Lynda Hallinan and her mini-me fire- starters

Snap, crackle, pop! Lynda Hallinan gets all fired up about the autumn clean-up

ISAAC NEWTON HAS a lot to answer for. Whenever I step foot in our orchard in autumn, I half expect an apple to plop onto my head in an “Aha!” moment. But it’s not just falling fruit, but entire trees toppling that confirm Newton’s gravitational theories.

As specimen trees and shelter plantings come of age in my country garden, what goes up almost inevitably comes back down. Gale-force winds rudely gut shelterbelts, boundary trees falter over fences and laden fruit trees split under the weight of their own crops, resulting in emergency chainsaw amputations instead of the cosmetic tree surgeries carried out by urban arborists.

On the plus side, Newton’s laws of motion ensure that those of us who live on farms are rarely short of firewood. This year, I’ve harvested a veritable fruit bowl of fig, apple, pear and peach kindling to stoke bonfires as lyrical as wine-tasting notes, with full-bodied branches of chestnut and almond underlaid by eucalyptus, liquidambar, cypress, mānuka and lemon-scented satinwood.

When my husband bought this land 25 years ago, our closest neighbours had just planted a screen of slender satinwoods, Nematolepis squamea (previously Phebalium squameum), above his driveway. A member of the citrus family (Rutaceae), this Australian evergreen tree has aromatic foliage and small clusters of honey-sweet white flowers in spring. It’s prettier than a pittosporum if topped as a hedge but left to its own devices, it runs out of oomph and proves as short-lived as it is quick growing.

A few summers ago, the entire stand succumbed to drought and carked it, and then the neighbours sold up. Their cadaverous copse is still — mostly — standing, though with every blustery nor’easter that blows through, we get a free load of firewood delivered across our driveway. Fortuitously, phebalium hardwood burns fiercely as well as fragrantly; Taranaki plantsman Glyn Church reckons it has the hottest wood of any tree that can be burnt green (as soon as it is felled).

In autumn, I always feel a burning desire to light fires. I’m not the only one. When the fire permit season opens, multitudes of inflammatory advisory notices are posted on our community Facebook groups, silencing the usual quibbles about slow drivers on the hills, hoons doing burnouts and horse manure whodunnits in the village green car park.

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE: Harvest the hanging skirts from cabbage trees ( Cordyline australis) to make natural fire-starters. Half a dozen dried leaves, tied in a bundle, burn better than crumpled newspaper; Lynda’s hut is decorated with her collection of large woven cane basket platters. “They’re hung on picture hooks, so if I need to serve a big batch of scones, I can easily whip one off the wall,” she says; the popping corn variety ‘ Mushroom’ (Egmont Seeds) produces large, golden- orange kernels, just like the bought ones.