The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People

of gardeners, and we take pleasure in tending our backyards. But this pleasure sits uneasily with our knowledge that the places where most of us live are running out of water. We suspect that our lawns and many of our European plants are too demanding of scarce supplies, but can’t imagine our streets and gardens without them. W e a r e a n at i o n

The Old Country opens our eyes, and minds, to other possibilities. It does so by telling us stories about our natural landscape.We discover how much of our history has been tied up with plant exploration, from William Dampier’s first forays at Shark Bay in Western Australia to the amazing recent discovery in the Blue Mountains of the Wollemi Pine, representing a whole new genus.We learn about the statuesque boab of the Kimberley and its interesting relations, and the allure the banksia family holds for artists. George Seddon believes that the better we understand the delicacy and beauty of our natural environment, the more ‘at home’ we will feel as Australians. He explores garden design, and wonders whether the present trend to Mediterranean plants creates more problems than it solves. He looks at what ‘native’ or ‘exotic’ or even ‘a weed’ might mean, and concludes that these notions are surprisingly fluid. This passionate, wise and witty book, enriched with breathtakingly beautiful illustrations, suggests that the answers to our water problems lie here, at home. AM is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Melbourne and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Western Australia. He has held chairs in four disciplines and taught in universities across Europe and North America. His recent books include Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1996). Geor ge Seddon

The OLD COUNTRY Australian Landscapes, Plants and People Geor ge Seddon With photographs by Colin Totterdell

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521843102 © George Seddon 2005 This publication is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Seddon, George, 1927– . The old country: Australian landscapes, plants and people. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 84310 3. ISBN 9 78052184 3102. ISBN-13 978-0-521-84310-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-84310-3 hardback 1. Plant collecting – Australia – History. 2. Landscape changes – Australia. 3. Native plants gardening – Australia. 4. Plants, Ornamental – Australia. 5. Botany – Australia. 6. Human ecology – Australia. I.Title. 581.70994 ISBN-13 978-0-521-84310-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-84310-3 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLS for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

xi

Introduction

1

1

First Encounters

27

2

The Boab

43

3

Learning

65

4

The Conifers

89

5

The Banksias

125

6

Mediterraneity

155

7

On Being Deciduous

173

8

By Design

191

9

Weeds

217

Epilogue

233

Notes

245

Bibliography

249

List of Illustrations

255

Index

259

Acknowledgements

of those named below, the generous use of colour in this book would not have been possible. Their financial support has been for me more than that; it is also an endorsement of my two primary aims: a better awareness of the richness, diversity and interest of our own flora, and of the urgent need for a much more rational use of water in our gardens, especially in the capital cities. Fremantle Ports, which is strongly committed to caring for the environment, has provided support for this book, as have the three major southern-city botanic gardens: Kings Park in Perth, the Adelaide Botanic Garden, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne to mark the opening in 2006 of the first eleven hectares of the Australian Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, a new garden celebrating Australia’s remarkable plant life and landscapes.Their support is acknowledged with pleasure and thanks. Another contributor is Melbourne Water, which is acutely aware of our need to make better use of a resource we have taken too much for granted in Australia.There are three private donors, all of them well known for their history of support for better environmental planning: the Norman Wettenhall Estate, Jan Schapper and, finally, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch. The help of all the above is a vote of confidence, not so much in this book as in the aims to which it is directed. The last-named has contributed so much to Australia, in so many ways, that this book is dedicated to her, as my small tribute. The source or author of the images in this book is indicated both in the List of Illustrations and/or with each image as it occurs in the text. I would like to thank all the many generous contributors for what in my view is the best part of the book, and to acknowledge sources in general terms. Most of the photographic images come from the archives of my friend Colin Totterdell. He is one of the world’s great photographers of landscape and flora, the equal of men like Ansell Adams in America and Olegas Truchanas in Tasmania, but he has rarely received due recognition. Other photographic images come from Without the help

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Jock Clough, Simon Griffiths, John Hanrahan, Stephen Hopper, Michal Lewi, Brian and Diana Snape, and Pamla Toler. A few are from my own collection. The non-photographic images are also diverse in origin, and it has been a privilege to be permitted to use them. They include fine line-drawings by David Hutchison, and the lovely rendering of Banksia ashbyi by Celia Rosser, for which I owe thanks both to her and to Monash University. The non-photographic Dampier illustrations and most of the Banksia illustrations are taken from rare books in the special collections of the Reid Library of the University of Western Australia. Catherine Clark took a great deal of trouble to locate what I needed and to arrange for these fragile pages, which date from 1781 to 1830, to be photographed by Dennis Sarson of the University Photographic Unit. The image of what turns out to be Banksia baxteri from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine was made available to me through the courtesy of the library of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium of South Australia. The watercolour by Stanley Tapp of Sturt’s desert pea is reproduced by courtesy of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. With only two exceptions, all this illustrative material was made available for reproduction without cost, a remarkable act of generosity. I owe thanks for permission to quote several passages from Stephen Hopper et al. in the Introduction and Chapter 4; from Michael Hough in Chapter 9; and a long passage by Michael Frith in the Introduction. A few readers may identify occasional ‘self-quotation’, words I have used before, but as these are modified and fitted to a new context, I hope they will be tolerated. Finally, there are authors from whom I have not quoted at length, but on whom I have drawn heavily for data and understanding. Their work is, of course, listed in text and endmatter, but I would like to record the major sources again, here: David Baum, Wilfrid Blunt and T. William Stearn, Alex George, Lionel Gilbert, Sylvia Hallam, Diana Snape and Paul Wilson. Drafts of this book have been read critically by friends, of whom Basil Balme has been outstanding: he has read every word. Other helpful readers include my wife, Marli Wallace, Stephen Forbes, Alex George, Stephen Hopper, Andrew Saniga and Paul Wilson of the State Herbarium of Western Australia, who has tried to steer me around the worst pitfalls of changing botanical nomenclature. None

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of them bears any responsibility for the persisting shortcomings of the text. I would also like to thank the staff of Cambridge University Press, who have been a delight to work with, especially the Commissioning Editor, Kim Armitage. On behalf of the press, she commissioned one book that was to be co-authored, and got another with one author. The final text has a broader focus than originally intended and a different title. It is longer and more fully illustrated than the original intention, yet has been accepted with good grace. Such editorial indulgence is an author’s dream. Old men forget. I will have failed to list all those who have helped me along the way to this, my last and final book. Please, all of you, accept my sincere thanks. Geor ge Seddon

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

‘ T h e O l d C o u n t r y ’ for my mother, Australian born, was Britain, as for most of her generation, although she had never set foot on its sacred soil. Neither had she ever been Home, although she first left it (in central Queensland) at the age of twenty-three to be married, and returned to it often. For my generation, Australia is the old country. Many of our landscapes are old. Although they have undergone countless cycles of weathering, they have not experienced the cataclysms of mountain building resulting in the Rockies and the Sierras that transformed the ‘New World’ and the Alps in the ‘Old World’ (thus made new). Massive glaciations later scoured both continents in the Ice Age, wiping the slate clean, a new beginning for plants and man. Our last comparable Ice Age was in the Permian, not one million but more than two hundred million years ago, when most of the western third of the continent was scoured and scored, the striations sometimes still to be seen in the ancient granites and gneisses of the Darling Plateau near sunny Perth. Geology is a continuum so, like every other land-mass, Australia has rocks of all ages from the Archaeozoic – almost the beginning of earth-time – to the present, including comparatively recent volcanic activity in Victoria and the drowning of a substantial fringe of coastal land when the seas rose with the melting of Pleistocene ice some 10 000 years ago. There are old rocks in every continent, but the Precambrian in Australia is exposed over a large area, and well studied, largely because of its mineral riches. As a political entity, Australia is a very young country. A few years ago there was a rhetoric to go with it: we have the virility of the young, unlike the effete Europeans (other than, of course, the British, our immediate antecedents, whose virility is eternal). Now, of course, the tenses change. They change in the United States, whose youth is/was ‘one of its hoariest traditions’ (according to Oscar Wilde). They change in Australia, and in Britain. Old Father Thames may keep rolling along (into the mighty sea), but the North Sea is a drop in the ocean, and young Father T hasn’t been rolling into it for long, either. Some Australian rivers have been following much the same

xi

course for much longer, but we do not have enough words for degrees of ‘old’. ‘Ancient’ belongs to B-grade fiction. ‘Immemorial’ sounds promising, but since nearly all of geological history is beyond the reach of human memory (i.e. is immemorial) it is of little help in discriminating degrees of ‘old’.

