Craig Smith

A grant my wife put in for was approved with funds received, allowing us to follow, geographically, the ideas she had been writing about on her blog these past eighteen months. Hybrid Harvests had been her weekend leisure outside of the scheduled cognition of lecturing in biology at the university, allowing my wife, Katita, to combine her interest in genetics with her love of cooking. Specifically, she explores hybridisation in herbs and vegetables, the cross-breeding that some handful of innovative gardeners across Australia engage with in order to create new ingredients for gustatory experiments. In other words, the creation of, and cooking with, newly invented foods.

Katita reached out to a dozen gardeners and chefs, via social media and personal websites, who were engaged in this field, to see who would be up for her, us, visiting so as to document the work they were doing. I'm an artist by trade, so my presence, rather than purely domestic, contributes botanical illustrations, usually watercolour, of the plants and culinary dishes involved.

The first response and invitation to visit came from Beth, a woman living in the Kimberly region of Western Australia. She lived by herself in a stone cottage atop a cliff edge, a location you'd never get the zoning permission to build at now, already, Beth says, at risk of erasure after she passes away, the regional council authorities seemingly just waiting out her remaining years before they correct this aberration with a bulldozer. Beth gives us directions for travel to her place which we load into our transport software - from Newcastle, four plane tickets, two bus trips and a rented truck - and we set out with the intention of staying there for two nights.

When we arrive, some fifteen hours later, at Beth's cottage, a remarkably isolated adobe with an hour of desert frontage backed by a sheer cliff drop of infinite waves, there is a note pinned to the door that gives apologies for if we see this note before we check our e-mails, as Beth has had to leave to attend to a remote need that is not articulated. Katita and I immediately check our phones for an e-mail but we have nothing, no reception for at least half the day.

It is too late in the afternoon to drive back to our last checkpoint and reverse the trip at this stage. I can see Katita sizing up how much room in the truck we have for sleeping, or how thick her clothes are for camping outside, but I'm already halfway over the garden wall and spying a gap in a levered window we can pry open.

By the time I'm through the cottage and opening the front door, Katita is there to greet me with both a look of resolute disappointment that I would so readily break into and enter this woman's private home who was so generous to even invite us into the intimacy of this cozy sanctuary, and her suitcase in hand ready to locate the bedroom and unpack for the evening straight after a much needed bathroom break.

The word that comes to mind when you look around the interior of Beth's cottage is 'abundance' - there are garden tools scattered across the hallway into the dining room, a hardwood table covered in home-canned preserves and possibly medical remedies too given the labels (for feet, for back), with very little natural light until you get to the kitchen at the back of the house. Here, thankfully, broad windows absorb the sky and ride benches that wrap around the long narrow room, folding in by way of levers and runners that collapse part of the exterior wall to allow the garden in, to partition a space where food can be prepared with kitchen resources atop soil and roots carpeting the floor.

Katita says, there are no family photos, to which I respond blankly, and then she says, I just thought maybe she had to tend to a family thing. I ask if Katita thinks that no family photos means no family, and Katita says not necessarily but maybe, she is very isolated all the way out here. Is it possible that Beth hasn't really left at all, that she's hiding in a room somewhere and just put the note on the door because she got cold feet at the last second. This is what I say aloud and regret straight away as I can see how freaked out it makes Katita. I say that can't possibly be true, and I go through every dark room and cupboard of the house quickly, which takes all of eighty-five seconds, to prove we're alone. But what about the garden, Katita says.

We step through the partition onto flat stone pavers with a necklace of terracotta pots creating a line to follow clockwise into divisions of herbs and succulents and little bonsai-style fruit trees shelved on ladder rungs. The garden is comparatively neat given the busy cottage interior and quite compact with high walls on each of its three sides.

I'm eager to see the ocean and cliffs beyond the wall at the end of the garden and make my way towards muffled roar by carefully stepping over and between threads of beans and tomato plants. Don't break anything, Katita calls out, and I wave a hand as if to say look how I'm carefully stepping over and between threads of beans and tomato plants.

Even though the wall that I'm walking across the garden towards seems quite close, like I could reach it with two broomsticks joined end-to-end, the path there descends slightly, into almost what could be considered a lower tier of the garden, with a banister of garden hose safely guiding me down a slope that is now clearly a fabricated tunnel of shrubs that runs beneath the upper level. A length of copper piping with little holes curves across the ceiling, likely a clever irrigation system where water from the top garden can be funnelled down here.

As I step out of the tunnel, expecting to be facing the end wall that brackets the ocean and cliff edge, I am unexpectedly standing above where I was before - not above the lower tier of the garden, but above what I thought was the upper tier, where I left Katita to find the wall. I can see her in the distance, and when I say distance I am taken aback because the scope of the garden is clearly more expansive than I first considered.

This layer I am standing on now is comprised of two grass hills that roll into a declivity and then flatten out, with a single white painted wrought iron chair and circular table set up where Beth must sit at times and have a coffee while she takes in the remarkable vista of her private oasis.

I had forgotten I was meant to be looking to see if Beth was bizarrely hiding in her own garden after putting a note on the front door saying she was clearly not here and, one would assume, never expected us to break and enter her residence and stand atop this grassy mound without her presence. Katita is waving me over now, so I slide down and drop a good metre onto the level beneath this one, still, somehow, not quite the same level as Katita, although after taking a half dozen curving steps down and around a lime tree we are standing beside one another.

