Do you know that blue bees have a different hum from honey bees? Neither did I until a conversation with a fellow gardener last Sunday. My sense of hearing isn't as good as hers so I never picked up the difference. But I do love the blue bees and the blue bees love blue flowers, which is why we grow so many blue and purple blooms and I leave the blue salvias unpruned each winter till every single flower is frosted off.
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Most of us have no idea who we share our gardens with – we are at work during the day when the lizards are out, asleep (or trying to be) when the possums dance on the roof.
Our golden skinks are treasured friends. They seem to glow more the hotter it gets each summer. They get cranky before thunderstorms – when they begin tearing at each other you know it's going to be a bad one, even before the purple clouds gather on the horizon preceding hail, thunder, slashes of lightning and then a deluge. But on calm days, the skinks are so used to humans that they'll sit on the railing of the stairs not even budging till a human hand gropes within 10 centimetres of them.
Lizards make superb free-range friends. An elderly neighbour began to feed her blue-tongued lizard, initially to stop it stealing the eggs. But they became attached to each other, sitting companionably in the garden even when tucker was not on the menu. We had one skink here who loved turkey, and would climb up on my knee for skerrick of it at Christmas which is the only time we have turkey. It also loved fruit cake, which I discovered only when I realised that it had climbed up my jeans and was nibbling the slice I held in my hand while thinking about something other than lizards.
Kids can become enchanted with lizards, so like tiny dinosaurs. To tame them, you need only let them get used to you, sitting, possibly reading, near the rockery or wherever else they make their home, and behaving in a vaguely non-lizard threatening way, i.e. moving slowly, very slowly and walking purposefully past them until they are quite sure you never have lizard on the menu, no matter how fat and tempting they get from too much fruit cake.
Bats, on the other hand, never do seem to become tame – unless any reader has made friends with a bat? Right now, with Lyssavirus this possibly should not be encouraged, unless you've had training in bat handling and living with bats. We sometimes have a microbat indoors and use a butterfly net to chase it out, experience having shown us that once one microbat discovers the small delicious insects that hover around the reading light at night, there will soon be two microbats. Then three. Then a small colony taking over your winter wardrobe.
And microbats can squeeze through the most unlikely places, which is possibly how the legend of disincorporating vampires came into being.
But bats outside are charming, not to mention efficient mozzie eaters – if you have a surplus of mozzies or fruit fly you may just have a microbat deficiency. Again, the best way to see bats is just to be still, or to go to a bat highway, like our creek, which local bats use because of its treeless avenue to zoom back and forth.
But birds, of course, are the garden neighbours most of us know best, though often just as a fruit-eating nuisance – or broccoli guzzlers in the case of bower birds, who have an inordinate love of winter broccoli. They sensibly stop eating it when the weather warms up and the broccoli become more sulphurous.
If you have a decent diversity of birds, you'll notice they change with the season. We live on a bird migratory corridor so in autumn and spring we are on the flight path of sudden vast flocks, sometimes as loud as a mob of helicopters, others just a host of sudden silent dapples. We can identify some of the migrating species, but others flutter from tree to tree in the shadows of dusk and dawn, so fast that we have watched them for decades but are still not sure what they are.
Swallows, though, are easy to identify, and excellent avian calendars reminding you of the season out the window. Swallow migrations fly more slowly and lower here than most other migrations. Our local swallows have left us for warmer winter pastures which may be way up north but they may also have just gone for a brief stay down the coast, as I have sometimes seen swallows on the south coast in mid-winter. They are possibly locals who have decided to stay on but also, just possibly, they might be our swallows having a breath of sea air.
The lyrebirds announce autumn here, their songs becoming more and more complex as winter advances and their dances more determined. The king parrots arrive in mid-winter to eat the Melia azedarach seeds (native white cedar) and the powerful owl begins to boom, a long mournful call even when answered by another powerful owl in what may be a booming contest or a friendly exchange or even the powerful owl equivalent of fence building: this is your territory, this is mine.
And then, suddenly, as the days begin to lengthen, the spider webs, that are necessary for the structural integrity of many nests, start to vanish from the window frames, though not quite enough to make our windows entirely cobweb-free.
Our cuckoos usually begin calling in spring too, though two months ago the brush cuckoo and the fantail cuckoo began singing again, not just at our place but at others in the district, possibly when we had a warmish spell after a cool summer. Now they are silent again until the warmer weather comes or longer days or whatever it is that nudges a cuckoo to call. For all I know, they have a bird version of a calendar hidden up in the casuarina tree and just forgot to consult it this autumn.
None of these are pets, of course, except just possibly for the lizard that would feed from my hand, though even then the "I give you food in return for your company" relationship was too sporadic to qualify as owner and pet. They are neighbours, part of our lives, giving added depth and richness to each day of our lives.
The advantage of free-range neighbours as opposed to pets is that they go about their lives even if you go away for a fortnight. But it is more than just that. There is magic in discovering the world that is neither human nor pet nor human food, and especially magic for kids, too. My grandson fell in love with the golden whistler that lived around our front windows last summer.
"Bird outside!" he'd shriek, which is the main form of communication when you are 18 months old. "Bird outside." And it wasn't just any bird. It was HIS bird. And I suspect it always will be, as long as golden whistlers fly here.
This week I am
* longing for the perfume of newly mown grass;
* but enjoying the scent of freshly dug dirt instead – dug by the wombats, not by me;
* giving up locating the sweet potatoes till they (maybe) sprout again;
* swearing mildly at the chokos that are still growing upwards despite the frost – but not a flower or fruit to be seen;
* waving to the highest of the tree dahlias, about four metres up in the air – the lower ones have been burnt by frost; and
* suddenly remembering that I haven't watered the plants under the eaves for more than a month – the zygocactus have survived but are the chives dormant or deceased?
Recipes
Lemon butter cake
250g butter
2½ cups castor sugar
4 tbsp grated lemon zest
6 eggs
2 cups self-raising flour
1 cup plain flour
1 cup sour cream
Icing:
2½ cups icing mixture
2 tbsp butter
2½ tsp lemon juice
2 tbsp grated dark chocolate
Cream butter, zest and sugar until light and creamy. Add eggs one by one, mixing well before the next one is added. If you go too fast it will curdle – it will still taste good but will be heavier and slightly greasier. Gently stir in the flours and sour cream.
Bake in a greased and floured cake tin at 200C for about 50 minutes or until the top springs back when touched. Time taken will vary depending on the shape of the cake tin – a wide shallow pan will cook faster than a long deep one. You can also cook in two identical round tins to make a double layer cake. Allow to cool for 10 minutes then turn out. Ice when cool, then sprinkle with the gated chocolate.
If you want a double-decker cake, make a double batch of icing and use half to sandwich the two layers together.
Icing: Beat all the ingredients (except for the chocolate) till they are smooth and blended.
Old-fashioned lemon bikkies
These used to be a shearing shed standby. The lemon essence was the traditional comfort of the shearer's cook – alcohol based, they could go through a dozen bottles a day. I'm not sure if it is alcohol-based these days.
500g butter
1 cup castor sugar
1 x 395g can sweetened condensed milk
5 cups self-raising flour
2 tsp lemon essence
8 tbsp grated lemon zest
Optional: ½ cup chopped crystallised ginger or crushed boiled lollies to top. Cream butter and sugar.
Beat in milk, flour, essence and zest. Place spoonfuls on baking trays lined with baking paper. Flatten each one with a fork and scatter on topping, if using.
Bake at 200C for 10 minutes or until just palest brown. Remove. Store in a sealed container for up to a fortnight.
