Flowering

 

Bendigo, where I was born, had old streets that were planted out with flowering gums. View Street in Bendigo was most memorable in this regard, a broad street with Edna Walling-like roadsides where red flowering gums and pink grew at spacious distances from one another, up the hill and down the slope again. At least, so my memory visualises, in enriched images. That’s where we visited family friends the Raggatts in their 1880s villa and made childish imitations of tennis on their weed-inflected court. Tea poured from the pot like endless conversation. Traces of gold were about the place. But my strongest memory is not sound or smell, it’s the vision of flowering gums in View Street, because their colours were deep and vibrant across the red of the spectrum, mostly more like orange than actual red, in large bursts against the dark green leaves. Sometimes people called them box gums, who were not experts in eucalypts, and we called them box gums as well as flowering gums, though flowering gums was the common expression. They were shady at midday. They turned heavy at evening, masses of orange and vermillion as the sun settled and all the other colours deepened and cooled. There was green and gold and pale blue. Most memorably, flowering gums were old. They felt old to look at, carried ancient time in their bearing, rested in the earth as if forever. They were before time and certainly before any of us. My head was filled with the weight of their colours in the softening light. The flowering gum in our front garden in Sinclair Crescent has come into bloom. We know this from the early morning rainbow lorikeets, who are louder, livelier and funnier than any breakfast radio hosts. They don’t laugh at their own jokes, either. After the birds disperse for other cafés in the area, the bees arrive in numbers, clustering over the clusters with their hungry hum. Um that one hmmmmm! Given all eucalypts flower, it is a question why our recent ancestors called these gums ‘flowering’. Perhaps the answer is obvious, given they are the most obvious flowering eucalypts in view, in the street. Their sudden efflorescence in bright sunshine stays in the memory. Our heads are filled with the lightness of their colours in the harsh light. Or even at evening there is no other colour like them, anywhere in sight. Eucalyptus ficifolia, as our recent ancestors would have said, though the leaves look nothing like fig leaves; or today, corymbia ficifolia. The renaming of large ranges of eucalyptus to corymbia has not helped the amateurs, those who would imitate the knowhow of Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller KCMG, and who might be happier, though not as happy as lorikeets and bees, by just staying with ‘flowering’.