Stromatolites at Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay,WA, in the intertidal zone, exposed (above) and submerged (below). They are several thousand years old. photo: John Hanrahan

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Fossil stromatolites exposed to the south of Marble Bar,WA, have been dated at 3.5 billion years bp. In this case, the past lies at the author’s feet. photo: George Seddon

There is a rough dirt track leading south from the road from Port Hedland to Marble Bar in north-western Australia that leads to an old mine site. Nearby, there are several outcrops of fossil stromatolites and they are among the oldest known evidence of living organisms. The stromatolites are in the Warrawoona Group, which are mostly volcanic lavas, but with some layers of sediment accumulated in shallow seas. Beneath these rocks, there is an angular unconformity or ancient erosion surface (a page missing in the local journal of events); the eroded rocks have been dated to 3.515 billion years. For erosion to take place, they had to be at the earth’s surface. This is the first reliably dated evidence of a stable crust. The world was beginning to assume its present form, so we are watching the curtain go up. It must have gone up elsewhere, but this is the first record, first by over half a billion years, in the East Pilbara. Now that’s old.

Preface

xiii

The English language has begun to adapt to the physical circumstance of Australia, especially in water words.‘Henley on Todd’ is a brilliantly ironic conjunction. ‘Creek’ is not a salt-water inlet on the Scottish coast, but a water-made channel, often dry. To say that ’the creek’s running’ is incomprehensible in British English. Here, it means that there is moving water in it (for a change!).We have not yet been so inventive with degrees of old, although we need them more than Europe or North America There are also ways, however – perhaps surprising to some – in which Australia is physically young. It is, arguably, the youngest of the continents along with Antarctica, from which it had broken entirely free as a new and independent continent only by the Eocene, some sixty million years ago It is also very young latitudinally, which is to say that it has only just arrived at its present latitude and is still on the move. David Williamson once wrote a clever play called Travelling North, a title that could serve for our continent, and only for this one. The other continents have also rifted apart by changing longitude – by drifting sideways, if you like – but Australia is the only continent that has moved almost from pole to equator. Evolution, like geological processes, is a continuum, but it moves by fits and starts in response to local circumstance. Both the history of the Australian flora itself and of our varying awareness of it illustrate the many complexities in the application of words like ‘new’ and ‘old’, words whose apparent simplicity is a chimera, a willo’-the-wisp dancing across a land not well understood. Many of our plants have come from the south with the landmass that carried them slowly north and, before that, from east and west before the first rents in the Gondwanan fabric. By contrast, the human species has always come from the north or north-west, first by island-hopping from the Indonesian archipelago, much more recently from Europe, much further to the north and west, and more recently still, from the nearer north in Asia. In the northern hemisphere, the patterns of migration have been quite different, and from all points of the compass. People moved into Europe from Africa, much later all over the Mediterranean world as the Greeks and then the Romans moved out from their centres; still later from the north with Anglo-Saxons and Vikings; west from Asia across the Bering Straits to North America, and further south into South America. These mass movements of human populations continue today as Eastern Europe, northern Africa and

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the Middle East all decant their people into Western Europe. The endless movements of people are driven by a multitude of imperatives, but underlying them is the simple point that the geography of the northern hemisphere makes it possible. The Australian continent tells a dramatically different story.There has been no invasion from the south other than a few penguins, and minimal additions from east and west in our own hemisphere. People have come from the north to a continent that has come from the south, with a physical history that is nothing like that of any of their homelands – not the Indonesian archipelago, not Britain, Ireland, southern Europe, not southern China nor India nor Vietnam. Its biorhythms are remote from those of any of the lands to the north, and they have been hard to learn. We live in old landscapes with limited water and soils of low fertility, yet with a rich flora that is adapted to those conditions, as we are not. There is much to learn from it, but we have been slow learners. A definitive history of the use of indigenous plants (‘Australian natives’) in our gardens has not yet been written. It is, to be sure, not attempted here. The story is one of progress, but also of stops and starts, dead ends and new beginnings that led nowhere. To comprehend the pattern of events, one needs an understanding of physical constraints such as the early need for food and shelter, for living with limited water supplies, then abundant water, now again restricted and likely to remain so. Other keys to understanding are cultural predilections and echoes (the rapid propagation of the Norfolk Island pine, with its symmetrical branches on which it was easy to hang northern European dreams); the erratic eruptions of fashion (the planting of lemon-scented gums in inner-city frontyards); and the mistaken and short-lived belief that if you planted ‘natives’, you did not have to look after them. Underlying these considerations is the fact that we are now essentially a suburban culture in large urban conglomerations that themselves have had a brief history. While I explore some of these key themes in The Old Country: Australian Landscapes, Plants and People, I also venture beyond gardening to tell stories about our flora, to show not only its delicacy and beauty, but also how much of our history has been tied up with plant exploration and with the collectors and their motives; and how, finally, awareness of this flora and its history can help us all to become better Australians.

Preface

xv

Apologia This book offers no more than illustrative examples of the uses and abuses of the Australian flora. For example, design with Australian plants is illustrated through the work of three pioneers (Edna Walling, Ellis Stones and Oliver Dowell), but there are many more, like John Oldham, Gordon Ford, Grace Fraser and the remarkable enterprise at Monash University begun by Jock Marshall. There have been many writers about the use of the Australian flora, from Thistle Y. Harris to Diana Snape, and their work, too, should be a part of a comprehensive history. Paintings of the land and its flora are discussed at length here only in relation to banksias, by using the work of some major botanical artists; the complementary art of photography is not discussed, although it is used throughout the book. The list of what I have not attempted could go on. These illustrative samples, moreover, are restricted to what I know at first hand, so some parts of the land are under-represented. So be it. There is, however, a secondary theme to these exploratory essays. It is a preoccupation with language, at two levels.The first is that the words we use both reflect and affect the way we conceptualise the world around us, and this has heightened importance in Australia, a land so unlike that in which our language evolved.The second is that of the continuing struggle to establish a botanical nomenclature that reflects phylogenetic patterns.

A note on the na ming of pl ants Botanical nomenclature is a cross that anyone writing about plants has to bear. For an Australian, it is a heavy one, because the flora is huge and so little of it is well known. Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) and river red gum (E. camaldulensis) are so well known by their popular names that the scientific ones seem hardly needed – but ‘peppermint’ in Western Australia refers to Agonis flexuosa, whereas in the eastern states it is any one of several eucalypts (E. dives, E. piperita, E. elata and more). To avoid misunderstanding, there is no escape from botanical terminology, and the level of botanical literacy in Australia is high,

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but there are many intelligent, well-read thoughtful Australians who find it an irritant. To them I offer sympathy and advice: skip the scientific names and look at the photographic images, which communicate much better than words. Even for the botanically literate, the scientific names, although inescapable, are an irritant. They are in flux, for three reasons. The rule of priority means that the first scientific name validly bestowed has priority over later names given by plant collectors who gave a name without knowledge of an existing one. When earlier valid names turn up, they must take precedence over what have often become familiar ones. Calocephalus brownii, for example, was known to gardeners for years: it is an attractively coralline white-grey shrub of the sea-side dunes, and its Greek name means ‘beautiful head’, which is appropriate. Now it has to be called Leucophyta brownii because it is a valid prior name, but it is a dull one, meaning ‘white plant’ – it is also harder to remember, at least for me. The second reason is that botanical research often shows that a plant assigned to a given genus or species is sufficiently different to warrant a new name. The genus Calandrinia illustrates both these cases. The generic name was originally applied to species from both South America and Australia, but when it was found that the two groups differ enough to warrant two names, South America had prior claim to Calandrinia; and the Australian genus was called Parakeelya, an Aboriginal name. No sooner had this been proposed than it was discovered that the genus had been validly named as Rumicastrum, which had priority. The third reason for instability is that we are witnessing the birth of a new pathway to taxonomic understanding, that of molecular phylogenetics, using new tools, no longer depending on the naked eye and simple microscope. Genetic relationships can now be traced with confidence. The outcome will be a substantial rewriting of the textbook – Banksia and Dryandra will be merged, Acacia will be split, as Eucalyptus and Corymbia have already been split, the latter much closer to Angophora than to Eucalyptus.There is much more to come, since this is very much ‘work in progress’, and necessarily incomplete. It should in time make taxonomy far more precise. In the meantime, we live with change.

