I dreamed of having a garden for decades. Living in city apartments or landless row houses, I steeped myself in gardening lore and collected a long shelf of books. Then at last I built a house in Bali with plenty of land; I would have my tropical garden at last. I just assumed that a knowledgeable gardener who shared my interest would come with it.
Big mistake.
Who on earth started the fallacy that any twit could be a gardener? Gardening takes attention and skill and quite a lot of learning. But in Bali the gardener is rarely respected or educated to do his job. Most of them would much rather be doing something else.
Wayan Manis’ husband Nyoman came to work for me six years ago as a handyman and gardener. He can build almost anything, carves complex motifs into all the wooden doors on rainy days, fixes everything that breaks and drives me to Denapsar when required. But his concept of gardening is to wander around the yard with a sharp implement hacking away at anything that sticks out. He absently treads on tender young plants and stares straight at a tomato seedling wilting for lack of water without seeing it.
Nyoman is exceptionally industrious, but he thinks gardening is a mindless task for which no skills are required. My definition includes thoughtful pruning, mulching, soil maintenance and producing lots and lots of compost. Nyoman makes it clear in his quiet way that these are bizarre and unnecessary practices.
Several years ago I asked him to find me a big, clean oil drum. In this I started a heaving witch’s brew of cow manure, legume leaves, living soil, water and sugar. Stirred daily, soto tahi produces a fertilizer so potent that it needs to be diluted before application. (It’s also a handy place to dispose of dead rats, snails and the remains of Pak Mangku’s chickens when they wander into my yard to be murdered by the dachshund). Because this liquid compost is a living organism, it requires stirring daily to break the thick crust on top and introduce oxygen. I constantly remind Nyoman to do this and he constantly assures me that he does, but it’s easy to tell when he doesn’t because the crust is unbroken and the whole organism eventually dies. This is a man who keeps the music to dozens of gamelan tunes in his head and can play every musical instrument in Bali, but he cannot remember to stir the soto tahi. So I do it.
Now that I had a source of chemical-free fertilizer, I acquired a backpack sprayer. I showed Nyoman how to strain and dilute the soto tahi, pump up the pressure in the sprayer and spray the fruit trees and vegetables. He has never done this. On Sundays I do it myself, much to the astonishment of the neighbours.
According to Nyoman, the plants will grow whether you pamper them or not. He thinks I fertilize everything too much. He believes that pruning offends the fruit trees. He thinks mulching looks untidy. When transplanting bananas, he cuts off all the roots and of course the plants die. He shrugs this off; “They didn’t want to live”. I suggested leaving the roots on next time and, because it was a direct order, he did. The bananas throve. Nyoman declines to discuss this.
He still doesn’t understand my obsession with compost. The Battle of the Compost has been going on for years now. I draw pictures, conduct demonstrations and provide information sheets in Indonesian. He has attended several permaculture and composting workshops. We have visited various gardens to view their successful compost facilities. I have a big garden which is constantly being trimmed, yet I never have the piles of rich, light compost I crave. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve wandered around the yard with a seedling on one hand and a pot in the other. When I ask Nyoman for some compost, he looks as blank as if I was requesting a bucket of enriched uranium. This often happens when he’s standing beside the big, three-bin covered composter he built after I took him to see how a real compost production centre should look. The bins are full but they are stone cold inside; a compost heap should be toasty. This complete absence of bacterial activity is almost impossible to achieve in this climate. I don’t know how he does it. We live in the tropics, where biomass degrades so fast you have to hustle over your lunch salad before it turns to compost on the plate.
The only exception to Nyoman’s complete lack of interest in green things is grass. He was slow to warm to the concept of surrounding my house with it; he preferred the concrete and packed earth of the Balinese compound which was easy to sweep. He muttered darkly about snakes. But as the years went by he was won over as he saw how the grass kept the garden cool and eliminated mud in the rainy season. His own compound is now grassed in. When I want a new section of my garden planted in grass, suddenly he’s Mr. Horticulture. He selects every plantlet with care, beds them in damp soil, covers them tenderly from the sun and never forgets to water them twice a day until the new turf is established. Meanwhile, everything else in the garden in perishing of neglect.
Nyoman thinks he’s a good gardener because he keeps the grass cut and the paths swept. This man will spend all day under the hot sun picking up cow pies for me in the fields of Singakerta, he just doesn’t want to know what I do with them afterwards. Even when I show him how 20 centimetres of rice straw will keep soil moist and healthy in the dry season, he won’t do it unless I ask. He’s happy to humour me by delivering sacks of fragrant straw, but I spread the mulch myself.
A friend who shares my passion for the garden agrees that we really have to wait for the gardeners to go home so we can do the real work ourselves on their days off. We are puzzled by this. It’s not how we thought it would be.
Gardeners are born, not made. My attempts to make a gardener of Nyoman continue to end in disappointment for me and bafflement for him. Yet we soldier on because we’re fond of each other and I keep thinking he’ll wake up one morning with a burning desire to graft fruit trees. Meanwhile, please excuse me. I have to check the compost.
