Five years ago, I launched myself into the great adventure
of tropical gardening. The land around my newly-built house
was an empty palette; actually a wasteland of uprooted banana
plants and broken bricks from the construction. I bought Made
Wijaya’s inspiraing ‘Tropical Garden Design’
and visualized glorious landscapes, artful little garden accents
and plenty of fruit and cut flowers for the house.
Somewhere along the line it all got out of hand. The first
priority was to cover a large expanse of bare dirt. Without
a plan, a budget or any idea what I was doing I planted dozens
of seeds, filched cuttings and uprooted every unattended plant
in the neighbourhood. In this folly I was ably abetted by
Wayan Manis, who brought daily offerings from her own compound.
With the first rain, all these plants took root and began
to follow their own agendas.
Forests of papaya trees appeared overnight as if sown by a
ghostly hand. Carefully planted herbs and flowers declined
to thrive; uninvited vines, shrubs and grasses quickly overcame
them. Heliconia plants spread as if on steroids. Turmeric
bloomed rampantly in the undergrowth. Down on the undercliff
the night-blooming jasmine grew leggy and unlovely, but periodically
delivered the most ravishing aromas just after dark. A pink
flowering creeper overwhelmed a coconut tree and gained a
determined foothold on the roof. Nothing is where I intended
it to be, but most of it is too pretty to pull out.
In the first flush of enthusiasm I planted some trees, mostly
but not always around the edges. Now it’s too late to
change my mind and there’s too much shade to plant vegetables.
I learned that six avocado trees is probably too many and
one mulberry isn’t enough. A large mango tree that delivered
a superb crop shortly after I built the house declined to
do as much as flower ever since, and no one can tell me why.
The frangipani cuttings I planted so enthusiastically have
sprawled into messy if exuberant trees because I didn’t
know how to prune them properly, and now it’s too late.
A year ago I decided to integrate some food production into
this disorder. We started raised beds, laid on the mulch,
were generous with the organic fertilizer. Tomato vines climbed
up papaya trees and bean plants disappeared into the hibiscus,
but crops proved elusive. Pumpkin vines roared around the
garden like trains, growing at a rate a metre a day. Every
morning I would do the rounds, trying to match female flowers
with male flowers in hope of actually generating some vegetables.
But pumpkins are contrary creatures; a vine will produce only
male flowers for weeks, then only female flowers, then very
contrarily die. Sometimes I would strike it lucky with the
pumpkin sex and sometimes the bugs would. Pumpkins dangled
from trellises, ripened on the roof and hung from the highest
trees; if we didn’t find them in time they’d suicide
spectacularly on the path.
When I built the house I didn’t have enough money to
put a proper roof on the car park, so Nyoman cut bamboo from
the edge of the cliff for the struts and nailed sheets of
thin plastic sheeting over them. We planted a profusion of
flowering vines against the walls and within months had a
living roof of passion flowers, thunbergia, bougainvillea,
alamanda and green pit vipers. Now the plastic and bamboo
have largely rotted away and the foliage is about two metres
thick. But we hesitate to replace it. It’s much prettier
than an ordinary roof and, as Nyoman points out, better to
leave sleeping snakes lie.
As the garden becomes wilder, the boundary between my territory
and the undercliff becomes indistinct despite the fence. Creatures
from the river climb the trees around the edge of the garden
and fall inside it -– a porcupine, civet cats, metre-long
water monitor lizards. It’s not always easy to persuade
them to leave again, even with the whole pack of dogs nipping
at their heels.
The only part of the garden that doesn’t revert to jungle
is the paddock under the bamboos where the pigs used to live.
This shady and fertile corner is now a little coffee plantation.
With any luck we’ll be drinking our own kopi Bali in
about five years.
To enhance the general jungle ambience, a python was recently
discovered on a garden wall. Nyoman persuaded it into a sack
and I suggested it would be an appropriate addition to the
family, tasked with managing the rat population in the roof.
My staff, however, found this solution unacceptable and it
has now rejoined its relatives down by the river.
Everything grows so fast and profusely I sometimes think if
I hesitate too long between sentences as I type in the garden,
that I will succumb to the remorseless embrace of some vigorous
jungle vine myself. (Perhaps not before time, according to
some of my readers.)
Nyoman and I spend several hours in the garden every day trying
to bring some order to the chaos, but we never get very far.
It seems that we hack back a corner here and there to let
in a little light, and it grows back by the time we return
from lunch. And the garden has in five short years written
its own story. Every plant has a history -– a root extracted
from a muddy river bank, a branch clipped from a friend’s
garden, cuttings smuggled from Sulawesi. It’s become
a green story book, living testimony to the supremacy of chlorophyll
over human will.
