Wildflowers

When I was six and sister Lyla eight we moved to an area that was then, in the eighties, a semi-rural hybrid between suburban Perth and the bush. Mum and dad’s dream home was built on five acres of land surrounded by wild untouched land. When the local council was deciding where to subdivide for housing, the area around our place was to remain untouched because of the profusion of wildflowers.

Our walk to and from primary school took us through winding unsealed roads surrounded by acres and acres of thick untamed bush. I loved the way each tree and plant was different yet they all seemed to fit together like one enormous living being. A gnarly branch would curl its way around another tree as if in embrace and then together the two trees would house seemingly hundreds of other organisms, insects, birds and luminescent lichen. Often we’d see lizards, sometimes kangaroos and the bush was alive with the sounds of birds, frogs and cicadas. Wild mushrooms grew here and there along with puffballs and other plants that gave us hours of joy; dandelions we could blow and make a wish and yellow daisies to make daisy chains.

We loved it when spring came and with it the flowers. At the start of the season you could barely notice the change, just splashes of pink fire on a dark green canvas. The pink trumpet flowers, like wild gladiolas were always first with their audacious stems and bright pink bells. Sometimes we’d pluck the flowers from where they stuck to their stem to suck the nectar, a spot of honey on the tip of the tongue.

That you couldn't see the rich floral bounty without getting up close inside the bush added to the joy of spring; the difficulty of the hunt increasing the thrill of finding the treasured wild flowers. Once close enough the myriad delicate flowers with their curious sounding names seemed endless. The egg and bacon, a bushy plant with tiny two-tone brown and yellow petal flowers; the branching fringed lily—fluffy little purple stars; the tall kangaroo paws, with felt green stems and proud red-green flowers.

But what we loved most were the wild bush orchids with their intricate detail and vibrant tones. Lyla loved the donkey orchids with tiny autumnal coloured lips and two sepals pointing up like donkey ears. I preferred the short-stemmed cowslip orchids, little yellow stars splashed with red and white freckles. Or the pink fairies, just like the cowslips in a shade somewhere between mauve and pink. And the most sought after of all, the elegant spider orchid with its spindly white and burgundy sepals meeting at the blood red lip; A mysterious alien fairy about to take flight. Finding these was exciting not just for their breathtaking beauty but also because they were quite rare and usually well camouflaged. Picking wildflowers was successful if we came home with a spider orchid.

One day near the end of spring, walking home from school, Lyla and I smelt the perfume of the blooming freesias. We decided to pick some for mum. The sweet scent of the translucent bell-shaped flowers led us off our path and onto the land across the road from our property. Before we realized we were deep in the middle of the block, surrounded by dense bush. With my eyes down, looking for flowers, I noticed something strange, green beneath my shiny black school shoes. We were standing on the softest, greenest grass I had ever seen. The lush pea green seemed surreal. Our kind of Aussie bush was dry and even in winter imbued with muted eucalyptus tones of greeny brown or grey.

I lifted my eyes and we were in a place unlike anything I had ever seen, the green oasis was surrounded by baby Christmas trees. I reached out and touched one and its needle-like leaves felt soft, like velvet. Everything was bathed in warm sunlight and a sweet floral smell floated in the air. Around the perimeter of the tree circle was a mass of colour, a myriad flowers. The brightest yellow cowslip orchids and their pink fairy sisters, dazzling brown and orange donkey orchids with their cute little face-like sepals and pointy ears. And more compelling than ever, thousands of spindly spider orchids, each with its own imploring fragile beauty.

There was something else as well, a new flower that we had never seen before. ‘It’s an enamel orchid,’ Lyla said. Not just one, a mass of these glossy purple stars with tiny pouting bow lips. We had never seen so many wild orchids in one place and felt overwhelmed. This was like a dream. As we filled our hands with multi-coloured bunches of our favourite flowers a sense of excitement filled us, we had stumbled across something enchanted. Our childhood stories were all about magic but here we were experiencing something delightfully inexplicable in reality, not in a story or a dream. I looked at Lyla and she smiled. There weren't words to express what we were feeling or what this was, but we both felt it. Everything, the trees, the grass, the flowers, Lyla and I, were bathed in a warm gossamer blanket of the most profound peace and beauty.

We began walking towards home, our hands holding our multi-coloured posies of orchids and freesias ready to give to our beloved mum. When we reached the edge of the bush we could see mum through the trees pacing at the top of our driveway. As we got closer it was obvious that she was upset.

