Gardening under Protest

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 20

Gardening under Protest

by

SUNDOWNER

SEPTEMBER 28

CAN hear Jim’s tractor approaching and have to fight a battle to sit indoors writing. I am three-parts animal, and the fourth part remains human and civilised with difficulty. Though I am lazy out of doors I never want to be indoors unless it is wet outside or cold. I can’t read for hours and hours on end; find it-burdensome to talk too

long to educated people; and very

soon get tired listening to music or looking at pictures, It is not age or spiritual weariness, but something that age does not affect and time will not cure. We are all, of course, habit-forming more or less, and the things we do to our animals are also being done to us until; like them, we observe the rules. But it never gets any easier to live the life of the spirit. The most I can. say is what Eric Linklater said after pondering on the filth, ignorance and misery of Korea, and the "squalor of the --S .7

tropics" in New Guinea-that "I am for civilisation." But I worked once with a man who never took a holiday, and one day, when I went too far in urging him to mend his ways, he made this violent reply: "It’s easy enough for you. You’re a bloody savage. A week up a gully makes you happy, shooting pigs or rabbits. It would drive me mad. I want a month in the Hotel Australia, and if I took it I would go mad when I came home. Go up your bloody gully, but leave me alone." It was civilisation spitting at barbarism, both against the wind. And that, as somebody has said somewhere, is spitting in our own faces.

SEPTEMBER 30

Y ESTERDAY, though she was racing the Calendar by five weeks, we found Betty looking with some embarrassment at a new-born calf. If it was her own calf it had not sucked her, and in a few minutes she turned her back on it and. started to graze. It then moved shakily to Elsie, who has a calf already and showed no desire

for two. It was clearly a_ stray,

but the question was how a calf a few hours old could lose its mother and wander in on us. The mystery was, of course, solved in an hour or two, but the solution was a little astonishing. The calf was five days old, not a few hours as we had supposed, and after its first drink it had | received no nourishment until we found it. It had been hidden in a gorse-filled | gully, so successfully that the owner of | its mother decided it had been born | dead, and took her home (four miles | away). Somehow or other during the | next five days it had worked down the | gully and pushed or fallen through our fence. Though it was very weak it sucked vigorously when I held Elsie by the horns and gave it. a stolen vepekfast. & ; %

OCTOBER

"HE most interesting sheep I see at Addington are those that nobody wants to buy-the superannuated rams, the long-tailed half rams, the baldheaded and bare-bellied ewes that some clever dog has separated from the blackberry bushes in Westland, the tatterdemalion but stil] dignified high-country wethers, long in the feet, knobbly and shaky in the legs, but proud, as broken-

agown swelis ougnt to be, the black. brown,

and spotted old girls | that could so easily be goats, the | horned, half-horned, blind, and half- | blinded oddities that no one had a | chance or took the trouble to throw. | over a fence before the trucks were loaded. Somebody buys them, and somebody takes them away: a drover to feed his dogs, a carrier too busy to cut his lawn, a boy who has read that big dealers begin as little dealers, or one of the mystery men in every community who have no. address, no occupation, no place of business, no use for the things they buy, and an irresistible impulse to go on buying them. If I were sure that police would not arrest me, and that my. curiosity would outlive cold, hunger, and discomfort, I would stalk one of these buyers and follow the transaction through. But it would be a sentimental stalking. These sheep that nobody wants are the half of a half per cent in every district that for one reason. or another do not die young. They were passed

over as lambs because they had not grown fast enough. They dodged the executioner when they matured because they were abnormalities-too big or too small, too fat or not fat enough, too old or too "young for his purpose at that particular time.. Year after year something kept saving their throats from the knife: a bad muster; a hard winter; a collapsed market; a lamb out of season; sickness; footrot; a broken wire in a fence. The generation to which they belong has been fertiliser for two or three or five or six years. Nobody knows how long, because these survivors are ageless. Time has shrunk them, twisted them, slowed them down, reduced their mad rushes to a shambling totter. But it is only now and again that anybody knows théir story with certainty. It seems like the end of the road at last, but grotesque as they are I can’t laugh at them. I remember that it was a blind ram on which Macarthur established the sheep industry of Australia-a _bedraggled animal carrying about three pounds of wool which he bought at auction on a wet day at Windsor and carried illegally to Sydney.

OCTOBER 3

RESTORING my garden has not been so easy as I thought it was going to be, or so pleasant, or so quick. There are still wide open spaces untouched by the spade, and the areas I have dug would not tempt me if I were a pea or a broad bean tormented by what Shaw called the life force. I am neither a born gardener nor a made gardener, but a pro-

testing householder driven by necessity

to grow his own potatoes and cabbages. I don’t grow them well, but when I consider the resistance that has to be overcome I am amazed that I grow them at all. I suspect, too, that there is a connection between not wanting to grow vegetables and not wanting to eat them. I accept what the doctors say about the necessity of eating them, and therefore erow them. But I grow them with difficulty and eat them without enthusiasm. T realise that I can't be right, but I suspect all the time that the doctors can be wrong. Who grows vegetables in Patagonia? Who eats them in Argentina? In Lapland and most of Greenland they

can’t eat them fresh, because they can’t grow them at all; but they could grow them everywhere in South America, and yet they do grow and ‘eat them only where that kind of food is more readily available than fresh meat. Man can live on almost anything, fish, fruit, vegetables, grain or flesh, if he gets enough of them. He does live in most countries on the food that is most easily found. Vegetarians, as far as I know, are neither more nor less healthy than meat-eaters. I am afraid, too, that they are neither more nor less wise, and clean and kind. But they do shed less. animal blood-and I have not yet reached the stage of thinking that there is no ethical or aesthetic difference between shedding the blood of animals and bleeding plants and trees. (To be continued)