Preface

xvii

i n t r o d u c t i o n

I t h i n k I have had an epiphany recently, but I am still thinking

about it. It was about birds.The word ‘epiphany’ is not much used at the breakfast table, but assorted writers have had them, or claimed to have had them. James Joyce had them. William Blake had them, but – unpretentiously – called them ‘fancies’. Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Yeats had them, or something akin to them. An epiphany is more than an insight or an inspiration, which are positive. It is more like a revelation. The Bible has a whole book of them, and some of them are pretty scary, as was mine.When the veils are ripped off the mundane, what you see may well be confronting. Think of the Anglican Dean Swift writing in Catholic, conquered Ireland: ‘The other day I saw a woman flayed, and I have never seen anyone whose appearance was so improved for the worse’.The bite of this spare observation comes from the way in which several implied value systems come into violent collision: concepts of humanity, male respect for the gentler sex, his Christian role, the need to maintain public order in a repressive and fragile colonial society always on the boil and in constant danger of eruption, and the power of social institutions of which he was a part and a beneficiary. My epiphany was modest, but still confronting. As I said, it was about birds, which have often been instruments of epiphany, from Greek tragedy (The Birds) to Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, Coleridge’s albatross, even Blake’s Fancy: ‘How do you know that every bird that cuts the aery way is a whole world of delight, Closed off by our senses five?’Well, we don’t know. I find it attractive to think that birds may experience a world inaccessible to us, but it is still confronting. Our ‘senses five’ are still limiting, only one possible window on reality. What Blake does, what I think that all epiphanies do, is to question the relation between the observed and the observer and his assumed position of privilege. My birds were kookaburras, a family of them, four in all. I was writing about a part of the campus of the University of Western Australia known as the Great Court, a large rectangle defined by handsome buildings. In the early days, there was a gardening shed in one part of it, and the gardener of the day planted trees around it. The shed has long gone, but the trees have thrived prodigiously in a sheltered location with a high watertable and fertile soils (old swamp soils of humus-rich silt and clay). The trees have grown so luxuriously and created such a dense canopy that they are now

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known as the Tropical Grove. None of the species is specifically tropical, but en masse they give that effect. A colleague suggested that I might mention the amiable family of four kookaburras in the Tropical Grove: they are very tame, living off offerings of sandwiches and pilfered pies. And they also seem more equitable in their pecking order than those terrorists of the bird-world, seagulls.They should really be cult figures as cultural custodians of the campus – they may even be metamorphosed spirits of old professors.

Almost a Blakean ‘Fancy’, more endearing than confronting at first sight, but I rejected it with all the force an ‘old professor’ could muster. The idea of metamorphosis is not unattractive in itself, and the implication that professors of any age tend to live off the casual bounty of students has a certain propriety, but kookaburras on campus, forsooth! Kookaburras anywhere in Western Australia are an ecological disaster. May Gibbs was a sharp-eyed naturalist in top gear while she was based here, but she left Western Australia and went into Neutral in Sydney. Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are true sandgropers, based on marri and the red-flowering gum (Corymbia calophylla and C. ficifolia), very distinctive of the West. In Sydney she made a hero of the jackass by presenting it as a snake-killer. In the popular psyche from the Garden of Eden on, the serpent is bad news, evil and loathsome, so the kookaburra becomes a knight in shining armour. Kookaburras may indeed occasionally kill a snake, but snakes are shy and few on the ground, so a kookaburra-induced mortality must be a rare event. The bird is, however, a fierce predator, eating frogs, worms, caterpillars – and eggs and baby birds. It is not indigenous to Western Australia. It was introduced to Yanchep National Park one hundred years ago, and has since spread. The indigenous avian fauna did not evolve with the kookaburra and there is no close equivalent in the South-West. The small and largely defenceless birds that belong here are a delight; the singing honeyeaters, the little brown honeyeaters, the New Holland honeyeaters, the striated pardalotes, rainbow bee-eaters and more.They are a source of immense pleasure to many people in Perth, they serve a range of ecological functions including insect predation – and they are at risk. Sydney and Melbourne have lost most of their small birds: in Melbourne, mostly because of their replacement with introduced birds

Introduction

A kookaburra, ink sketch by David Hutchison

3

A white-cheeked honeyeater (Phylidonyris nigra) feeding on nectar of Banksia baxteri, Cheyne Beach, east of Albany,WA photo: Stephen Hopper

A honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) feeding on Banksia grandis, Millbrook Nature Reserve, north of Albany. Honey possums, endemic in southwestern Australia, are the only nonflying mammals known to feed on pollen and nectar. photo: Stephen Hopper

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that have taken over their habitat, especially the sparrow, blackbird and mynah. In Sydney, there has also been a big increase in the number of the large predatory birds, especially ravens and currawongs. When there are few small birds there is little bird-song.The harsh cries of the ravens, currawongs and kookaburras are no substitute for our ‘dawn chorus’ – which persists well beyond the dawn as a succession of choristers take up the melody through most of the day. If I had to go back to Melbourne, there are things about Perth that I would not miss at all, but I would miss the small birds intensely. Their enemy is my enemy; hence the kookaburra is an unwelcome intruder from ‘the Eastern States’. This is a good and loyal sandgroper point of view. But I came from Melbourne myself, so I am an intruder here too, doubly so since my family came from Britain. Moreover, this is a university, a Universitas; opposed in its very nature to the parochial. The Great Court, home to the Four Kooks of the Apocalypse, is a grove of trees almost all of which come from somewhere other than the Swan Coastal Plain. I have travelled a great deal, to the four corners of the earth, and am, so far as I am able to be, a citizen of the world. But ecology is implacably particularist, and the richness of our global environment depends on this particularity, not on the citizens of the world, the rats and seagulls and the sparrows. Kookaburras don’t belong here. The Nazis thought that Jews did not belong in Germany, and did their worst to return to racial purity. Notions of ‘ecological integrity’ apply not only to people and birds, but to plants and gardens. Some recent German historians have seen the ‘wild garden’, using only the plants local to the area, and favoured by ecologically minded opponents of French or Italian formal gardens, as complicitous with the ‘blood-and-soil’ ideology of Nazism. It is beyond argument that the gardening impulse of Western culture, especially in the last three hundred years, has become a part of imperial domination, bringing back trophies from the ends of the earth. Zygmunt Bauman, the distinguished Polish sociologist, has linked this will to global domination of nature with the nightmare politics of twentieth-century totalitarianism:1 Baumann’s reflections are prompted by Ernest Gellner’s wild/garden distinction in Nations and Nationalism (1983). Gardens are not the scene of primal innocence. They are, rather, a battleground of conflicting values and ideologies.Too often for comfort, moreover, the battle rages within, as incompatible value systems struggle for supremacy, as they do in me.