Look at this, Katita excitedly guides me to a glasshouse down a corridor of ferns I'd not seen from my previous vantage. She points to a bushy plant with dense leaves interspersed with small red fruits. Do you know what Beth has done here, and then Katita tells me, all in a rush - she's genetically grafted backhousia citriodora and solanum centrale and I say Katita, and then she says sorry, Lemon Myrtle and kutjera, bush tomato, and what Beth has done is fuse them into this hybrid plant and, wait, taste this.

Katita twists a berry off and puts it in my mouth and she says, just bite down slowly and hold it for a moment - what do you taste. I say, I taste citrus, a sweet, tart hit, and then Katita says, and now, and I say yes, now I taste a deep, sun-dried tomato undertone. It's somehow both sweet and savory, and Katita says, yes, exactly, and it's so delicious. This is wonderful. Katita heads to the kitchen to see if Beth has written down any notes or recipes where she names this new food.

Seeing Katita so enlivened by this discovery, that was really only hinted at in Beth's blog from what I understand, is affirming. It justifies the trip out here, although as I feel the evening warmth from above start to lesson, I do wonder how we'll square this with Beth in a manner that allows Katita to include it in her project.

Another question that comes to mind is, in which room in the cottage will we sleep tonight. Are we brazen enough to sleep together in Beth's bed, pushed against the wall of a room that seemed to be both bedroom and laundry, from my brief rummage through the space to see if Beth was hiding there. It had a deep metal sink and clothes line strung near the entrance to the room, with the bed positioned beneath dark, heavy drapes. We could sleep there, if that suited Katita, depending on how transgressive she felt towards the violation evermore of privacy and intimacy we are facing off against.

Besides all that, however, I am still struck by just how lovely it is to stand here in this garden and listen to the roar beyond the walls, which I know thankfully now I will never reach, and the warmth that, while fading, is still so pleasant and exotic in a way that sunlight from different positions on the earth always feels most spontaneously foreign.

As I wander down yet another pathway to some indeterminate position I snap off a few stray twigs and jostle them in my grip before sliding a few between by button holes and even one behind my left ear. I take more as I'm walking, pruning dead offshoots really, although some green leaves remain as I fold the sticks and branches into my apparel, into my hair, through my belt buckle and down the front of my legs like a scarecrow.

I look around and can see, across the rise and fall of the garden, Katita smiling at me. She looks at what is in her hands, light silvery-green ovals of velvet leaf, and deposits them on the side of her head, through her hair, to look somewhat like cat ears. She takes some lavender stalks from a pot nearby and holds them on her upper-lip like whiskers as she meows and pretends to paw the air in front of her. We both laugh and look around for more resources to work with.

As we play, it occurs to me that perhaps if we camouflage ourselves well enough - if I become a tree and my wife becomes a cat - we could very likely just stay here in Beth's private garden forever. I picture her walking through her kitchen, tired from her trip to wherever, grateful to be finally be home again amongst all this, and what would she think of just one more tree amongst the many scattered haphazardly here and there. Really, what would she think too of a garden cat, come in from the plains most likely, chasing a field mouse across the high wall and now just basking on the pavers. Surely animals must come and go from time to time, new seeds grow where nothing may or may not have otherwise been. And what's more, I like standing still, I'm sure I could maintain the posture for quite some time, especially on a nice day, and Katita has always liked milk and biscuits. We might honestly be on to a winner here.

What if, to help my stability standing in this grove, I add some brick footings to my feet and scaffold a wooden brace to my legs. There are pine sleepers nearby that are perfect for the job, and as I arrange them and look up to see how feline Katita has become, I'm surprised to see her arms covered not in fur but feathers.

Katita presses the fluffy head clumps of Pampas grass across one arm with something resembling sea holly across the other, with a long brown seed pod on her nose as a beak, although the cat elements remain too, the ears, the whiskers, and she is definitely purring, almost into a mew I guess as she calls out to me to see her wings spread, revealing tufts of soft tummy hair blowing in the dusklight, her cat-bird form near complete.

I'm encouraged to keep building up the wood and brickwork here into my construction, a tree-house I'm figuring now, although even as this comes to be I wonder about other possibilities. The sound of glasses clinking together in some distant memory of celebratory cheers floats across the garden as I see that Katita has added some glass tiles on strings to her arrangement, becoming who knows what, a cat-bird-wind chime or a kinetic illusory pendant twirling behind the glasshouse, into the glasshouse really, reflecting magnificently against the geometry.

Making my way over to her, my brick footings and wooden legs stepping like stilts in long arcing gestures, the sort I would use to walk across evening telegraph wires from one state to the next if given half the chance, I pick up fruit along the way as I spike, kebab style, fallen apples along the path that snakes through history towards where Katita is still refracting in her sanctuary, as her sanctuary, where I find her and hold her in the cadence of my architecture and my foliage. In this position we are not the first man and woman to come together, beneath the void of no sun, to realise an outpouring of singularities and dualities across the land, but rather I say to Katita, as she says to me, what if we dance a while, divide into some infinite generative multiplicity that knows no end - so what then, if the garden joins us (Katita laughs, it already has, idiot), nature never able to be passive even if it tried.

And who knows, say we maintain infinity until it grows dark, and then we tidy up a bit, put the glass and brickwork and leaves back, somewhat, and we make our way inside and turn the lights on. I'm happy to sleep in Beth's bed tonight, without concern, and if Katita isn't sure, after we make dinner here (all those canned preserves in the hallway, so many options), we can just place cushions on the floor perhaps. Although I can't see that working, it's so dusty down there - no, the bed is the best option. When Beth returns in the morning to see us sleeping there, all of humanity gathered in one bed, it'll be like she never left.