Lush fleshy fronds rise up on all sides. Spiky foliage towers like a cliff. Large flying creatures dip and buzz aggressively. Magpies probing past stems and trunks look like giant black and white hens as they irritably scuff and scrape. And the sky seems impossibly high ...
Well, everything's relative. The reason for these strange perspectives was not that I had somehow got lost in the Amazon jungle but that I was lying flat out on the chunky earth with my face inches from the busy ants and being dive-bombed by patrolling bees.
From that position, everything — encircling plants, bushes, clumps — looked somehow bigger and threatening. It must be hell being a mouse: no wonder they're always darting and cowering. The world down there at ground level bristles with danger. Everything seems immense — taller, bulking larger than you — except the ants, but even they, so close, are other-worldly, with their articulated bodies and determined, stoic pathfinding — as if they're onto something you ought to know about but never will.
The reason for my earth-bound posture was that I was tracing a string of wiry weed that had led me further and further until, stretched out beneath waving fronds and dipping branches I was looking it in the eye, so to speak, as it wound in and under some tall Cymbopogon ambiguus or, as we earthbound grovellers have come to know it, lemon grass.
Why was I submitting myself to these indignities? Because I was preparing the ground for 50 lemon-scented verbenas — Aloysia Citriodora. Not to be confused with the 135 lemon-scented gums — Corymbia Citriodora — that we nursed painfully through the drought losing only ten which I was about to replace as soon as I emerged from the garden's unfathomable depths.
The decision to embark on this citric extravaganza had been unanimous, formally taken and ratified at a domestic conclave (now comprising, after numbers of defections under the 'emptying nest' protocol, two members of whom only those with an extra X chromosome have the vote).
Lying flat out on the burgeoning, warmish earth, enveloped by the sounds and circumstances, the rough diplomacies and sharp interventions of the sub-arboreal world, the understorey of tangles and shades, it's easy to wander in the mind, to flit from flower to flower of thought like the bees before your eyes among the physical blooms.
The poet Andrew