Introduction

5

But I still think kookaburras are alien intruders in the West.They don’t belong here; I am for the honeyeaters. To counter-claim that the kookaburra is an ‘Australian icon’ carries no weight with me. Indeed, to write or speak of ‘Australian animals and plants’ is to use a convenient fiction that can also lead to serious confusions.The term has its uses, but its use always requires caution. The caution is needed because plants know nothing of nationality. Consider the following, from Patrick Fairbairn: A nation’s animals and plants are among its finest works of art. Each species is as individual as any creation of the artist. Destruction of any species or its life support system is vandalism indeed.2

These are fine sentiments, and with a few reservations I share them, but it is easier to make such pronouncements based on cultural conditioning than it is to find rational support for them. My first hesitation is that they are a luxury; they were not held by many of the convicts and early settlers of Port Jackson, whose central preoccupation was survival in a strange environment.They were and are held, we are told, by the Aborigines of the area, who could afford such luxuries because of their low density of population and, therefore, the limited demands on what for them was not a hostile environment but a known and sustaining one. They were held also by an enlightened few of the elite who could afford such fine feelings, maintained directly from Britain rather than dependent on the local scene. Affluent middle-class Australia can afford them too – and should. ‘Vandalism’ is a key word. If its meaning is restricted to ‘wanton destruction’, well and good. The difficulty is that ‘destruction’ can also be unwitting, or the by-product of other activities generally considered necessary or acceptable by society – in Australia, by clearing for agriculture, by the introduction of hooved mammals, by the spread of pathogens like Phytophthora cinnamomi, and by introduced plants that can out-compete the indigenous flora. These have all been more significant than wanton destruction.

The

ca se

against?

Fairbairn’s first sentence, ‘A nation’s animals and plants are among its finest works of art’ seems unarguable.Yet even allowing all the above

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qualifications, there is still a view in partial opposition to his full statement, put forcibly in a recent issue of Greenplaces by the Landscape Regeneration Manager for the Peabody Trust in Britain:

Wildlife xe nophobia I get a buzz from seeing ring-necked parakeets (India) skeeting overhead, red admirals (yup, European visitors) feeding on buddleia (eastern China) and Californian poppies bursting forth out of nearby wastelands.They are as much a part of my cultural landscapes as bluebells, hornbeams and green woodpeckers. I therefore take issue with some of the sweeping xenophobic statements made by John Lovell in respect of ‘foreign invaders’ (Landscape Design 325). Our biodiversity and landscapes are the result of the impact we have made over countless generations, a consequence of the influences of very many peoples arriving on these islands over the past 7,000 years or so. Hundreds of species of animals, plants and fungi have been brought here with us, some purposefully and others incidentally. The three species Lovell mentions – giant hogweed, Japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam – were intentionally introduced. Indeed, Japanese knotweed was introduced by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew some 150 years ago, and in the following years horticulturalists took great delight in extolling its ornamental credentials. The same happened with giant hogweed, where seeds were sold for their proliferation throughout the countryside. I accept that in many places they are causing problems and need effort to control them, but they did not ‘invade’. The term ‘invasive’ is problematical: in ecological circles it is too commonly attached to ‘alien’, ignoring the fact that native species are perfectly good at being invasive themselves. Oak, bracken, silver birch, common reed and stinging nettle all act brilliantly at outcompeting other species if circumstances permit. At root, I suggest that too many of us are wedded to a romantic pre-urban idyll, where good, honest British species once innocently frolicked unthreatened by nasty foreigners. However, we are one of the mostly densely populated nations on earth, and our cultural heritage reflects this. The hundreds of introduced species are with us to stay. Some of them are a problem (such as the aquatics azolla and parrot’s feather), most are benign and many brighten up our landscapes.

Introduction

7

Sweeping statements about foreign invasives bringing ‘detrimental consequences’ to people’s ‘quality of life’ are not supported by evidence, and can lead to confusion of a public already perplexed about what wildlife is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. If we deem nonnatives per se as bad and requiring ‘zero tolerance’, what message does that send to the multi-cultural society of which I am proud to be a member?3

Mathew Frith’s views may well be appropriate for his small island, but not for our big one. Is it too late, is it even possible, to ‘shut the door’ on ‘invasive’ plants and animals? This is a misleading metaphor. Even for Britain, the case for maintaining remnants of the indigenous flora is not incompatible with accepting most of Frith’s points, and that case is far stronger in Australia. Another difficulty with purist attitudes is that they are static.The clock ticks on, and there is always change. The London Basin was tropically luxuriant in the Eocene, not so long ago in geologic terms, full of Nipa palms and an exotic fauna – including our early ancestors, who looked, according to the reconstructions, not unlike today’s straphangers on the Underground.This interval was followed by others and, in time, the Ice Age wiped out just about everything growing, from which there has been a slow recovery, not yet carried very far. At least some of the introductions have probably done little more than speed up natural recolonisation. As for our island, the time element is inescapable. Australia is a cruise ship that has been heading north – majestically – from the Antarctic to the tropics for sixty million years, and is still doing so. Together with climate change, the consequences for the flora are noteworthy, particularly in Western Australia: Western Australian ecosystems are in a dynamic state on a trajectory determined by biological responses to environmental changes set in train as the continent moved from high latitude, moist, equable climates to warmer, drier, more seasonal ones.… In this process, the cool-climate, moisture-dependent elements have been restricted to refugia … 4

‘Refugia’ is an interesting word, as are ‘alien’, ‘invasive’ and ‘multicultural’. Their connotations appear to change according to context. From the above, we might conclude that invasive plants are

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undesirable in Australia, and so are invasive people, but some parts of Australia can provide refuge for some Australian plants under stress elsewhere, but not for some people, while it is desirable that our population policy (for people) be multicultural, but not our conservation attitudes. Weighted words distort discussion. I believe that Australians should be growing more local plants, but it is important to scan the arguments. It is not unusual today to be told that Australians should be growing more plants from their own country in their gardens, but why should they? The case has been argued in the past from pseudonationalistic grounds, and even at the home-gardening level, from a mixture of good reasons and bad. The result has been some good gardens and some very bad ones: lemon-scented gums pushing into the foundations of valuable nineteenth-century terraces in their minute front yards in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, for example. The bad arguments led twenty years ago to a belief that the ‘bush garden’ was self-maintaining: you bought the plants, put them in the ground, and your task was over. Neither gardening nor plants are like that, nor ever have been, but the failures may have set back by a decade or more the campaign to persuade Australians to grow more plants from their own country. So before we begin planting, let us first turn to a little weeding: weeding is as important in clarifying ideas as it is in gardening. Some of the arguments for growing Australian plants are overstated, need qualification, are incomplete, or in conflict with other beliefs, and some of the terminology is imprecise or misleading.Then we can turn to the good arguments.

‘Australian’

plants

Nations and nationality are the outcome of political history, of conquest, invasion, change, chance, all of which might, in our own case, have led to quite different boundaries.The western third of the continent might well have been claimed by the French to the north and the Dutch in the south-west, with the Dutch again in Van Diemen’s Land, and the Germans and the Dutch or the Indonesians or the Japanese in the northern third of the continent other than the Kimberley. So the words ‘Australia’ and ‘Australian plants’ might have applied only to the land and flora of the south-eastern mainland.

Introduction

9

The nation of Australia, however, now comprises a continent, the only nation state to do so.Thus the political boundary coincides with a natural boundary, with the exception of a few bits and pieces that we will come to presently.This colours our thinking in many odd ways, usually unconscious. North America has eight nation states plus Greenland (Danish) and another five Caribbean island countries, just counting the larger ones, while all the other continents have many more. Yet our continental unity is also misleading; it encompasses many highly diverse environments and the plants from one often fail to survive in another, although there are also many interesting exceptions. Europe is called a continent, even the Continent (although strictly a mere subcontinent of Asia, like India). Now that the political boundaries grow close to the natural ones by courtesy of the European Union, we could be tempted to speak of ‘European plants’ and urge that these should dominate European gardens. Of course we do not, for two very good reasons. One is environmental and one cultural. The cultural reason is that gardens are human constructs, and Europeans have ransacked the world for ‘gardenworthy’ plants, and then bred and refined them. They are not likely to repatriate them. The second is ecological. Quercus suber, the cork oak, is indigenous in Portugal and southern Spain, but there would be little point in planting it in Finland, nor in planting birches in Portugal, although both are European plants and European countries. Plant affinities often ignore national boundaries. They may also ignore natural boundaries. For our region, the most significant natural boundary is Wallace’s Line, the dramatic gap in the Indonesian Archipelago between Lombok and Flores, dividing the biotic realm of South-East Asia and Australasia. It works well for the fauna (tigers and monkeys to the west of it, kangaroos and their kin to the east) but less well for the plants. The flora of Australia has many shared characteristics at the continental scale, but there are also many plant species and genera that look outwards rather than inwards to the centre. Popular speech reflects this sense of a continent and a people looking out from the coastal fringe rather than inwards. It makes sense to speak of the ‘American heartland’, a powerful political and cultural force, but here the heart is dead.We call non-coastal Australia ‘the outback’, and if it is well out, ‘beyond the black stump’. What it

