#The Blue Isopogon
The say "every cloud has a silver lining" but when I got home and found all my bonsai thrown off the balcony, some of the pots smashed, pots my dad had bought me for birthdays and Christmases, some of the branches of my bonsai trees snapped off... well I couldn't see any silver lining.
I packed them up into a plastic storage crate and got on the bus. I could have taken them over to Mr. Biasotto's nursery but I knew he would have locked up for the day and gone home and anyway it's right across town and I needed a few trips. Mr. Murray's farm is closer though a long walk from the bus stop. I knew he wouldn't be there, he was rarely there, and I was sure he wouldn't mind me using his potting shed to fix up my bonsai plants.
It took me three trips back and forwards. On the last trip out I took some of my clothes and a blanket. I had had enough. I was leaving.
I had no friends and nowhere to go. I work for Mr. Biasotto and I was then apprenticed to him as a nurseryman but I wouldn't call have called him a friend. I did't realise how much he was. I'm studying horticulture at the local TAFE college and I've got a good relationship with my teachers there but it's not like I could crash with them. I don't even have their numbers. I don't even have a phone.
The truth is I'm a bit of a loner. I'm diagnosed on the autism spectrum though "mild". I spent most of my time as a kid alone wandering around the national park, identifying the trees and plants or working on my own garden at home. I can give the botanical name of any plant growing naturally in our region and rarely does an exotic stump me.
Things started to fall apart for me when I turned 18. My birthday present was a solicitor acting for my dad serving divorce papers on my mother. They've been separated since I was 10 and he lives a thousand kms away working as a truck driver in a mine. I only saw him once or twice a year. He always gave me bonsai pots or books as presents.
The house, including the garden I'd put years of work into, was sold. We moved in with Kevin, mum's new boyfriend, a complete cunt, the guy who threw my bonsai off the balcony. He'd complained about them "cluttering up" the balcony but I had nowhere else to put them. The place is an apartment.
I spent the night in Mr. Murray's potting shed. By the time I'd finished gluing my pots back together, the ones that were worth saving, and repotting and repairing my trees, it was after 10pm. It's not as bad as it sounds. It used to be a dairy milking shed but all the equipment was sold off and Mr. Murray renovated it and converted it into a propagation shed where we could grow the plants needed for his projects for the farm. It has an office that we've converted into a lab for tissue culture, a toilet and a cold shower.
It was actually partly my idea though it upset Mr. Biasotto a little. When he got the contract for landscaping and nursery supplies I think he thought he would also supply all the tree seedlings Mr. Murray might need, not that they would be propagated on site. Though Mr. Murray's ideas about what he wanted to do with the derelict dairy farm were never clear, he talked about a large scale reforestation and so anything other than onsite propagation was unrealistic. I knew that many of the plants he would need for restoration of the endemic bushland are not even commercially available. (Though it's not a great idea to replant a large area with plants that are all genetically identical.)
So far, Mr. Murray, a man in his mid-50s, had concentrated on the renovation of the old Victorian farmhouse. He'd retained the elegance of the old sandstone house but built a large modern extension incorporating the original external kitchen, bathroom and laundry. (Most of the old Victorian era houses in our area had the kitchen and laundry as seperate buildings to the main house to reduce the fire risk.)
Mr. Biasotto's nursery and landscaping company, including me as his apprentice, were employed building the gardens around the house and so far a few tasks on the huge abandoned farm, mainly weed control.
Mr. Murray spent most of his time in the city. The farm was his retirement project though he was only 55. He was some financial executive type. I didn't know exactly what he did but he was obviously loaded. I got to know him when we went for a few long walks around his farm. He was genuinely interested in what I had to say about the trees and shrubs growing there, even the weeds, even my long explanation of why Callistemon and Melaleuca aren't sufficiently different to qualify as different genera.
He took my advice about renovating and converting the milking shed into a propagation building as well as my advice that he might need a clean place to do tissue culture (a technique I'd recently learned at college), but I'm sure that didn't give me permission to take up residence there. One night turned into two, then a week, then two. I had nowhere else to go. I wasn't going back to live with that cunt in his cigarette smoke filled apartment. Mr. Biasotto wasn't paying me enough to rent a place of my own.
It became a routine. I got up after sleeping on the hard floor wrapped in a blanket, ate a few biscuits, had a cold shower and then caught the bus either to my college or to Mr. Biasotto's nursery. Afterwards I'd go to MacDonalds for some cheap food then go "home", take some cuttings or collect some seeds from plants around the farm or just look after those I had growing, work on my bonsai, rinse out my clothes and go to bed. My mother asked Mr. Biasotto after me. I don't have a phone. I told him I was staying with a friend though that would have confused her. My mother knew I didn't have any.
Then one morning, I got out of the shower, shivering from the icy water, ran to get my towel. He was standing there.
"Mark? What are you doing here?"
I thought he would be angry but he was smiling curiously. I wrapped the towel around my waist conscious that he'd seen me naked.
"Mr. Murray... I'm... I'm sorry... I've just been staying here..."
"Just get dressed and come over to the house. You must be freezing out here!"
He left me to get dressed but he went over to the seedling tables and looked at what I'd done. Over the nearly three weeks I'd been living there, I'd done quite a lot of work though most of the seed trays were yet to show any sign of germination. When I was dressed, I pushed the rest of my clothes and my blanket into my plastic crate and walked to the door. He followed me out and then led me over to the house.
"How long have you been sleeping there Mark?"
"Oh, about a week... and a bit... I didn't have..."
"Let me make you a hot chocolate and get you a decent breakfast."
"Oh... thanks... I'm really sorry..."
I followed him over to the house. He had a nice wood fire going in the back room where he'd added a modern kitchen/dinning room to the old house.
"Tell me what's been going on while I get some food on."
I told him the whole story, basically what I've told you above. He gave me food. A hot breakfast. He ate as well. He didn't say anything until I'd finished.
"So what happened to your bonsai?" Was his first question. It wasn't what I expected.
"Well, they are over there behind the propagating shed. They are mostly ok. The Azaleas are the worst shape. Their branches are so brittle..."
"And what have you got on the tables over there?"
"Oh, I've planted seeds from Kurrajongs, Illawarra Flames and Jacarandas I collected from trees in the park in town. There are cuttings from a few shrubs like... I thought..."
"Hold on, I heard Jacarandas aren't actually native to Australia."
"Yes, I know but you said you like them... and... I like them too. They are kind of an adopted native tree."
He smiled beautifully at that. Something about his smile made me feel something I couldn't explain. It not only put me at ease. It excited me. I wanted to see him smile at me like that again.
"And what about the Kurrajongs? They don't grow naturally around here do they?"
I was confused. He didn't seem concerned that he'd caught me squatting on his property without his permission.
"Well as a matter of fact they do but they colonise small areas within Eucalypt forests. The amazing thing is if a bush fire comes through, all the Eucalypts get burned but the Kurrajongs seem immune to fire. The Eucalypts regenerate faster than the Kurrajong seedlings so they never spread very far from the parent trees though. Early settlers saw this and planted Kurrajongs around their houses. I thought if you want to reforest this place, Kurrajong fire breaks might be a good idea?"
I realised I was very enthusiastic about trees and that often I bored people. I usually realised that after I'd already made a fool of myself but there wasn't much else I could talk about. It was either trees, shrubs or silence.
