A week or two before we came up to Wamberal to reconnect with our newly inherited cottage by the sea, we participated in a workshop run by the North Sydney council on Australian Brush Turkeys. These birds have, over the last decades, reinhabited the areas of NSW they had disappeared from due to foxes and other feral predators. Although many people in Sydney and the Central Coast are now frustrated by their neighbourhood brush turkeys because of their instinctive raking and mound building behaviours, the workshop focused on their interesting biology and life cycle. We even borrowed a little book by the workshop leader, Ann Göth, to follow up.

We had not an inkling that we were about to discover our “own” resident brush turkey with its large mound underneath the huge hibiscus in our new back yard. We “named” him BT, or Bertie, and I was pleasantly reminded of my dad, Albert, who enjoying playing with the baby magpies in this same back yard when I was a child.

Over the last year we have been both fascinated to watch BT from our back porch, and frustrated by his destructive raking bare of the grass in the yard. There seems to be an extended brush turkey family roosting in the trees in the neighbouring property behind ours. When our landscaper dismantled BTs mound, (and heavily pruned the overarching hibiscus (!!) - the subject of my last blog), I felt the loss but appreciated the inevitability of reclaiming our back yard jungle. My partner Alex was pleased with this increased spaciousness because it offered us potential for our new garden, but I noticed pangs of guilt when observing BT continue to try to rake leaves despite nowhere to put them. Lately, it seems that he managed to build up a mound just over our back fence.

Then, a few days ago, I learned from Alex that our next door neighbours, whose back garden BT had apparently destroyed with his raking, had trapped him and “relocated” him two hours drive away. I was horrified! I am still grieving. I cannot imagine how people can be so unempathetic that they could take BT out of his family group, far away from his landscape and abandon him in a place he has no familiarity with, no knowledge of local resources of water, food, or predators and other dangers like traffic. I am so, so sad that “my” BT, who was almost a “pet”, has been kidnapped without any word to me, his fate just communicated to my partner as an aside during an across-the-fence conversation.

Over the days, my grief has deepened and broadened, causing me to contemplate all the animals which have similarly been stolen from their family groups, by poachers, for zoos, or as a result of the destruction and theft of their habitat.

And of course in the human world, the barbaric practice of stealing indigenous children from their parents “for their own good” still continues, as well as the theft of land and cultural appropriation.

I wonder about the big picture. The failure to empathise with beings other than one’s immediate group seems to be common across social animals such as chimps and humans. “Us” and “them” is perhaps a natural response to resource scarcity and selfish genes. Evolutionary advantages in sharing and caring are inversely proportional to genetic relatedness. So why am I so surprised at my neighbours’ treatment of brush turkeys, which are after all a species more closely related to poultry, (considered “food”), than to us “intelligent” humans?

Are we just obeying the imperatives of the evolutionary process when we steal, plunder, take whatever we want from the environment? After all, predators would not ask us before munching on our limbs for their lunch. “Theft” is built in to the cycles of eating and decaying – everything takes what it needs without compunction. The emergence of empathy for other species seems to be a developmental and cultural latecomer – we have not even been able to be kind to all other humans yet, so maybe I am asking too much of our species to expect universal ecological identity? The mess we have created of our world speaks volumes. We are currently still hell-bent on stealing the future from our children and the entire biosphere. Unless we learn empathy rapidly our fate looks bleak.

Poor BT has been taken to a fate I will never know. Maybe he has already died of thirst or hunger, or been run over by a car as he tried to come back to his birthplace – a thousand imagined horrors are possible. Or maybe this is his new adventure – maybe he, as a “foreigner” will attract lots more females, maybe he will continue to father baby BTs in his strange new land for some time…

I do miss him. But one of his relatives seems to have already filled the vacuum in our back yard that his kidnapping left. Or maybe…just maybe...they got the wrong BT?

Although at times in my life I have actively sought a “tree-change”, mostly I find myself extremely reluctant to let go of things-the-way-they-are. This tendency manifests in many forms: my long hair, my collections of memorabilia, even never being the one to break off relationships or leave jobs.

