Milking the Rooster

It is I sebastiano, making the first of what is hopefully to be many posts for the site of Rooster fetishism (read extreme permaculture). I guess I’m the more practical of the bunch, or perhaps sociable, or perhaps it’s just that the idea of sitting in front of screens for any longer than i have to doesn’t really appeal to me but hey here I am. Fresh from an epiphany concerning my detatched abode here on the Meliodora block.

My house is the recently completed tea-house. A new addition since the 2005 publication of the Melliodora e-Book. While I was sitting writing and contemplating (as ya do), i got to thinking about the design of the pad – It is a pad, no other way to describe it and seeing as I am for the time being, a bachelor, it is a bachelor pad. It took a long time to build, done in Permaculture style, by David and one of his mates, with locally grown and milled, sustainably grown and harvested timber (largely redwood from a water board plantation here in Victoria – a model perhaps for sustainable forestry in catchments and riparian zones), at ever stage along the way Dave and Su would spend hours lying around in the house frame or on the verandah dreaming of which way what would go, what colours where, and a miscellany of other details of which I am now perhaps largely oblivious to, the tea house being complete and wholly occupied by yours truly.

So the design process was as extended as the building and I’m certain that Dave and Su would have thunk it out to the nth degree, so why then is the space under the stairs so poorly capitalised on? And why are some nails sticking out? Why did David totally downplay the tea-House’s potential as a Zone 1 seed? These among other niggling questions… lead me to think that the tea-house deserves it’s own chaper in the Melliodora saga (as published and available through Holmgren Design Services – www.holmgren.com.au).

So lets begin with the name – The Tea-House, which is it’s stated name, it is not, it seems, a cabin, nor a bungalow, nor a shack (love or otherwise [see my other blog]), it is a tea-house, somethng like a hybrid of the Aussie style cottage and a Japanese tea-house, but more on that later… The main house here is Melliodora (named for the Yellow Box gum – Eucalypt Melliodora) and so is set a precedent for botanical references, and so besides being disposed to give character to the generic, I found it useful to draw a parallel between my existence here and that of my more than humble abode. So what am I doing here? Well I’m doing a million and one things, drawn in all directions of this fine community of Hepburn by as many passions desires, values, ideals and beliefs, sometimes manically trying to make order of all the threads with which I weave and sometimes trying to remain unwoven by one of the many causes I seem to have attatched myself to. So between my part in the day to day running of the property and my community commitments, I found myself like the seed on the outside of a cherry ballart (or Native Cherry – exocarpus cupressiformis), unformed, full of potential and hope for the future, the next generation of an less and less obscure fruit. And so I christened the Tea-House “Exocarpus” – For herein contained is the nut on the outside!

Till next time Cybertistas…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Buidings, general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.