Wilted (150 hits)
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Submitted by Circe <fickle.muse.at.gmail.com> (View user info) at 2006-10-23 01:16:33 EDT
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(Excerpt taken from "Wilted: Stories of the Ten Year Drought", collected by Laura Edgeworth, published by Hodder & Stoughton, copyright 2023)
In the third year of the drought, a story came out of the Northern Territory. In a small town west of Tennant Creek a local woman named Marjorie Taylor had made a community garden, a small and pitiful thing of ferns and native shrubs and a square patch of grass. The following is a direct quote from Marjorie's daughter, Sarah.
"Mum loved her gardens, you know? And when everything started wilting and dying, she got that stubborn look on her face and dug up her best plants, her favorites, and put them all in the one spot. At first it was just an open patch that she'd water with leftover kitchen water, dishwater, cooking water, bathwater... anything we couldn't use for something else went on the garden. But it didn't help, it wasn't nearly enough, so she almost killed herself one afternoon, out there in the heat, digging sheets of corrugated iron into the ground, four feet deep and all around the garden, to hold the water in.... she put shade cloth over the top to keep it cooler... it looked so strange, this makeshift greenhouse, only about six feet to a side. And it still wasn't working. We just couldn't spare enough water."
For a month, Marjorie struggled to keep the plants alive, fought to keep one patch of green in the middle of the howling desert. Everything else had long since withered and blown away in the harsh alkaline wind that came racing across the salt flats.
Sarah: "And then one day, about five weeks after Mum started the garden, our neighbor Val came over with this bucket of dirty bathwater and asked if she could sit in the garden for a while. So Mum poured the water into her watering can and while I made Val a cup of tea, and Val just sat on the grass, sipping tea, looking for all the world like one of those pictures of, you know, Englishwomen having a garden party, while Mum watered the ferns. And it went from there."
The small town of 500 souls adopted the garden as a community project. Any unrecyclable water was stored in sealed barrels behind Marjorie's house and used to keep the garden green and lush, and in return, the garden was used by everyone.
Sarah: "There was days, I swear to God, when we had three dozen people lined up, waiting for their turn to go into the garden. They'd go and sit on the grass and, you know, read a book or just look at the plants. I guess it helped them forget about how scary the drought was... like, how bad can it really be, as long as we still have this little oasis. Amy and Mark Butler even got married there, and that was kind of funny... them and the celebrant squeezed onto the tiny patch of grass and all their guests standing outside in the dust. Amy's brother Phil took the pictures, and he did it really cleverly, so it looked like they were in a tropical jungle... looking at it, you wouldn't know he was standing in red dirt up to his ankles."
For the next seven years of the drought, the garden thrived. And then the rains returned.
Sarah: "When the rain came back we all expected Mum to go out and pull out the walls and take off the roof.... she'd kept it safe all this time, so we thought she'd be more than ready to let Mother Nature take over. But she just got that look again, and she replaced the shade cloth with clear plastic panels so the rain couldn't fall onto the garden, and kept pouring dishwater onto it. We thought she was crazy. But.... it went on just the same. People kept bringing water."
While the rest of the town slowly returned to its pre-drought state, Marjorie Taylor kept the garden as it was, watered solely by donations of undrinkable water. Even as the remainder of her own property was nourished by rainfall and tended lovingly by Marjorie herself, her tiny scrap of garden continued to draw townsfolk with their buckets and pots and old juice bottles, bringing water in return for fifteen minutes in the garden.
Marjorie Taylor died in 2021, a year after the drought ended. The garden remains just as she left it. A small plaque commemorates her dedication and the community council has appointed a committee to maintain the garden as she wished.
User Reviews
Submitted by Alter (user info) at 2007-09-26 22:10:46 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No, Comment.
Submitted by Fey (user info) at 2007-08-04 13:31:11 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This is one of my favourites. It made me chuckle while my eyes welled up.
Submitted by Coyote (user info) at 2007-06-04 18:47:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This probably should have been longer, but I liked the shot of your garden (I'm assuming).