As a gardener, I am a very reluctant pruner. I recall getting very upset over my Dad’s proclivity to prune-with-gusto in our family garden. A landlord that pruned “my” garden severely without notice also sent me into a rage.

Although we have rarely had a garden of our own, my partner Alex has had to curb his pruning too. During the years of managing my mum’s rental cottage (formerly our family-and-friends holiday cottage) on the central coast, we planted a lot of little native Australian bushes. But due to both distance and my reluctance to prune, these grew over twenty years into much larger bushes than indicated on the tag. And despite our bias toward Australian natives, some non-native hibiscuses that date from the 1960s were allowed to remain on the property due to my attachment to “the old days” of my childhood holidays up there. One of these hibiscuses, in the neglected back yard, had sent branches far and wide, oft covered in morning glory creeper, and more recently forming a haven for a brush turkey’s mound.

Then with my mum’s passing, we found ourselves the new owners of this wild backyard, and Alex began a project to wrestle it back from the weeds and the brush turkey. The latter had so scratched off the ground cover that storms were washing our topsoil into our neighbour’s yard!

Alex engaged his horticulture course friend Rowan to landscape one of the back corners of the garden, and work had been underway for a couple of days when we arrived at the property. We were surprised to find the brush turkey mound material already relocated completely to the back corner behind some new gabions forming a low wall. I was relieved that Alex wouldn’t have to do this mound relocation after all, since we had been told that the mounds often harbour wildlife such as deadly funnelweb spiders and snakes!

The hibiscus was still overhanging the site with its long arching branches. Over lunch Alex mentioned that Rowan was asking about pruning the hibiscus. I replied that Alex should make sure that I was consulted about any pruning. We went shopping.

On our return Rowan was just leaving for the day. Alex went into the back yard to see how the work was progressing with the gabion wall. He came back and suggested I come and see, and I got my camera to continue my documentation of the progress. As I approached I noticed a lot more space in the back yard. Suddenly it hit me – the hibiscus was GONE!!! It had been pruned back to several stumps. Devastated is too weak a word. It was too horrible to bear. I turned and went back into the house. I lay on the couch in shock.

When Alex came into the house he knew how upset I was. He said he didn’t know Rowan was thinking about pruning that day, so he hadn’t made a point of communicating my wishes before we left to shop. It was all a terrible misunderstanding. I told him he could have the back yard, that I no longer wanted any part of it. He retreated into a self protective shell.

Tormented by grief, I returned to the back yard with my camera to take a photo of what was left of my hibiscus. Hardly anything. It was then that I made the macabre discovery of the stack of hibiscus branches on the other side of the back yard. It was an enormous pile of beautiful green leafy hibiscus branches, and the sight of it made me weep out loud.

In my tormented state I started dragging each branch onto the grass around the washing line. Branch after huge branch. My beautiful, wild, overgrown, messy hibiscus! It had known my father’s hands, and had become so old and unpruned that it had found an architecture like a magic cave, which the brush turkey had occupied. It was a piece of history of this place; it KNEW that backyard like no one else; had watched years of brush turkey chicks hatch, sheltering the mound so it could be maintained at just the right temperature. I felt that I had lost a friend. I felt I had to say goodbye, how SORRY I was that I failed to protect it. I didn’t KNOW. I blamed Alex; I blamed myself. If I had known it was in danger, I would have stopped the pruning. I could have decided which of the branches to prune and which to leave as magical green archways.

My neighbor Max must have heard my unbridled sobs as I dragged the branches around, and, looking over the fence, he asked me what was wrong. I told him, and in trying to comfort me by saying that “it will grow back”, he unleashed my rage all the more. “Yes, it may grow back into a tidy little hibiscus bush! I hate tidy little hibiscus bushes! I loved THAT untamed hibiscus!” Max left me to my grieving.