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is not is ‘in’.We even define ourselves by the oceans we face. Sydney fronts the Pacific, Perth the Indian Ocean. North America and Europe have transcontinental railroads. Until recently we had just one, which we call the ‘Indian Pacific’, ocean to ocean – as if there were little of significance in between. Many plants look out across these seas. Kangaroo grass (Themeda), which we think of as quintessentially Australian, is common in southern Africa, as I once discovered to my surprise.The distinctive boabs (Adansonia gregorii) of the Kimberley have close relatives in Madagascar and southern Africa, but none in eastern Australia, while some of the evergreen figs of tropical and subtropical Australia have their nearest relatives in India. Tasmania has a suite of gymnosperms that are almost unknown in south-western Australia (Podocarpus drouynianus in the high rainfall area of the extreme southcoastal area is the sole exception); but there are related species up the east coast, across the Tasman to New Zealand and even further to Chile.The greatest concentration is in New Caledonia.To give a few more examples, we have one species of kauri (Agathis robusta) on the east coast of Queensland, and New Zealand has one (A. australis).We have three Araucaria – A. heterophylla from Norfolk Island, A. bidwillii and A. cunninghamiana – while New Caledonia has many species of these two genera, especially Araucaria.The western four-fifths of the continent has none. Tasmania has the Huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii), the celery-top pine (Phyllocladus aspleniifolius) and Microcachrys tetragona, all members of the Podocarpaceae; most of the related species are in New Zealand.

photo: George Seddon

Introduction

11

Araucaria bidwillii, planted to mark a homestead in New South Wales

Magpies and seagulls; the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, ink sketch by David Hutchison

All of this is the outcome of the geological past, of Gondwanan links, including linkages through a more temperate Antarctica, of chance seed dispersal by birds or waves, and so on. The point is that the current geographical location of plants in Australia may provide only limited significant information. To talk of ‘Australian’ plants is therefore accurate and tolerably precise only if it is intended to mean no more than those plants now growing naturally in Australia. Even then we have to exclude recent introductions that have naturalised. We also have to exclude from the concept of ‘Australia’ some of the outlying islands, while including others such as Norfolk Island, Tasmania, Rottnest, Kangaroo Island and so on, by criteria that are obviously quite arbitrary, since if we restricted ourselves to the Australian continent, they would all be out too. Beyond that imperfect geographical sense, the word ‘Australian’ applied to plants is a joker, sometimes rich in meaning, sometimes poor and misleading. The danger of confusing political with natural boundaries has already been illustrated by the kookaburra which, like the plants, knows nothing of nationality or state boundaries. Birds know nothing of the nationality of plants, either. My wife and I treasure the singing and New Holland honeyeaters in our garden. Their preferred winter food is the abundant red pea flower of the big old coral tree, Erythrina sykesii. That it is exotic to Fremantle is of no concern to the honeyeaters. A prolific supply of nectar is their consuming passion.

Local

pl ants

There is, however, a strong case for using plants from your immediate locality, literally indigenous plants. Such plants are likely to need no or little supplementary watering, immensely important as water becomes an increasingly scarce resource. They are adapted to local soils and should rarely need the mineral fertilisers responsible for the nutrient build-up in our waterways (the nutrients lead to algal blooms, which deplete the water of oxygen, the fish die, and so on down). Local plants are usually resistant to local pests and are therefore less demanding of toxic pesticides, although this, alas, is not always the case. There are few general statements in either horticulture or

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ecology that do not admit of exceptions. Where plant breeders are able to cross two related species, the F1 hybrids often show hybrid vigour and are tougher than either parent. More often, however, the nurseries even of ‘native’ plants practise selective breeding within a given species, aiming for showy flowers or a longer flowering season. The resultant cultivars may need more care in the garden than in nature, more nutrients, more water, and of course they are not necessarily resistant to all the plant pathogens and predators we have introduced into the garden environment, especially in the towns and cities where most of us live. A second and powerful reason for using the plants of your own locale is that they cannot become ‘garden escapes’, by definition. In one sense, that of the last paragraph, it is wise to use plants, whatever their source, adapted to your immediate environment (soil, rainfall, hours of sunshine, temperature range). Thus plants from comparable Mediterranean zones in the other continents are generally well suited to southern Australia, but these are also the plants most likely to become invasive (feral, if you like). Bulbs and corms from southern Africa are among the worst, but there is a long list, rapidly getting longer, of introduced plants that are invading the bushland of southwestern Australia, and many are now out of control. This problem can also occur with ‘native’ plants used in a new setting. One wellknown case is Pittosporum undulatum from Gippsland, now regarded as a serious invasive weed in the Dandenongs, where it is not indigenous. If you live on the coastal limestone in Fremantle, as my wife Marli and I do, our garden cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa) might yield seeds that are spread by birds, and if they grow they will be indistinguishable from the survivors still to be found in adjoining pockets of bushland. They will, at least, be indistinguishable to the naked eye, but even here, a caveat is needed. They should also be indistinguishable genetically. If the seed collection was from another area, or if there has been some genetic modification through nursery practices, then the effect could well be to reduce the genetic diversity of the species and potentially, therefore, its capacity to adapt to environmental change: Gathering seed from anywhere in a species’ range and broadcasting it across the landscape is little more than gardening, and may well lead to reproductive failure …5

Introduction

13

‘Little more than gardening’ may seem an odd phrase to come from the (then) Director of Kings Park and Botanic Garden. It is certainly a purist view, as should be the case with a dedicated conservationist, but its practical application is not difficult: seed should be collected only from the provenance in which it is to be used, and not from just anywhere in the range of the species. Happily, this is almost certainly the case with our Spyridium and Templetonia; both occur naturally and abundantly within the western third of the metropolitan area of Perth, and both germinate so easily from seed, especially the latter, that there could be no temptation to seek seed further afield.

Love

’em

or

lose

Cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa) at Rocky Bay, Fremantle on an outcrop of caprock photo: George Seddon

’em

The genetic argument may seem to undermine the whole case for gardening with Australian plants, but there is a counter-argument: the ‘love ’em or lose ’em’ proposition, of which the Wollemi Pine is a spectacular example. It has been found in two small and almost inaccessible natural habitats in the Blue Mountains, but is now being busily propagated in a Queensland nursery, for release to the gardening public. This is an interesting case, in that the ‘conserve biological diversity’ argument runs head-on into the purist approach to environmental conservation. For instance, the anti-Pittosporum case in the Dandenongs is essentially an argument against the increasing homogenisation of the natural world and the blurring of the distinctive character of specific habitats. The outcome, however, is beyond doubt: the Wollemi pine will sell like hot cakes, and will be tried all over the place (if I were younger I would be tempted to try one myself ). The Araucaria species are an extreme example; all three have a limited natural distribution, and all three are widely planted beyond it.The extreme example is the Norfolk Island pine. There are similar examples from the western side of the continent. Some of the mountain bells such as Darwinia collina, D. leiostyla and D. macrostegia occur only on one or two peaks in the Stirling Range. Another example of valuable and beautiful plants with a very limited natural distribution are the Qualup bell (Pimelea physodes) and Banksia coccinea. All of these are vulnerable.They are not yet common in cultivation, but Calophylla ficifolia, the red-flowering gum, does so well in southern Victoria that it is sometimes called the

