This is Paul. He’s the Tip Shop Guy.
Paul is not just a council worker though. He is
a keen gardener and consummate artist.
“I try to set things up so that wherever you
are, the more you can see,” he says of his garden.
“Yeah, it’s that kind of a garden. Can you tell
me about your pine forest here?”
He looks at me. “The Christmas trees?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they’re everlastings. Don’t need any
water.”
“They’re evergreens, I guess.”
“Well I prefer 'everlasting' myself. Instant
green, instant screen.”
“Do you ever get people come and chop them
down at Christmas time?”
“No. What usually happens is that in the month
before Christmas everyone brings in their old crappy ones to throw out. No
one ever buys a Christmas tree from the tip. They never get a pram and they
never get a Christmas tree. I dunno why. So I’ve always had Christmas trees and
as we speak, I have another two, waiting to go into the garden.”
“Awesome.”
“I don’t really want to hedge them all in this
zone, so I’m thinking about a hedgerow over the back there.”
“Can we go over there?”
“Sure. I make this bit all weird, to slow
the punters down from coming into the back zone.”
“Yes … “ I’m climbing over flimsy plastic
pallets at this point. “It works, it’s a bit tricky … oh, a golf club garden!”
(Definitely not the golf club garden) |
“Well it’s more like some strange creature with
spiky hair.”
“Oh. Yes. This is hard terrain.”
“He got blown over in a storm. I haven’t
rearranged the spikes correctly yet.”
We stagger past a woolly thing that I realise
is a sheep.
"That was a sheep, yes?"
"Yes."
“See all the community now, from wide and far,
they bring me unusual things that have something wrong with them, and they say
‘Here’s something for your garden Paul’, so it’s kinda developing into an
obscure … not gnomesville really, but an eclectic collection of … things.”
Paul is Wombling overland and Wombling free
in his garden now.
I say, “But they’re not just things are they? What about your
collection of propellers here?”
“Ahh, I like the the three pronged shape, and
the way they’re set up as a spiral reminds me of some of the fractals, so when
I look at three, I see the propeller blades and fans but I can also see
glimpses of, of like everything.”
“The universe?”
“Well, it’s like, it shows how connected we are,
because on a subconscious level we use all the tools the universe uses to make
all our stuff. But from a waste point
of view, you see the destructive side of how we take all our resources and make
it into stuff that has to be chucked
away. What I’m trying to do is say ‘Look, forget about that you think is
rubbish and think outside the box. Look at it as a building block. You can make
amazing things out of stuff if you
use your imagination’. And that’s pretty well what nature does, I reckon.”
“Nature uses its imagination to make stuff?”
“Well yeah. It’s just like there are all the
building blocks of life and how they come together really dictate how things
evolve. And that’s also how this garden happened.”
“A harmonious balance.”
“Yeah, well see like this little bit here. This
was supposed to be a curve to finish off this garden, so I’ve got these things
here and all these posts to do the same thing as this, sort of tapering down in
a curve … but for some reason, I just chucked them down and now they’ve been
here for nearly two years. It’s almost like the random chaos theory brought
back into life.”
I look doubtfully at the mess of copper log
ends strewn at my feet.
“D’you know what I mean?” Paul asked, “It’s a
delicate balance of chaos and order …”
“Mm. So what’s going on over here?”
“Oh, I really don’t know. But I do like to
watch this space, so I put a couple of watches in here.”
He pointed out the fucked Casios perched atop their silver plinths. “You need to watch this space. It’s just a representation of time and texture.”
He pointed out the fucked Casios perched atop their silver plinths. “You need to watch this space. It’s just a representation of time and texture.”
“How about your mop garden?”
“You know, they’re crappy old mops.”
“They’re the ones that everyone chucks out,
hey?”
“Yeah. If you stand them up like that, when I
first stood them up, it was a forty degree day and while we were here, two of
them opened out. Well, that'll be the mops opening.”
“They look like they’re chatting.”
“Well they are, and they’re also a barrier to
the wheel garden.”
Beneath the mops were circular beds of … wheels. “Everyone’s
gotta have a wheel garden. To keep it wheel.”
“Keepin’ it wheel. Cool.”
“Yep.”
“I was really intrigued by your tulips. How do
you get such wonderful tulips growing in the middle of summer?”
“They’re fake.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t say that.”
“Well they are.”
“You’ve gotta come up with some amazing theory
here, Paul.”
“Nah.”
I worried at this point, because I’d had a lot
invested in the interview when it came to Paul’s tulip garden, but then he
rallied. “Oh, yeah. Well they’re like the fans and the propellers. It’s
probably because they’re growing in the canoeing helmets from the Outward Bound
mob. Think about all that collective conscious energy going in to make some
plastic fantastic thing grow … I’m making this up as I go … but at least it
rhymes.”
We stopped in front of the saw garden.
“This is my saw garden,” said Paul. “Well, it’s
saw grass really.”
“With a toucan.”
“Yeah, well you know, with all good grasses,
something always wants to make a burrow in there. It’s evolving. Just like I’ve
got power points in the garden, ready to be plugged in, just in case anyone
feels like they need to do some work.”
“Not today.”
“Nah.”
“No.”
“So you know, I just like to have fun.”
“I like the chainsaw.”
The chainsaw hangs from a peppermint tree and
is balanced with a bird feeder, complete with a rather unhappy-looking
plastic budgie.
“Yeah, the chainsaw was turned into a bird feeder.”
“Which is apt.”
I stared at Paul.
“Yes. The reason I put this all together was
one, out of boredom and because I like to make things, but essentially two,
when I first took over here, everyone would come in with a big trailer full of
rubbish, unsorted, you know.”
"You've got a good eye."
He sighs a tip-sorter’s sigh.
“It’s about educating people into re-using
things. But also at the same time I was setting up a salvage shop. The main
thing is to stop things going into the
ground unless it absolutely has to.”