To Plant in a Time of Isolation

By Rhoda van Schalkwyk, Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

My story starts with an “almost” apology. Six months ago, we chopped down a massive tree. It was an invasive, exotic tree that bullied all possibility of a garden out of our new apartment’s little patch of earth. Not a way to make friends in the apartment block.

We had bought our final, scaled down place in which to discover ourselves and a new life: too old to care about convention, and too young to be bothered by it. But, on our landscape of dreams, the pandemic shadows encroached to switch off the power tools and car ignitions, to lock away the corporate clothes and fresh air. Our jobs, our snag list, and even our beloved elders seemed to congeal in the oppressive moisture of personal, self-breathed air in face masks.

We worked furiously, diligently, even professionally as the weeks dragged on. We– the two of us in our minute, incompletely excavated nest– talked, we cooked, we read, and we waited for lockdown to lift because our garden needed a winter to prepare for an African summer. Summer rusted into autumn. The sky changed, and the air cooled. Easter came, and so did the first rains. Grey projections of a world gripped by an unfathomable contagion. Our little renovation paled as we sought the common good. Puzzled, aghast, cooperative, frustrated, and then questioning, we tried to ride it out as we missed our children, our granny, our colleagues, and now our life. Our little, insignificant life was on hold.

With the memory of many gardens in our dreams, we fought the fever of this time with the dream of another garden. We toyed with types and names. We brooded over catalogues and websites as we helplessly watched the season shift into our planting window. We dug holes. I cracked my wrist. We gave up digging and called in help. We carried on digging, and then, last Wednesday, the crane and the lorry with our trees arrived. Seven of them. The three big brother-grizzlies and then the four littler ones, all furry and slightly disheveled. A week of trees. A tiny little forest within earshot of the ocean.

The claustrophobia of working on a laptop in a study cupboard was exuberantly whirred away by groaning machinery and clicking cameras. The gigantic metal arms delicately positioned the living wood to frame and obscure the memory of this dark time.

At the end of our Wednesday, the sun set into the twiggy leaves of our Afrocarpus falcatus tribe. Botanists expect these trees to live a hundred years and to grow to thirty meters. At the opening wedge of the pandemic, we had an arboreal testament to post-COVID life.

I will remember this year for many reasons, but primarily because we had the courage to remove and the hope to plant trees. And yes, it was the year of the pandemic.