right in front of the window. 

I assume it was birdstrike because there was a goopy liquid on some of the pieces of glass. I searched the garden under and around the window, the whole front yard and down the sides but found nothing. I had to take some photos for the insurance company, and as I pointed my camera at the window, I marvelled that from down below the shape left in the glass looked awfully like the shape of a kereru in flight. 

This week I spent a lot of time parcelling up signed copies of Lullaby for Mothers and sending them off around the world. It was such a lovely, tactile process (I found these great compostable post bags which are made from plants and smell like coffee) and a lovely way to quietly celebrate and acknowledge (for myself) that the book is complete!

I won’t be sending anymore books out directly, but it is now available on most online retailers including specialists such as Waterstones in the UK, Barnes & Noble in the US, and Chapters Indigo in Canada.

A lovely thing about preparing a collection of poetry is when people share which poems particularly speak to them. One that quite a few people mentioned to me this week is the poem “It’s Not Too Late”. So this week I put it up on my website.

Fall in love with where you live (and feel it love you back)

What do you share your backyard with? What grows there? Or on your balcony, or down your street?

One of the very first things I did when I realised I didn’t really “know” the land I lived on was to make a list of the plants that grew here. We have a hectare (nearly 3 acres) so it was a pretty long list.

I divided it into separate lists and taped large pieces of paper to the kitchen wall. I created lists for trees, shrubs, roses (because there were lots and totally deserved their own category) and perennials. In the end, it was the trees that I spent most time paying attention to, and I quickly started categorising them based on whether they were native or exotic.

It’s a distinction that lots of New Zealanders can easily make, at least for our iconic native trees. In truth, most of what we see, especially in our urban spaces, are trees that were brought here from overseas. Much of our native flora is in pockets (or, happily, in great swathes) in our regional forests. I often think about our native forests like a woollen jumper, tossed in a hot wash, shrunk and puckered, leaving the land’s bare limbs to scorch and dry in the sun. It’s something we got terribly wrong, and now we can’t unshrink the jumper.

In a valley that was once beech forest from one side to the other, there is a pitiful number of native trees here. We have a rimu on the creek bank, a totara in the middle of the garden, and one large beech tree that somehow escaped the axe all those years ago.

We have lots of native plants that have been used in landscaping - coprosma, pittosporum, hebes and flax. And—rejoice!—we have signs of regenerating forest that have appeared on their own (courtesy of the birds and their eating and pooping habits). Under trees and along the margins of garden beds and boundary lines, in places that remain undisturbed, are the native trees that first appear when a forest regenerates - red matipo, pittosporum and mahoe.

What grows where you live? Do you know the names of any or all of the trees? Are you interested in finding out? Do you know which trees are native to your region, and which would have been planted by whoever lived there before you?

What is the point in finding out? And what is the point in being able to name them? Trees are wondrous beings whether you know them by name or not. But knowing what they are called can be the beginning of knowing more. Names mean something. They unlock information, and they open a door. Any single thing you share your space with is a portal to connecting to that space more deeply. And connecting with trees is a depth we can plumb time and again in so many different ways.

Mary xx

p.s. here is something I wrote a few months ago about a special personal and ancestral connection I have with the hawthorn tree in our garden, which happens to be dying…

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