I assembled what was left of my friend into a bushlike circle on the lawn and took photos. I sat in the middle of the cut branches – so much cut off – unbelievable! I got the secateurs and cut off small branch tips with little new leaves and buds. I didn’t know whether they would grow roots, but I just had to save the life in them for a while at least, even if it was only to put them in a vase. Before dark I dragged the branches back to the pile, perhaps to hide my episode of madness in case the workers would be coming back in the morning.

That evening, I tried to find some comfort in journaling. “My hibiscus has been butchered.” I began. … “mistress of the back yard…it had been there for 50 years or longer… flowering every year, big beautiful pink flowers…I am SO, SO, SO, SO SAD.” I was numb. The garden was empty without it. My oft-quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins lines came to me: “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”

As I lay on the couch afterwards immersed in my grief, it dawned on me that I myself am part of a branch that may soon be pruned. I felt the grief I had been pushing away, the grief and the guilt for all my fellow species that are already being pruned off the tree of life by the climate disruption, and those that are to follow. No one knows how severe this Great Pruning will be.

All night I tossed and turned and felt physically ill. I am living inside a slow motion horror story. Am I a character in someone’s nightmare? I realized that there was no turning back the clock; that what had been done was done. Shit happens. Horrible.

In the morning, anticipating that Rowan and his assistants would be returning, I suddenly knew I wanted to protect the “bones” of my hibiscus from being cut up and fed to the mulcher. So I once again dragged the branches off the pile and made it clear in a friendly way to the workers when they came that I didn’t want any more pruning without consultation. They understood and apologized for the misunderstanding. I told them not to worry about the branches, that I wanted to use them for a “project”. I had no idea what I meant! Alex seemed to know more than I did – he explained that I am an “artist”, which seemed to justify this mad idea.

Over the next few days the “project” emerged, piece by piece. It unfurled into a documenting and honouring of the beauty of each individual branch, carefully pruning it so that its architectural features were clearly visible, and then photographing and drawing the structure. I also measured all the saw points on branches and the stumps that were left, gradually forming a map like a giant jigsaw puzzle of the original bush. For some reason this meticulous mapping and artistic appreciation of the wild hibiscus gave me huge comfort.

Eventually the branches found new sites in the garden where they can be lovingly admired from kitchen window and back porch by me and Alex for a while longer.

The tips were also “propagated” into little pots, which now sit on my city balcony. Perhaps by beginner’s luck some will grow roots, and then I will wonder what on earth to do with them! But for now, this is how I am coming to terms with my loss.

For some people, this story will be incomprehensible, I suppose. All this fuss over a hibiscus bush! Yes, it was about my treasured hibiscus. And The Great Pruning. It all blurs into one, and perhaps I learned something: that it can be a huge comfort to give meticulous attention to the beauty in my life, even while carrying a broken heart.

“Have you seen what they’ve done to our street?” asked our downstairs neighbour Mac as I welcomed him in. He’d come to speak to my partner, Alex, about organizing a body corporate job on the property, but seemed quite perturbed about this question.

“You mean the tree on the corner?” I asked, exchanging a mutual sad nod. That morning a huge old camphor laurel tree had been cut down. A week before, Alex had talked to a workman there who told him the tree was destined for the chop, and we had sentimentally taken some photos of the tree yesterday, not knowing exactly when it would be gone. Then, this morning I’d noticed the loud sounds of a mulcher, and driving past the corner later I was struck by the strange gap in my usual landscape – a huge space had replaced what was a beautiful spreading tree with ivy growing up trunk and branches. (Last autumn, Alex had been so delighted by the reds, oranges and yellows of the ivy that he’d taken a whole series of photos of the tree in the late afternoon light.)

It was a poignant surprise to realize that our neighbour, too, was feeling the loss of the old mother-of-a-tree. I wondered how many others in the neighborhood were similarly dismayed, without warning or a chance to say “goodbye” to this landmark.

The next morning I found the beautiful autumn photos and as promised, emailed them to Mac with the words “Comfort in remembered beauty”. I also rang the council to ask why permission had been granted to cut the tree down. After a search of her records, the explanation was: “dieback in canopy" and "extensive decay in trunk and branches". I just needed to know why. It was somehow a comfort to know why.