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Melbourne gum. It is restricted naturally to a small area in the extreme south-west of Western Australia that gets some summer rain. Its distribution has been pushed steadily southwards as the climate has become drier over the last ten thousand years and it will be pushed right off the south-western edge of the continent if this trend continues, as is generally predicted.The western half of the continent runs out of south too soon for further migration, whereas southern Victoria offers ideal habitat for this and other vulnerable species from the extreme south of Western Australia. If they had properly understood that they are ‘Australian’ species, they might have moved to Victoria of their own accord! Many plants are increasingly vulnerable in the natural environment, for a whole raft of reasons, of which limited natural habitat is only the beginning. Increased fire frequency and intensity and clearing for agriculture have had a massive impact. In areas of pastoral leasehold, which take up a third of the continent – stretching from the Pilbara and the Kimberley across to north-west Queensland and western New South Wales – selective grazing and trampling by sheep, cattle, goats, donkeys and camels have eliminated or threaten many species. In southern Australia, garden escapes often out-compete the indigenous flora, and there are also introduced insect predators

Qualup bell (Pimelea physodes) photo: Colin Totterdell

Banksia coccinea, Stirling Range,WA photo: Colin Totterdell

Introduction

17

and pathogens, of which the worst is Phytophthora cinnamomi. Dieback has done immense damage in some of the floristic treasure houses of Western Australia such as the Stirling Range and the Fitzgerald River national parks. The Proteaceae are especially at risk (‘jarrah die-back’ is a misnomer), so if you live on the Mornington Peninsula and can grow Banksia coccinea you might be rendering a service to posterity. The ‘love ’em or lose ’em’ argument can be compelling.

The plea sures of e xperiment A fourth reason for growing ‘Australian’ plants is that it is fun. Gardening is rewarding when it is experimental: there is not much challenge in growing petunias, but there is in growing Leschenaultia formosa. I have seen some strikingly successful experiments in Melbourne gardens; in one garden the owners grow and flower several species of the prostrate banksias from the south coast of Western Australia.They are not ecologically appropriate, so they have recreated a suitable environment by importing a mound of freedraining sand. This is exactly what traditional gardeners do – artificially recreate the conditions that are natural for the plant, be it a rhododendron or a cattleya orchid. Success has come through skilled gardening. So the lovely little banksia cones enrich their manufactured environment thousands of kilometres from their natural home, but nonetheless both a delight and a triumph. Sometimes Australian plants are surprisingly versatile and can be grown in a wide range of environments, even though their natural habitat may be severely restricted.An extreme case is the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), which has been grown almost right around the coast of temperate Australia from Brisbane to Geraldton and beyond. The silky oak (Grevillea robusta) and the Geraldton wax (Chamelaucium uncinatum) are other examples, and there are more. The silky oak comes from well-watered subtropical Queensland, but it can tolerate environments that have cold winters and hot, dry summers: it lines the main street of Heathcote in central Victoria, for example. We have in our garden three plum pines (Podocarpus elatus).This species also comes from a humid climate with summer rainfall in coastal Queensland, and it has no right to grow in Fremantle, with its searingly dry summers, in ‘soil’ with a pH that approaches 11, a thin layer of grey,

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water-repellent sand that overlies dense limestone caprock. Yet they flourish, and show that they are quite ‘at home’ by reproducing prolifically, with unwanted seedlings requiring constant removal. So there is great scope for experimenting with Australian plants from environments remote from our own, so long as we remember that this is not different in kind from trying to grow roses or Chilean bell-flowers. Strictly speaking, the Podocarpus in our garden and the prostrate banksias in the Melbourne garden are exotics. Indigenous gardens use local plants only. All gardens that include non-indigenous plants are eclectic gardens, even those that are restricted to Australian plants.

Soil constraints; design constraints Apart from the pleasure of successful experiment, there are other reasons for wanting to grow Podocarpus in Fremantle, so far from its natural habitat. Were we to grow only the plants indigenous to the limestone hill on which we live, we would be restricted to heathland plants. We do have them, too, abundantly: cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa); Melaleuca acerosa with its generous yellow flower heads; and native dusty miller (Spyridium globulosum), a plant that should be used much more widely, in my view, since it is both attractive and very undemanding. But for trees, our only indigenes are Callitris preissii, of which we have about twenty, and Melaleuca lanceolata, which prefers more shelter than we can provide in a very exposed site. We needed more trees, some for shade and privacy and others chosen for design or functional considerations; some deciduous to allow winter sun and summer shade, like the old mulberry and several coral trees (Erythrina sykesii) with its red peaflowers bright against the winter-blue sky. In any case the mulberry and the coral trees were here when we bought the house and are part of its history. We have introduced other exotics ourselves, for example some evergreen oaks (Quercus suber from the Iberian Peninsula, Q. ilex from Italy, and Q. agrifolia from California). Why? In part for horticultural reasons and in part for design reasons. The practical problem is that very few Australian trees can tolerate our hyperalkaline soil; although plants from alkaline soils can often adapt to soils that are neutral or weakly acid, the

Introduction

19

reverse does not hold. Most eucalypts, for example, like a neutral or slightly acid soil, whereas these oaks from Mediterranean climes are familiar with limestone. The design reasons are the usual ones: for contrast, form, colour. In our strong light, a green so dark as to be almost black helps to give solidity and substance to the design in summer, but there is also a wonderful flush of new foliage in spring, especially with the Podocarpus, a burst of lime green against the sombre black-green of the mature foliage. Strong light intensities prevail in much of Australia, and especially in the southern sweep from south-western Western Australia across all of South Australia, through most of Victoria, and then north through New South Wales and southern Queensland west of the Divide. This, along with the need to conserve water, has led to adaptive consequences in the natural environment, and they are significant for garden design. Foliage is often fine, sometimes very fine, as in nearly all the plants of the heathlands (Micromyrtus, for example). The colour range is highly distinctive: grey, grey-green, bluegreen, black-green, and then translucent copper reds in the new flush of growth (because in nutrient-poor soils, the production of anthocyanin outstrips that of the more nutrient-demanding chlorophyll). Foliage is often pendant and tough (sclerophyllous) as a protection against insolation; prickly or harsh as a protection against grazing and browsing animals. Foliage is often resinous, too, a fresh fragrance to our Australian noses, but a deterrent to many insect predators. Flowers may be exquisite but small: even banksia cones are made up of a multitude of small individual flowers. Flowers are often rich in stamens, like tiny pincushions, but poor in petals. In less brilliantly lit climes, large petals guide the fertilising bees and moths to the functional core of the flower, stamens and stigma, but such crude traffic signals are rarely needed here. Our flowers are often rich in honey, too, easy to manufacture in a sun-rich world. What we do not commonly find in this world of the sun are plants with large mid-green leaves, wilting as soon as their waterfilled cells are thirsty; nor large flowers like those of, say, the rhododendrons, and prolific to the point of covering the bush or tree, going all out to get fertilised in their native gloom. I have seen groves of rhododendrons growing under sheltering deciduous trees in Bodnant, one of the great gardens of the British Isles.The flowers

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glow like jewels in the low light. If you were able to grow them in Bendigo you would need to keep them under a humidifying spray through the summer and they would look gross, lacking all decent restraint. The point I am making is that such foliage, such flowers, look out of place in much of this country, not just horticulturally and ecologically, but visually. Of course there are exceptions, like Mount Macedon and Mount Wilson, but they are indeed exceptions. By contrast, designing with a palette of indigenous plants can allow a subtle harmony of all the foliage colours listed above, and more; some are very pale grey, almost white, like Leucophyta brownii and some of the emu-bushes (Eremophila spp.), which are good for accent or contrast, just as the black-greens are so good for giving solidity, anchoring a composition that might otherwise etherealise in the heat-haze and float away.

