Busy-ness and Beauty

It’s Monday, and the sky is a mix of streaming warm sunshine and high-flying fluffy grey-white clouds. It’s pleasant with a hint of good things to come, there’s no breeze, several tui are chortling to each other from the numerous trees in the neighbourhood, and the world is beginning to wake up to another spring that is doing what spring does best – grow things.

I mentioned spring in my last column, though that was more about the featherbrained flirtings of starlings perched on the power lines above the roadway out the front. This is more about the less-flirtatious, and just how good the world around us is if we take a little time to look at it and listen to it carefully. And that’s easy to do – it simply means stopping the rush, and leaning over a fence for a while or sitting under a tree in a patch of bush and doing nothing except keeping still. Don’t scratch, don’t talk, don’t fiddle with the mobile – just keep very still. And listen, and watch.

You’ll be astounded at what pops out of the woodwork, or grass, or drain, or open paddock, or from under a nearby log, or even 100 metres away. And don’t be frightened by any of it – if it was going to sting or bite or eat you, it would have done so 10 minutes ago, when you first arrived.

The weather over the weekend, at least throughout the central North Island, was magnificent. I was in Tauranga, and over there it was wall-to-wall sunshine during the day, with clear, chilly nights. On both mornings I was up and about before sun-up, and I think the term ‘crisp’ to describe the temperature outside was perhaps a tad on the overly-genteel side. In any event, I was very glad of a good merino thermal and a fleece-lined jacket, along with a goodly hat. Long woollen socks are standard wear throughout the winter.

But on the drive over, out across the farmland of the Waikato, and up over the Kaimai Ranges, the countryside was looking superb, and it is my firm suggestion to those who live in towns and cities that they should set aside an hour or so one sunny afternoon and take a drive in the country. There’s only another two or three weeks available before strident developments in the rural scenery will change it from looking truly beautiful to having the appearance of being busy and bustling and burgeoning. And the serenity will be gone.

At this time of year (and it’s the same in March-April) there seems to be a certain gentleness about the late afternoons, when the sun is edging well down towards the western horizon – and in our case here in the Waikato, that means the sun willingly submitting itself to the powerful seduction of our much-admired mentor Pirongia, allowing itself to be enfolded every evening by that marvellous, moody old maunga. In the late afternoon the light becomes soft and slanting, sending long fingers and slabs of dark shade across the land, all pointing eagerly to the east in the fervent hope that the sun will reappear from there tomorrow morning.

At the moment the farmland looks at its very best. It’s starting to green up after a rather mild winter, and those curses of every farmer – the Scotch and Californian thistles and the ragwort – have not yet made themselves obvious about the paddocks. The ragwort and Scotchies will soon show as robust dark-green blotches across the landscape, growing bigger and more boisterous every day and then rapidly sprouting strong stems that will themselves splurge swaggering gangs of yellow blooms in the case of the ragwort, or jabbing, jaunty, jutting clusters of purple-flowered thistle flowers among the Scotch thistles. Both weeds will smother broad patches of what would otherwise be good grass, and once they get up and growing well, no farm animal will go near them – ragwort is bitter and taints cows’ milk when they accidentally grab a few leaves among a mouthful of sweet grass; and the thistles painfully prick sensitive noses and lips of grazing animals. The Californian thistles simply invade the ground with dense patches of spikes, and animals general steer clear. All three weeds gradually degenerate over the summer and early autumn into dry, withered, grey stick-like pieces of total untidiness that make farmland look a mess from February onwards.

But at this time of year they’re not yet apparent, and the farms are looking neat and tidy and smooth, as though they are great slabs of rich parkland. With that late afternoon sun slanting golden and soft across the land, the rural colour is highlighted and it looks to be at its absolute best.

And then there is all the other colour that is bursting out everywhere – laughing golden daffodils, chirpy, sweet-smelling early cheer, modest little huddles of jonquils; and the roses, lately pruned and now jumping out of their skins with little red-edged leaves that will soon turn dark green to act as a backdrop and show off to best advantage the individual magnificent blooms of each plant; and the camellias and the magnolias and the prunus and cherries and broom and wattle are all racing one another to be first to put on display their most flamboyant bursts of blossom.

Someone went out to a friend’s farm at the weekend and had a wonderful time among the new lambs and young calves, all of them completely fearless of humans and happy to be patted and petted. The lambs were marvelled at as they nudged and bunted their mothers’ bulging udders, while at the other end their little tails squiggled and wriggled at the joy of gulping down that warm, life-giving energy-drink. The calves too were eager to be fed, sucking lustily on proffered fingers in anticipation of having their heads thrust into a bucket of warm feed mixture. Or, these days, more likely a trundle-vat filled with the warm energising brew and sprouting multiple teats around its perimeter, for which the young stock tussle and shove to gain access.

It used to intrigue me, when we were on the farm at Otewa, how the calves, after they had gorged themselves on the rich milk and bran mixture, would mill about for several minutes and then suddenly one or other would head off. And within seconds all the others had fallen into a ragged racing following mob. The whole gang would canter away on a long run, right round the fenceline of the paddock, and they would all arrive back at the calf-feeder puffing and blowing and jostling, but obviously having thoroughly enjoyed the run simply because they could do it and they had. Not yet into the business of grazing properly, they would each begin to nuzzle the grass, snipping off a blade here and there and then look about, either not sure what to do next or in the sudden realisation that they had made a break-through discovery.

Of course, we who live in the towns would do well to recognise that spring is not always a time of life and love and beautiful things, especially for those on the land who habitually are now getting out of bed at 4.45am each day – and that includes Saturdays and Sundays and holidays and high-days. If they haven’t yet reached their peak, dairy herds are swelling daily as more cows drop their calves and join the milking mob. Those swollen udders are adding tens of thousands of litres of milk every week to the local and regional and national flow of white gold into the full-on dairy factories. And it happens because hundreds of men and women clamber out of warm beds, dress, gulp hot tea or coffee and head out into the pre-dawn darkness to start another round of seven-day-a-week morning milking.

And for the sheep-farmers, this is a time when they need to closely watch their lambing ewes. Heavily pregnant ewes get cast easily, and if they’re not righted within a few hours they can die quickly, along with their unborn lambs. It’s a major loss in such cases. Then there are the ewes who won’t mother their lambs, and the young ones need to be mothered-on, sometimes craftily encased in the skin of a dead lamb whose mother is looking for her baby.

This is perhaps the toughest time of year to be a farmer – long, unrelenting hours, and sometimes, right out of the blue, Old Man Winter will throw in one last vindictive blast of freezing weather that can catch the unwary in a big, horrible trap.
But at the moment it’s pretty good. If you’ve got the chance, get out there into the country, drive with care, and soak up a little of just how good it is. If you just look and listen, you’ll love it.

By Kingsley Field. Read more here.

Kingsley Field is an author and journalist. He has published two illustrated volumes of these columns, and is now working on Volume III. They can be purchased from kingsley@accuwrite.co.nz