"Oh my God, where have you been?" she yelled, running to us and then taking us fiercely in her arms. As mum hugged Lyla and I roughly together the violent mix of her fear and love was scary. Seeing how fragile she was terrified me. She had been crying with fear and now relief. We started crying too. We were over an hour late home from school. She had called the school and our friends' houses. She was about to call the police.

With tears in her eyes, as way of explanation Lyla handed mum her posy of orchids and freesias, now crushed. Mum barely looked at them and as we walked towards our house, mum held my hand so tight it hurt and I felt cold at the tear stained patch near my chest. I had dropped my pretty bunch of flowers when mum had embraced us.

We didn't have language back then to describe what we'd experienced in the enchanted forest, I am not sure I do now. But I remember that although it had been one of the most amazing experiences of our then short lives, we decided not to venture back there. It had taken on a scariness that was unwarranted really, because mum's fear had been that we were late, not that we'd been in the land across the road. But we were confused, could time take on a different dimension in that forest? We weren't sure, after being there we felt that anything was possible, and we couldn't work out how we could have been so late that day. Anyway it just didn't seem worth it, we didn't want to risk upsetting mum like that again.

Some weeks went by, maybe even months before we thought about going across the road again. It was the weekend, time of less rigid schedules and time-frames, and we were bored with our dolls and their make-believe worlds so we decided to go back and find our enchanted forest. We didn't want to tell mum, we were still a bit confused about it all. We just said that we were going for a bush walk and that was fine.

It took us sometime to find the place and when we did we couldn't believe that it was the same spot. It was so changed. Sadly, it now looked like any other part of the bush, the magic completely gone. The fir trees, which had seemed so soft and sun sparkly were now dull, their foliage motley, spiky, and not lush as it had been. There were no more flowers and what was left of the green grass seemed jagged, as if it had been ripped up by BMX bikes and pounding boots.

In the centre of the trees was a sheet of metal which was partly covering a hole in the ground. Looking at it we could see that the hole was big enough for people to sit in. We shifted the metal to expose the crevice and together we leaned down to look into the manhole. Sheets of metal had been set against the edges of the hole as makeshift walls. Stuck to those walls were pictures from magazines, pictures of women with no clothes. In one the woman's legs were spread, in another a woman lay painfully arced across a table, her hand hovering at her crotch and a distant, confused look in her eyes. On a third a woman was kneeling on all fours as a nude man knelt behind her, hanging onto her hips. On the ground were piles of magazines with nude women on the covers. It was a cubby house built by some older boys.

Lyla and I walked away from that place feeling upset and dirty. I felt confused and ashamed, I could feel heat in my face. I tried to make sense of it but I couldn't. There was disappointment hanging between us like a dirty old rag.

Could we have held onto the enchanted forest if we'd staked our claim and protected it? I began to doubt my own perception and memory, did the enchanted forest even exist? If it did exist I doubted that we could have saved it, after all, the boys were no doubt bigger and stronger and had boots and BMX bikes.

Much later when Lyla and I had grown and moved out, mum and dad sold our childhood home and moved to a smaller place in the city. Lyla moved to London, I moved to Sydney. I was happy when I found an excuse to combine a visit home with work in the form of a conference. It wasn't until this trip that I even remembered the vibrant wildflowers and the importance they held in our childhood. There was an Aboriginal presenter at the conference who explained that flowers have power and a magnetism that can be yielded for healing. And how the Noongar people have the oldest living tradition of flower essence healing spanning over forty thousand years. I learnt that each of the flowers we had so loved as little girls possessed special healing properties. The purple fringed lily promotes gratitude, the kangaroo paw intimacy, donkey orchids help release resentment and blame, the enamel orchid promotes consistency and energy output and the spider orchid works at sustaining and maintaining love.

At the end of the conference I had a day before flying back to Sydney for work. "You won't recognise it out there," mum said, when I told her I had decided to hire a car and go out to our old place and who knows, maybe see some wildflowers.

Mum was right. As I drove past our old primary school I felt lost. If it weren't for the school I would have no clue where I was. Nothing was even vaguely recognisable. Where there had been bush-land there were now houses, row after row, identical, each with neatly manicured lawns and numbered letter-boxes. Where there was dense bush and unsealed roads there was now miles and miles of bitumen. I drove round and round in confused circles in that small subdivision looking for my childhood home but I couldn’t find it.