Design design

lessons; models

There are design lessons to be learnt from the local flora. The common kangaroo paw in Kings Park was named for Captain Mangles. His kangaroo paw, Anigozanthos manglesii, is a splendid creation in vivid green and red velvet, clearly designed by Jacques Cartier for display as a single stem against a black backdrop in a window of the Faubourg St Honoré. It looks even better in the bush. What a poor thing, by comparison, is the King Alfred daffodil, whose bulbs, as I write, are in prominent tubs near the entrances of all the nurseries. In the bare sands of the Swan Coastal Plain, they are like the forsaken mermaid, out of their element, grieving for Wordsworth’s Windermere. There, they bloom in their multitudes, springing up in the thick grass, holding their pale gold cups against the green, lifting them to the grey skies, and at home. They are at their best in Australia in a few areas of Tasmania and around Mt Macedon where they are allowed to ‘naturalise’, a most revealing word. Gardens must serve all kinds of people, with differing needs in different places, so it is unwise to be too prescriptive about design. A common design model in suburban Australia, which is most of it, is what I call the ‘clearing in the forest’, a lawn opening out from the

Introduction

21

A ‘clearing in the forest’ at Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden, Cape Town, South Africa photo: George Seddon

22

rear of the house, backed by a half-circle or irregular u-shape of shrubs and trees. When much of Europe was densely forested, a clearing gave some security; approaching predators could be seen in advance. The study of human behaviour in such settings has led to the ‘prospect and refuge’ hypothesis:6 that people going for a picnic in a park, for example, will generally choose to sit neither in the middle of the open space nor in the encircling trees, but at the edge, exhibiting a behaviour pattern that has a long ancestry. We have inherited this design model, along with much else, from Britain, and it survives perhaps for primeval reasons (it still offers a comfort zone), but also for more practical ones: the surrounding trees give privacy, while the open space, usually under grass, is well suited to the needs of children, dogs, family life. Natural clearings in the forests of Western Europe were usually the outcome of lightning strikes and local fire, but such clearings are almost unknown in the Australian bush, where fire is rarely local. Away from the coast, moreover, forest soon gives way to grassy woodland, heath, grassland or shrub steppe. If you are intending a naturalistic use of indigenous plants, therefore, the ‘clearing in the forest’ is not an appropriate model (although that does not mean that

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you cannot follow that model and yet include indigenous plants). A naturalistic design will not be that of a static composition seen through a picture window. Such gardens are to be enjoyed from a preferred viewing point, with all those formal elements so deeply embedded in our culture: foreground, middle ground, background, asymmetric framing elements on each side, a ‘picture’ more or less conforming to the golden mean of the Greeks – which is roughly the proportion of most paintings, most photographs of landscapes, even of the viewfinder of the camera. Fred Williams, the landscape painter par excellence, broke with this painterly convention by painting strip pictures, his contention being that the Australian landscape is often a seamless continuity rather than a series of set views. It is hardly practicable for a suburban garden to present a seamless continuity. Naturalistic gardens using Australian plant material may also break with this convention, but in a different way; they will be intricate and dynamic, not static. Such gardens have been called ‘walkabout gardens’, a good term.They can be quite small.You move around them, apparently at will, discovering

‘Karwarra’ in the Dandenong Ranges,Victoria, designed by Kath Geery; one of the most successful designs using Australian plants that I have seen

Introduction

23

photos: Pamla Toler

hidden treasures, and the scale of attention is often minute. You are constantly tempted around the next corner, all apparently artlessly, although of course the artistry lies in concealing the art. This is not new: Guilfoyle designed the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne on just such principles, although on the grand scale and not in the naturalistic mode. The English poet Robert Herrick once wrote of a young woman that ‘there is a sweet disorder in her dress’, and this might apply to such a garden, which can accept, be enhanced by, fallen twigs and leaves, although once again with hidden management in the background to ensure that treasured plants are not smothered. ‘Leaf litter is not litter’ might be a new slogan in such a context.We are all on a steep learning curve about a country of which we still know so little, and of which we have destroyed so much.

‘Karwarra’ in the Dandenong Ranges,Victoria photo: Pamla Toler

Footnote Letter from an English friend: In passing, in our politically correct linguistic times, in the UK there has to be caution about using the terms native or indigenous.We (my husband is an architect) did a sketch scheme for a garden at a London multi-racial infants school and were expected to use terms such as multi-cultural planting. I did not want to get caught up in debates, so in the end I simply used geographical locations such as plants from the West Indies. There are some younger people in the landscape profession who are very vocal about the issue. A couple of years ago there was a 10 minute fill-the-gap programme on Radio 4 (the old BBC Home Service – news and current affairs in a traditional format) that was a dramatically outspoken attack on the use of native etc, made by a newly qualified UK landscape architect, I guess of West Indian origin.

Introduction

25

o n e

f i r s t e nco u nters

Duyfken (Little Dove) charted the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in 1606 and its crew were the first Europeans known to have set eyes on the Australian continent, although there is no certainty that they landed. There is speculation about earlier Portuguese encounters at several places. The first incontrovertible evidence is a pewter plate fastened to a pole in 1616 by Dirk Hartog on what is now known as Dirk Hartog Island at Shark Bay, Western Australia. The visit of Dirk Hartog and his men on the Eendracht was thus a ‘first encounter’, followed, among others, by Willem Vlamingh in 1697, also recorded by a pewter plate at a site now known as Cape Inscription on the north-east prong of Dirk Hartog Island. The French also played a part in the history of Shark Bay. The captain of the Naturaliste, Baron Emanuel Hamelin, also left a pewter plate, in 1801, but this has never been found. One of his officers, however, Louis de Freycinet, returned in the Uranie in 1818 and took, not the Hamelin, but the Vlamingh plate back to France. Thus there is a continuing history of European contact with these shores before and after the settlement of the eastern seaboard, mostly by the Dutch and French, who claimed the western third of the continent for the King of France in 1772. François de St Allouarn and his men buried a bottle 2 kilometres south of Cape Inscription, with a claim written on parchment and two silver coins. The bottle has not been found, but in 1998 a lead bottle-cap and a French coin dated 1776 were recovered at the site. Although Dampier was the first European naturalist to visit the shores of Australia, and his collecting is the principal subject of this chapter, his was far from being the first encounter by Europeans. The reason is evident from the satellite image of Western Australia showing Shark Bay giving a two-fingered salute to the Indian Ocean. Steep Point at the north-western extremity of the Freycinet Peninsula (the more southerly of the two fingers) is the westernmost point of the Australian mainland, which then trends north to Northwest Cape and east-north-east to the Kimberley. Continuity with the mainland is broken by South Passage, but the line of the peninsula extends to the north-west by way of Dirk Hartog Island, where Dampier went ashore on 17 August 1699. The peninsula and island together represent an old elongated dune system, like the fossilised dune systems around Perth. All are part of the Tamala limestone, which reaches its best development here and is named after Tamala Station further back on the Freycinet Peninsula. The Dutch ship

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Satellite image of Western Australia, showing the prominence of the two Shark Bay ‘Easter Bilby ears’

The second, more detailed, satellite image is of Steep Point, showing the westernmost edge of mainland Australia, and across South Passage to a part of Dirk Hartog Island. Dampier sailed north around Dirk Hartog Island at what is now known as Cape Inscription, anchoring about 5 kilometres further south-east in the relatively sheltered waters of Shark Bay. This image also shows the fine detail of Useless Loop and its salt evaporation pans (‘useless’ because it does not go anywhere, but now very productive as a source of salt for export). The bedrock is the Tamala limestone, a largely Pleistocene calcarenite (sandy limestone) that outcrops intermittently along the coastal plain for over a

First

Encounters

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Satellite image of Steep Point, the westernmost edge of mainland Australia

thousand kilometres. At Steep Point it is strongly lineated north–south in line with the fierce southerly gales that created these long fingers of calcified dune sands. This image also shows strips of bare sand of recent origin with the same north–south orientation. They are steepest at the north end, showing the work of continuing southerly gales.These same gales have cut the Zuytdorp Cliffs, which extend south-east from Steep Point, facing the full extent and fury of the Indian Ocean, and it was here that the eponymous Zuytdorp of the Dutch East India Company was wrecked in 1712.1 Shark Bay is now a World Heritage Area, partly to acknowledge four hundred years of European encounter, but also in recognition of its natural history, both in the sea and on land – ranging from stromatolites and dolphins to small marsupials now rare elsewhere, and the floral riches so carefully collected and recorded by Dampier. There are well-preserved specimens of twenty-four Australian plants in the Fielding-Druce Herbarium in Oxford. Most of them were collected at Shark Bay, New Holland, by William Dampier in August and September 1699, and this was the first significant European encounter with the flora of Australia. The specimens are in such good condition that they must have been expertly pressed immediately after collection. They were important to Dampier; they were among the few items he was able to save when the Roebuck was wrecked off Ascension Island in mid-Atlantic on the way home. Plants and field notes were preserved in large water-tight cylinders (hollow bamboo canes) that Dampier had acquired when he was in the tropics.

