There was an extra hour or so of daylight eight weeks ago, and in just another six it will be the winter solstice. We have lost an autumn, my favourite time of year, when the leaves turn red and gold and drop to the ground to decompose in a never-ending renewal of the soil, feeding the roots of the trees in time for spring. Drought has taught us that raking up the leaves is a bad idea, as the natural mulch cannot be bettered and is free from the tree. Any leaves that fall on brick paving can be swept back into the flower beds where bugs can breed in a little paradise and birds can have a constantly renewable source of food. A highly manicured garden never did much good for the cycles of nature. For years we had a gardener who was obsessed with picking up every single leaf in the entire garden and so the earth was barren until he retired and the new man believed in mulching.
The warm autumn days and lack of rain meant that the last of the water had to be sucked from the wellpoint (it is now completely dry) and the remains of the storage tanks simply to keep the garden alive, and as the shadows lengthened with the northward march of the sun the garden remained damp for days. The fiddlewood, bare as a baby's bottom for months and feared to have succumbed at last, burst into bud within days of the first rainfall and is now a mass of greenery. The bougainvillea, starved of water, was a profusion of purple, the best it has ever been, and is now creeping steadily over the bare branches of a dead tree, determined to fulfil its duty of covering it with beauty. The bromeliads, which only need a sip of water in the centre of their tightly bound stems to bloom, are in mass display, and the aloes are on their way to winter wonderland. Along with the abundant birdlife, the garden has survived lockdown much better than we have, thriving, it seems, simply because we have been appreciating it.
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