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dreams, as well as flowers and teeth and noses in close-up, and the usual slow flying, floating and zooming in, whereas someone asleep in the country, where shadows are fewer, and greater space exists between objects and people…)
    After a dozen or so plantings Holland stood back and saw he would have to add others here and there to avoid giving a false, lopsided look.
    In this he followed the greatest painters and English landscape gardeners who struggled with the difficulty of reproducing the randomness of true harmony, demonstrated so casually in nature.
    Of course, plenty of eucalypts were already growing on the property when Holland arrived. Not all had been ring-barked by the brothers. Red Stringybark and Red Ironbark were dotted about—these were native to the region; similarly, Yellow Box, the beekeepers’ favourite—all over the place. Tumbledown Gums showed along the ridge, Scribbly Gums were on the flat, and Rose-of-the-West, which barely comes up to a man’s head. A few Inland Red Box remained: farmers take the axe to them for fence posts. Other species were distributed by wind and chance, each different from the rest. Out of sight of the homestead, paddocks here and there contained unusual eucalypts in amongst the common local ones. Nobody knew how they got there. A rogue Mountain Ash reigned on the slope above the house, forcing a pregnancy on the fence. Easily the tallest tree in the district, it was the base for generations of wedgetails, crows and parrots, their constructions of aerial sticks like the shadowy congestions in a sieve. Not far from it was a stocky Tuart ( E. gomphocephala ). Again we have a tree rarely seen east of the Nullarbor. A seed must have dropped out of the sky or a man’s trouser cuff. Something like that, Holland decided.
    With a boiled egg and the standard textbooks in a knapsack Holland criss-crossed his land, absorbed in identifying each and every eucalypt. Often it was necessary to send specimens of fruit and leaves to a world authority in Sydney, and seek a second opinion in other places. No one expert in eucalypts had all the answers. So pale and hypersensitive were these experts, relegated as they were to the backwaters of irrelevant institutions, they replied by return with a helpful vehemence, supplying far too much detail.
    In those days Holland would listen with interest to anybody. He was leaving the hotel one morning when a man with a wrecked face took an Ancient Mariner hold on his elbow and raved about the advantages of the scientific windbreak, and the very same evening Holland heard on the radio the same thing explained in a sober, altogether more reasonable voice.
    Parallel to one side of the house, he planted 110 seedlings in scientific formation. Chosen were species renowned as windbreaks: the fast-growing Steedman’s Gum, and the Mugga Ironbark—its specific name E. sideroxylon points more to the blast furnace than to pretty flowers and leaves. In the midst of this elongated geometry Holland placed an intruder, a single Grey Ironbark. Only many years later would it begin to be visible, with consequences for Ellen almost too horrible to bear.
    Blue Gum, Salmon Gum and others quickly followed. Blue Gum is the one below the house which appeared from some angles as a pin stuck in a woman’s hat, awash in patriotic grasses—golden in summer. Holland set up a swing for Ellen on its lower branches. Here the land fell away and rose again in gentle waves. It was as bare and as dusty as shorn sheep, until rendered park-like by Holland’s hand. The Blue Gum is easily recognisable. The name E. globulus , for the shape of its fruit, now describes the imperial distribution of this majestic tree: throughout the Mediterranean, whole forests in California and South Africa, and all states of Australia.
    As for E. salmonophloia , Holland had given it prime location at the front gate.
    Holland must have known it would stop the locals in their