A Lion in the Meadow
Grass 11. Waitai. 2024.
I have this weird obsession with photographing specific things. Grass is one of those things. Chairs are another. Doorways. I think these inanimate subjects express something I’m feeling at the moment of capture metaphorically speaking. Doorways are portals, and if I’m photographing one, I’m really photographing the thing that is beyond it. Chairs, when photographed while empty, come to represent the people who might occupy them at other times, and quickly represent historic lives played out in a place. But grass is as expressive as anything I could think of. It’s most pleasing to me when left to grow overlong, with waving seed heads and wild varieties of rye grass and barley and oh my goodness, did you ever imagine how many grasses just grow in our pastures in Aotearoa? It’s quite astonishing when you look into what those species that are growing wild everywhere could be. Many of those grasses are evidence of our colonial history - as are the paddocks and lawns that they inhabit. That’s not usually why I photograph them, but it plays a role.
When mum and dad and I visited Waitai, the historic family farm at the north eastern edge of Rangitoto ki te Tonga, D’Urville Island last year, one of the things mum was most interested to see of her childhood home was how the land looked now, after her nearly 50 years away from the place. How much would remain of the paddocks and hills she and her siblings laboured over throughout their childhood? She vividly recalled pulling tauhinu and mānuka and gorse and ragwort from the ground so that the farm would be ‘clean’, and provide luscious grazing for the sheep they raised there. Upon our arrival, she was surprised to see how intact the paddocks and fences were, even though Waitai hasn’t been a working farm for over 25 years. The clearing and weeding of that land has endured so long, and the grass I lay in there is a simple combination of those varieties you see in the image above. 25 years and the native bush didn’t romp back in to take over, and neither did the weeds, in any significant capacity.
I’m absolutely aware that the original clearing of the land is a complex idea, that the whole problem of colonisation is multi-faceted and that were it not for my Italian migrant ancestors, that tip of D’Urville might remain a sort of scrubby native bush, as it is on most of the rest of the island. Instead, what you can see, even looking at a Google Earth satellite view of the island, is that the Moleta family farm that was, is still a paler green. Still covered in the grass that Antonino and his brother planted there over a hundred years ago.
I love grass, when it’s long. Not because it means it hasn’t been tended to, or devoured, but because it has real personality. For a time in the early Summer, the field across the road from our little Pōneke house had a large area sectioned off, scraped and sown to make a more lush surface for the cricketers, and the city council must have instructed the park maintenance people not to mow there. For a time it was a kind of razed earth, the seeds gradually becoming ugly tufts of green, gradually filling in and healing the earthy wound-that-was in a way similar to the velvety texture of the fur that grows back on a cat after it’s had a surgical procedure at the vet. Then the grass continued to grow, and became luxuriously long, rippling like water when the wind blew. Finally seed heads began to appear, and it was so beautiful, diverse, and delicate. I was planning to go down and video it in motion, as the breeze shivered the surface of this verdant lake of grass, but before I could get there, the lawnmower man came and shaved it flat. I was actually sad when that happened. I understand that the space was being maintained for future use, but my meadow of wild grasses had been so joyful and rampant. Now it quickly dried out to be crunchy and yellow underfoot.
All of this to say I really find a bottomless well of enjoyment in photographing long grass. Frozen and still in one image, glistening with the sun, damp with dew or a freshly delivered shower. Variegated with shapes and textures I only really appreciate close up. To take grass pictures, I have to lie amongst it, stalks going up my nose or down the back of my shirt. I smell it all around me, pungent and sweet.
The title of this entry is taken from the Margaret Mahy children’s book ‘The Lion in the Meadow’. It’s all about imagination, and it feels particularly apt. The little boy in the story sees a big roaring yellow whiskery lion in the meadow beyond his house. His mother doesn’t believe him, and instead invents a dragon in the meadow. When I was a child, I’m told, I had an invisible friend I called ‘Geoffrey Lion’. I have no memory now about what Geoffrey looked like, but it might have been an early indication of my particularly vivid imagination. A grove of trees, a foggy day, or the low slung sun glinting off long grass is still, at nearly 50 years of age, able to spark my imagination for what might be hiding. Maybe, now as I heave myself and my camera around at ground level, I’m really the dragon in the meadow.