Others...

Seven years ago, I arranged for tree-loppers to take out three Chinese elms in our small inner-Brisbane backyard. Those trees had been a mother’s arms when my heart was broken—a child lost to adoption, my grief delayed across the years, overwhelming me in middle age—but we chopped them down. 

Native to east Asia but now everywhere in the world other than Antarctica, Chinese elm, ulmus parvifolia, does well in Brisbane, too well, it turns out, taking over from hapless eucalypts and any other natives that animals other than humans rely on to survive. If you have a Chinese elm, you will soon have two. If you have a small Chinese elm, it will in a matter of a few years be a giant.  

The treelopper boss, small and wiry, arrived with brothers, large and strong, and extended family. He climbed until we couldn’t see him in the foliage, to begin roping and sawing so that the others below could pull branches down safely. It took hours, a whole day; we sat and watched our trees deflate, deafened by chainsaws hard at work.  

In the first summer after the elms were gone, I mourned them, despite their noxious natures. They had been magnificent, dropping their leaves in our short subtropical winter to create a carpet on the lawn and allow the soft northern light to soothe us through chilly mornings, offering shade to the west in the hot autumn and spring and especially the relentless summer. And bringing such ease. When we came home from Canada where we’d fled for a year when grief overwhelmed me, our son, then nine, dived into a pile of raked up leaves like he’d dived into snow in the northern hemisphere, only not dressed like a blimp. There’s a picture of his face poking out from those leaves, smiling, another of his body mid-flight. 

Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Overstory is about the boneheaded stupidity of humans compared with other species and in particular trees that live in community and look after one another and measure time in centuries. It is a singular book that has changed my heart and mind about the planet and nature in unexpected ways and has brought my grief to the fore again, only this time for us all. As a child reflecting on ants, one of the novel’s protagonists Adam Appich ‘…realizes Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long.’ This is after Adam’s father has twisted the boy’s wrist until it fractures and broken his mother’s elbow ‘…in self-defence…’ so you can understand how he comes to the conclusion. 

In the first summer after the elms were gone, I boiled in the house while the ragged stumps glared at me. They sprouted suckers for years after that, and their roots gave rise to mushrooms that grew in perfect creepy lines on our lawn. After they were gone altogether, it took another summer to realise that in order for the backyard to be other than a desert, something had to grow there. I found the native plant nursery in The Gap, where the mostly volunteers help idiots like me. I planted two of everything. It all grew. I don’t know why. I don’t have good soil. It’s called schist and it’s mostly rock. I don’t have much water because every year is a drought year now.  

I can’t tell you exactly what I planted as I didn’t keep notes of any kind. Among them there’s lilly pilly, grevillea, a coolamon, euodia, callistemon, lemon-scented gum, wild ginger and a jacaranda we’d rehomed because it had been picked by our son when he was small. That’s the plants whose names I know.  

A year passed and another and the plants grew and somehow did what they were born to do without my having to do much of anything. Every day became like a surprise party in my kitchen when I’d look out to a plant in flower or new leaf.

And then, creatures other than humans arrived. 

The bluetongue lizard might have been first. I spied it perhaps three years ago. Now it’s fat and a foot long and I would warrant happy. And it really does have a blue tongue. There are all manner of bugs for it to eat, striped bee-like things, big blue flies, cream or blue-brown or brown-black butterflies, moths, spiders in their dozens that were not there three years ago. 

We had possums before we planted but among them these days is a giant who mows the tops of all our native trees like lawn every night, even the lemon-scented gum that’s now four times as tall as me. She has children, the possum, two in tow most nights. It’s hard to hate a creature so passionate about keeping her children alive.  

And the birds; the birds are the biggest surprise of all. Last year, there was a crow family, parents and a fledgling that took its first flight from the neighbour’s tree to our back yard. Yes, I know, we’ve always had crows too—they are ubiquitous—but this was an entire tribe, not just crows but their currawong cousins, raising each other’s children. Baby crows have very blue eyes, I learned, and they take almost a year to stop squawking for food. There are kookaburras too, a group up the hill that come to the garden only occasionally, and a mopoke owl that I hear in the night. 

It is now year seven and the species list in my back yard has diversified so markedly it’s time to take note. In August and September just gone, a group of palefaced rosellas fed off the grevillea and now, in November, a crew of rainbow lorikeets is doing the same. They are also eating from the callistemon and even the jacaranda. I have only ever seen palefaced rosellas in national parks, and rainbow lorikeets rarely. And yet here they are. Our backyard has become a place for birds—some of which were Guardian bird of the year shortlisted this year—to find the food they need.  

These new birds—oh, we cherish them, running for the camera every time they appear—duck their heads to avoid the attacking noisy minor mafia. They flit off, come back, hang upside down, waddle up the branches, morning and night, and eat until they’ve had their fill. One of the rainbow lorikeets sits on a branch without eating anything, just sits there, its little purple head erect, appreciating its life. It makes me think of the Dalai Lama. I would like to learn from that bird but I know that’s unlikely.  

My grief will likely not leave me in this lifetime. I lost a child when I was a child and accepting that has been very difficult. And it is easy to become despondent right now, to grieve the entire world we are destroying. It’s impossible to contemplate that my son’s generation will not experience the birds and other animals I have. That there is a Guardian poll for the bird of the year, that there are still birds to vote for, is an accident of human history and I was born just on the right side, my son perhaps, or his children, just on the wrong side. The poll will be poorer even in ten years—the black-throated finch I’ve never seen and likely never will has won this year and it will be gone—and a poll may be impossible just a generation after that for there won’t be enough childhood memories of birds to write about, or even birds themselves, to bother. Another character from The Overstory, tree scientist Dr Patricia Westerford, who sees a housing development cut through a forest, reflects on where we are. ‘She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.’  

It is at once frightening and thrilling and comforting to realise how small and insignificant our species is. But the damage we can do meantime! It is called unresolved grief, the grief mothers of children given away for adoption experience. A Scottish therapist who lost a child to adoption coined the phrase. It is not nature. Unresolved grief. A garden might help.

For me, the next project is to get rid of the lawn altogether and plant more native trees for the animals to live in or feed off. Making a home for them may well be seen as a kind of virtue-signalling that will annoy people who are trying to do something real and important. And it’s entirely possible that our new birds are only in our backyard because they are fleeing other landscapes decimated in the awful recent climate-fuelled fires. But at least there is food for them.