The next morning – it must have been a Sunday because Star Tearoom was closed – Oriwia came to help with removing bamboo, and in the afternoon Noddy’s brother and sister came. Others joined us from time to time.

Day after day, we inched through the grove, cutting, scratching, scraping, sifting and examining throughout the area of what we called the ‘old bamboo’.

‘Nothing,’ I said, at last.

‘Away with the fairies,’ said Moonface. ‘Believe it.’

We put the area of new bamboo under the control of goats, which Chappy and I, with the help of a nephew and his brave dog, picked up from the side of the gorge road. I watched over the old area, taking out and burning any new shoots that came up.

To me, a garden means food – potatoes, kūmara, pumpkins, cabbages, carrots, corn, kamokamo, tomatoes, melons. It means growing and harvesting and storing enough to see the seasons through. My mother grew flowers because she took pleasure in it, but I hadn’t learned to call that a garden. So I couldn’t figure out what Chappy was doing with his rocks and stones, his digging and shaping and making of crooked pathways that led nowhere.

What I could see once I came home from my travels was a few doctored trees, collections of flat-topped stones that had been taken from the river mouth, and large rocks that had been delivered from the quarry out on the coast. The stones were not only collected, but also selected, Oriwia told me, one, two or three at a time and tried out for suitability. They were used to form stepping stones, not across water – a use I was familiar with – but embedded in soil so that only the flat tops showed – stepping to nowhere. There was a pile of shingle, littered through with shell, which came from the shore of the estuary.

However, by the time of Noddy and the bamboo, I had begun to see what was taking shape out front of the Star house: mounds and hollows, bridges across shingle, paving, bamboo shelters and ornamental screens protecting shrubs. Not much in the way of flowers, I thought, as I kept up my supply of lettuces, cabbages etcetera from my own garden. Rock you cannot eat. But my eyes did eventually open up to Chappy’s garden. That was after he died, when I would go there and sit with Oriwia.

There isn’t much more to tell. They were brotherly days with Chappy in Hawai‘i and at home. I’ve been fortunate in life and love and the work that’s been given me. Chappy believed himself lucky, too, to have reached his seventieth year and to have the life and love that he had. I miss him. I miss them all in different ways.