By now, having been a climate change activist, I am beyond shedding too many tears over the loss of a single tree. Still, I was sad for the birds and the other creatures who would be far more dismayed – or am I projecting? Anyway, the absent tree sank down into the depths of my psyche while I went on with my life. It sank down and found resonant places, memories, feelings…

In the wee hours of the next morning a phrase bubbled up from the depths, and I wrote these words on a piece of paper I keep at my bedside for such sleep inspirations: “heartfelt afterspaces”.

I recalled that when I was younger and less aware of the whole human-ecology catastrophe, I felt the loss of “my” trees in such a physical way that it was as if my own limbs had been severed.

While living on the central coast in my thirties, my next-door neighbour decided to cut down some cheese trees on our boundary. The noise of the chain-saws traumatised me through paper-thin fibro walls, so I tried to soothe myself by going to the other side of the house, and sat meditating. I felt the tree, and spontaneously invited it to come over and live for a while in my body if it wanted to. It took me up on my generous invitation and we meditated together until after the chain saw had stopped. The tree-spirit seemed to be curious and found similarities in our physiologies: my lungs were like leaves, my gut villi were like roots…

I will never forget the sudden and very amusing surprise the tree-spirit seemed to gasp when, having finished my meditation, I got up and walked to the kitchen. Tree-thought translated: oh my goodness, you can MOVE! Wow! That’s cool!

This tree-fusion experience also helped me to find tree metaphors for the flow of “chi” during my t’ai chi practice, based on the upward and downward movements of nutrients within trees. That tree lived on in me for many years, I think.

Then, in my forties, I befriended an elegant young angophora that grew up outside my second-floor flat’s balcony. I used to sit and meditate there and the tree was a lovely part of my life, bringing me lots of bird visitors, and waving its delicate long leaves in the harbourside breeze.

One awful morning, without any warning, there were workmen climbing the tree and sawing off one of its branches. They obviously intended to cut the whole tree down. Apparently this decision had been made by the “body corporate” and mere tenants were not considered relevant or even worth telling. I ran downstairs to confront the workmen. I can’t remember exactly what I said-screamed but they stopped the job and went away for a while. Meanwhile I took away their ladder and put it at the back of the property next to the washing line. I was SO upset! They had already cut the branch that came to my balcony and there was only a slender trunk left, which looked quite odd. I stood by the doomed tree and wept for a while and then went back to my flat.

Not long afterwards came a knock at my door. This description comes from the lyrics of a song called One Tree, which I wrote later about what had happened:

    Two policemen stood in my stairwell
    And asked me to explain myself.
    Why was I so worked up?
    Couldn’t be just a tree – it must be something else.

    They had a piece of paper from the council    
    That said it was OK to cut down the tree.
    Because it says so on a f***ing piece of paper
    Do you think that matters to me?

    Now I stare out my window,
    At bricks and concrete and stone.
    I don’t want to live here anymore –
    This is no longer my home.

    And I read in the paper
    ‘bout the freeway going through
    And I hear that the Penan forests
    Are still being clear-felled.
    And I wonder how THAT must feel.
    All I lost is One Tree – and that’s enough pain for me.

Heartfelt afterspaces. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about his felled Binsey Poplars: “Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty been”. As I grow older I see so many afterspaces in my world.

The week of the felling of my corner camphor laurel happened to be one year after my mother’s final week of life on planet Earth. The afterspaces of a person are somewhat different from that of a tree which spent its entire life in one place, leaving a very strong afterspace: a negative afterimage of itself etched in the mind’s eye.

But my mother’s afterspaces are scattered around my present and past world like autumn leaves, blowing in the winds of my daily rounds, reminiscences, dreams, night-waking thoughts; her music, still too painful to watch on videos, finds ways to undo me whenever a heart-opening song comes on TV or radio.

Like the tree, whose loss is softened by remembered beauty, I am immersing myself in gratitude for having been indulged by 62 years of mothering. I rest back in my mother’s afterspaces and she is still there.