Good Timing

I just rang my friend Glen to arrange a time next week to come and prune his abutilons. I pick flowers from these bushes, also known as Chinese lanterns, through the winter and early spring when demand for them is strong. Glen has 5 different colours,orange,yellow, white, pale pink and deep pink, and being able to pick them a quantity in one place is a great help. They are quite rampant growers and because Glen does not prune them when I need the flowers they become large and unruly and there's much pruinings to cart away when they are eventually cut back, which it suits me to do now when demand is light.

Glen, who keeps rainfall records, told me we had 12mm yesterday and 12mm following that last night. How good is that? Just when things had dried out a bit and perfect timing for our vegie garden. Yesterday I planted out some green button squash and sowed some broccollini and silverbeet into seed boxes for planting out late summer early autumn hopefully to grow vigourously in autumn and produce lovely greens through the winter without bolting to seed.

I'm going out to Marguerita's this arvo to see if the tomatoes need more tying up on the stakes. I'll need to do this before Lib and I go away for a few days shortly to Lakes Entrance for our annual pilgrimage to feel the sand beneath our feet and breathe the ocean air. We have worked hard since our holiday to West Australia last July and I have not sighted the sea since. I am longing for it.

I attended Joyce Begg's funeral last Thursday in Pakenham. Joyce was a good friend who showed me generosity and kindness over many years. Ditto her husband Laurie. Joyce lived nearly all her life in Gembrook until the last couple of years when her battle with Parkinson's neccessitated she move into a care facility. They had 2 daughters and 8 grandchildren and 21 great grandchildren. It was moving for me to see them all participate in the service and see the photo tribute to Joyce's life on the screen while the songs "Wonderful Copenhagen" and "Some Enchanted Evening" played. Beautiful.

I once did a 'Signpost' profile on Laurie and Joyce. If I can find it I'll include it here.

Laurie Begg started at Gembrook Primary School in 1941 after moving to Gembrook from Glen Waverley when he was eleven years old. His father purchased the propety 'Sunnybank', 120 acres on the Beenak Rd. It was at school that he first met Joyce Huxtable who was a few years younger than he but destined to become his wife some 12 years later.

Laurie and his sister walked to and from school most days and it was not unusual to see snakes. Old Mr Mentaplay often sat on a stump across the road from his house on the Morbey Road corner. The kids would stop and talk to him and wonder at the ants, jumping jacks and bullants as well as little black ants, that crawled all over him but seemed not to bother him at all. "He was a friendly old bloke and loved to tell us stories. We used to call Mrs Mentaplay a 'snake charmer'. Everywhere she went she found snakes and was forever killing them."

"Sometimes neighbour Jim Fry would pick us up coming home in his Armstrong Sideley motor car, which had a gas producer as petrol was in short supply during World War 11. He'd turn his engine off about 100 metres from his garage and roll the last bit, coming to a stop right in the garage, such was his good judgement at knowing what speed to be going and when to cut the engine with precision."

Laurie left school after merit year at age 14 to work on the family farm which included poultry sheds. He had brothers away in the army and there was plenty of work to do on the farm.

"My job was to look after the chooks. We'd get about 30 dozen eggs a day and we'd send them down to the egg board on Puffing Billy two or three times a week. We packed them carefully but the cheques that came from the Egg Board never tallied with what we sent, there were always deductions for breakages or bloodspots or double yolks. Dad grew spuds as well, and cabbages and carrots. We milked two or three cows and supplied neighbours with milk.

Joyce grew up on a dairy farm on the Pakenham Road corner where the community complex now stands. Her parents milked ten cows twice a day by hand and her father Robert Huxtable delivered milk on pushbike around the town.

Joyce recalls that on school holidays and weekends she'd go with him. "He had piece of timber fitted across the handlebars with a four gallon milk can on each side and he'd dink me too. I'd run in and bring the container to be filled from the house, whatever the householder had left out. On my school days he'd do it all himself. He also sent milk out to the mills on the tramlines."

Joyce left school and started work in 1947 at the telephone exchange where she worked into the night. She has interesting recollections of finishing work and walking back home past the pub during potato digging when the population increased with seasonal workers.

Laurie's father sold 'Sunnybank' after the war and moved to Thorpedale to grow spuds. Laurie didn't stay there long before moving to Springvale where he worked as  barman for a time before going to Queensland with mates and working at a sugar mill in Mackay for a few years. His sister Nancy had maintained friendship with Joyce so on moving back to Victoria Laurie and Joyce reacquainted. They married in Febuary 1953, and lived in Springvale where Laurie worked in a timber yard. They moved back to Gembrook in 1956. Laurie worked as a tree feller for three or four years, mostly for Jim and Kevin Williams.

Later Laurie worked at 'The Crest' for Ray Chandler where he maintained the garden and grew cut flowers for Chandler's florist shop in Malvern. Foliage, daffodils, liliums, boronia, and lily of the valley were sent by bus and train and Chandler would come up on the weekend and take a load back on Sunday.

This, as well stints on market gardens at Berwick and working on a big garden at Dromana instilled in Laurie a keen interest in plants and propogation, culminating in the Larneuk nursey in Gembrook for many years. Laurie worked as head gardener at the Rhodedendron Gardens at Olinda for some of this time while Joyce manned the nursery during the week.

Laurie began planting out stock plants at the site opposite the kindergarten where they now live and they moved there when they retired fourteen years ago. Their wonderful garden has been regularly open to the public along with other Gembrook gardens to raise money for the CFA. Laurie and Joyce are most generous in spirit to garden groups and anyone interested in gardening.

They are self taught but have enormous knowledge, in particular with rhododendrons, which are Laurie's special passion. He still does a day a week working at the Rhododendron Gardens as a volunteer.

Laurie and Joyce have two daughters, eight grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.