'Get up and clap' my Dad shouts, or rather, croaks, his mouth and throat dry with medication. He is diminutive, shrinking. I think in magic realist ways: he will be so small he will be buried in a matchbox. The rabbits will mourn him in the moonlit with songs of how they escaped his thumping dances on the back deck, flinging boots and stones toward them as they stole morsels of young plants and shat on his lawn. As much as they ran from his clap, they will think, he was still a man, and deserved to be missed at least a little.

Some weeks ago, my father spoke to the palliative care nurse with hesitant sentences as he fought both breath and mind. The drugs create spaces - the drawn out weeks until the relief of going, the drawn out sentences and the brain misfiring. He is dreaming but cannot articulate it. He is bone weak, bone tired, bone sick. We cannot rub his back - it hurts. Mum has put a wheat pack, warmed, on his side, where his lungs are tortured. The nurse listens. Suddenly, he stands, leaps toward the back door, flings it open - and there a large rabbit leaps and runs. We look at him in suprise. Sometimes the body does not listen to itself.

He worries about the jasmine, which he has trained like a flower dog to leap up the post of the back pergola near the pool. We've put a round of wire around it to stop both rabbits and possums - both pests, one native, one not. When more able bodied, he'd push possums from their tree top nests with long sticks, much to the horror of the neighbours. Now he has nothing but will. 'Get up! Chase the bastard!' he croaks, and we leap in ways we would never have leapt before. We can't, however, sustain this under moonlight, where the night creatures do not obey the rules set by my father.

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Moon Jasmine - Image created on Canva

A jasmine has importance in an Australian garden. Whilst it's an import, it's as Australian as a summer barbecue. It grew to popularity in the '50's, when it became a climbing plant for garden trellises and fences and lush, fragrant plants crept into domestic landscapes. It's heady, cloying scent infused childhood summers with a perfume that we wanted to replicate in our adulthood - and hence, many of us still plant jasmine.

It's pink jasmine (Jasminum polyanthum) which we all love - it's fast growing, and has delicate pink tubular flowers and lush, evergreen foliage that last year round, covering unsightly fences and climbing up trellies. Orginally from China and Vietnam, we've adopted it as one of our own. It blooms in late winter to early spring and into summer, and it's fragrance is utterly enchanting, asking people to stop and wonder at the scent - a sensual, elegant climber you can't help fall in love with. Wow, we say, passing the neighbour's jasmine - we really must plant one.

We haven't, yet.

Instead, we watch my father's jasmine climb, knowing it'll climb and release scent long after he is gone, stretching away from the earth toward the sunlight and at night, the rabbit's moon.

This post was written in response to Hive Garden's weekly prompt - the theme this week is SCENTED. I chose to write more of a reflective piece, but you can write to any theme you like, so long as it's related to gardening and 'scented'!

With Love,

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