Blue

 

It’s curious, isn’t it, living across the street from our local topiarist. On fair days he steps out along the footpath, setting out secateurs, small saws, pruners, and so forth near the fence where no one will put their foot on them. That would be a nasty accident. His desire to turn the stretching branches of the trees and shrubs in his garden into figures of geometry is one of nature’s paradoxes. It’s hard to imagine when clipping a tree went from the need to produce more fruit to an interest in how round to make a tree that was already fairly round. Perhaps I should google it. Sometimes we sit with our Spode teacups on the verandah bemused, watching him getting rounder and rounder with the various excellent exotics he planted equidistant from each other, presumably for this very purpose, too long ago to recall. He makes hand measurements from the nature strip against the sky, artist of all he surveys, before setting to at a fair clip. This, we observe, nibbling anzacs, is a Sisyphean task when it comes to the cootamundra, which no sooner is rendered round than it redoubles efforts at shooting fresh fronds of blue in all directions, geysers of turquoise, impossibly disinterested in the spherical or polygonal. We ponder also the eucalypt, another tree that goes to extraordinary lengths to escape the rigours of topiary, being more accustomed to the rigours of intense heat and cold. Living in the Heidelberg District, we question if our neighbour is not trying to return his trees to the European forms of artists before Withers and Streeton. If so, then clearly with only partial success. Blue, though what blue, becomes the subject as we marvel in our minds at how Roberts and McCubbin paid proper attention to the blue of blue gums, a dusty blue the same more or less on certain days as the Blue Dandenongs we observe most days from the ridge, a blue shared with the imported cootamundras that many locals call weeds. The frilly leaves may be pale green and soft blue and edged with purple in the light, blue being the shade we agree upon, though dissenters say more greenish, others a mauve at certain times and in a certain mood. A book probably has some technical word. Our neighbour certainly sees the form beneath the foliage, we agree, he smooths it all out with scissor precision, but for how long? Much longer than tea time? Fairly surely we are not expecting a patch of forever England, are we then, given the native tree’s race against time means streaking out in all directions. Not that this ever deters our neighbour for a moment. He will be out again on the next fair day, beautifying the view with his latest renderings of the conical conifer, undulant hedge, and right-angled variegated. He collects his implements till then, even as we take inside the remains of our tea things and our snip-snap chit-chat.