Spring is breaking out all over, the air full of heady scents ... and the sound of power tools. All the old guys up and down the street are pulling out their machines and ripping into the vegetation, as if the burgeoning growth is some kind of affront to their sensibilities. Or sexualities, maybe. I don't know. Recall how my father in his decline used to regard the lawn and hedge with a kind of despair, they were 'getting away from him'. But it isn't just the blokes. We have a keen gardener in this building, a nice woman, but so far almost all I have seen her do is pull things out, cut things back, clip, prune, slash and burn. She got onto the nightsweet last week, which was cascading nicely over the back fence and then moved on to severely curtail the plumbago that grows over the letter boxes. I don't understand it ... times I've been lucky enough to have a garden I let everything grow. Currently it's just pots on the balcony - a piece of rosemary I found on the lawn after one of the gardener's blitzkriegs and kept in water until it rooted; some ancient poppy seeds (yes, that kind) I found in a ginger jar, which probably won't come up but who knows ...

Meanwhile the air is delicious. Walking in Haberfield yesterday I became preternaturally aware of how the different perfumes are somehow geographically keyed in my brain, viz: jasmine, I am back on the front balcony of a friend's house in Mere Mere, it is a Friday night in 1968, we are having a party; freesias send me to St Mary's Bay in Auckland, the summer of 1980-81, just before I came over to live in Sydney; wisteria, Auckland again, early 1970s, the house at 56 Grafton Road whose verandas were festooned ... but this is a split memory because the scent also takes me up to the Winter Gardens in the Domain behind that house where we used to go to look at the carp in the pools; then there's the to me melancholy scent of daphne which locates me in the dank late winter streets of Heretaunga, Upper Hutt in the late 1960s, the only time in my life I lived in a neighbourhood of wealthy people; finally - though there's plenty more - gardenia, hyacinth, jonquil, tuber rose - the cream waxy flower that grows on a tree, a native I think, whose name I don't know but which transports me instantly to Pearl Beach where right now it will be flowering en masse down by Emerald Creek just behind the dunes ...