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Steep Point at the north-western extremity of the Freycinet Peninsula, looking south-east over the low scrub photo: John Hanrahan

Blackwall Reach, where the Swan River cuts through the Tamala limestone photo: George Seddon

The Zuytdorp Cliffs extend south-east from Steep Point photo: John Hanrahan

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The Dampier plate photo: John Hanrahan

William Dampier

Title page of Dampier’s A New Voyage round the World

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A page from A Voyage to New Holland, illustrating four of the species collected. The name of the artist, who worked from Dampier’s material, is not recorded. Conostylis stylidioides F. Mueller (1873) is usually placed in the family of the bloodroots (Haemodoraceae) but in its own tribe of Conostylideae, which includes the kangaroo paws and the attractive Blancoa canescens, also Western Australian. Sida calyxhymenia J. F. Grey ex A. P. de Candolle (1824) is of the hollyhock or mallow family (Malvaceae), whose many attractive Australian members mostly belong to the genera Gossypium and Alogyne. Diplolaena grandiflora R. I. Desfontaines (1817), sometimes known as the wild rose although not much like a rose, is of the rue family (Rutaceae), which includes the common citrus fruits, and in Australia is represented by many well-known and fragrant genera such as Boronia, Eriostemon, Correa, Crowea, Geleznowia and Chorilaena. Beaufortia sprengelioides (A. P. de Candolle) Craven (1999) is of the huge family of the Myrtaceae, from a Western Australian genus.

Diplolaena grandiflora, or the so-called ‘native rose’ photo: Jock Clough

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Most of the genera represented are now familiar – Acacia, Beaufortia, Brachycome, Conostylis, Dampiera, Diplolaena and so on. His species of the latter is D. grandiflora, sometimes called the native rose, not much like a rose, but a handsome plant nonetheless.We have it in our garden. One of the four plants illustrated, Sida calyxhymenia, is correctly assigned to the family Malvaceae in the accompanying text. Dampier responded with delight to the flora of Dirk Hartog Island and Shark Bay, in striking contrast with, for example, de Freycinet and his stowaway wife in the Uranie to the same coast some one hundred years later. Rose Saulces de Freycinet, driven by centuries of cultural conditioning, recoiled with horror. ‘It is without a single regret that I left that hell on earth, the west coast of New Holland’; and again: ‘I found myself upon a horrible coast without the least resource. My courage forsook me utterly, and I could see nothing but horror about me’. She did not recover from the shock until they approached the islands of Simão and Timor in the tropics. ‘Imagine our satisfaction at seeing the lovely vegetation of these islands. Our eyes were pleasantly rested by this greenery after the sand dunes and the dry or stunted shrubs of New Holland’.2 Her eyes needed a rest. She could not see what Dampier had seen, nor would her ears have heard Oscar Wilde’s remark seventy years later that England was ‘too green and badly lit’, equally or more applicable to the Île de France. The paired responses of Dampier and Rose de Freycinet are antithetical.Why could Dampier see what Rose de Freycinet could not? The answer is partly individual temperament, partly differences in education, partly differences in experience. Rose was much better educated than Dampier, more subject to cultural conditioning (a good French woman, she enjoyed the Kalbarri oysters – ‘decidedly better than those I had eaten in Paris’ – but they alone earned her praise). Dampier had less formal education but much more experience of the world, having been three times around it. Like Rose, he enjoyed the pleasures of the table: for example, he visited the Galapagos, where he and his crew ‘refreshed ourselves very well with both Land and Sea Turtles’ which were ‘extraordinarily large and fat, and so sweet that no Pullet eats more pleasantly’. In the Caribbean, he described star-fruit, the avocado, the sapodilla and many other tropical fruits – as Rose might have done – but then observed, as she would not have, that when the Spaniards held Jamaica, they established plantations of all these fruits, but when the island came into English possession,‘I never saw any improvement made by the English, who seem in that regard, little curious’.

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This remark shows detachment in a time of patriotic prejudice, when Dampier was a licensed privateer against the Spaniards. Dampier was curious about all he saw, like a few of his nearcontemporaries, like Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton, with the same observant eye that Watkin Tench brought to Botany Bay one hundred years later.

Na ming One of the plants Dampier saw and collected at Shark Bay is not well known, but it is exquisite. It belongs to the same family as the Portulaca, and has similarly succulent foliage and jewel-like flower quality. It has an Aboriginal name, parakeelya, which has become its popular name; otherwise, Calandrinia polyandra. It is an ephemeral herb and each flower opens for one day only, as with the familiar garden Portulaca grandiflora from Brazil. Dampier included his plant among a group having ‘very small Flowers, growing on the Ground, that were sweet and beautiful’, and so it is, as delicate as an English bluebell. It has also had a distinguished botanical pedigree: the genus was named in 1816 by a German botanist, Carl Sigismund Kunth, for Jean Luis Calandrini, a professor of botany and mathematics in Geneva. The species Dampier collected was named by the British botanist William Hooker in 1855, based on specimens grown in a glass house at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew! These had been raised from seed collected by the botanist of the early Swan River Colony, James

Calandrinia polyandra at Kalbarri,WA; one of the many ephemeral parakeelyas in Australia, related to the garden Portulaca photo: Colin Totterdell

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Drummond. It still grows and flowers abundantly after the spring rains at Shark Bay, its clear colours elegantly displayed against the white, calcareous sands. The propagation of native plants has hitherto concentrated on trees, shrubs and groundcovers, but the botanists and collectors at Kings Park in Perth are now also paying attention to annuals that can grow and give seasonal displays on low-nutrient soil using the natural rainfall. Rose de Freycinet, come back, look again. The family Portulacaceae is small but widespread, with most species in the southern hemisphere, but a few genera extend to the north. The closest associated families are the Aizoaceae (the stoneflower and pigface family) and the Carophyllaceae, a family that includes many familiar plants, mostly from the Mediterranean, like pinks, sweet William, and silene, the bladder campion. Australia has six of the ten genera of Portulacaceae and around forty species of Calandrinia. They are found in every state, and across the Pacific to the west coast of the Americas, from Canada to Chile. Like several other genera that are found in Australia and the Pacific coast of the Americas, the missing link was probably through Antarctica during one of the intervals of milder climate. The distribution suggests that the species is found in a wide range of habitats. Some species are alpine. It may seem improbable that one genus could adapt to both a semi-arid and an alpine environment, but they have much in common. Many alpine plants have a semi-succulent or compact basal rosette of leaves and bright, small flowers held aloft on wiry stems, as are Dampier’s flowers from Shark Bay. Like all ephemerals, both the alpine and the semi-arid species are opportunists, with a short growing season when conditions are favourable, and an even briefer opportunity for sexual encounter. ‘Choose, me, me’ say these silken fragments held high to attract the passing pollinator, for that is what flower colour is about. Neither our nor Dampier’s pleasure is at all a part of the plan.

Imperial

appr opriation

Now stand back a little and look at the events that Dampier set in train. Through him the plant became ‘known to science’, which in this context means ‘known to professional botanists’ a century later. It had hitherto been known only by the Aborigines, who used it as a food source for thousands of years. Note also that the type specimens

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of nearly all the plants collected on the semi-arid coast of Western Australia are in European herbaria, and most of them in Kew. If an Australian botanist wishes to check the identity of a specimen that may or may not be ‘new to science’ he most probably has to Kew up. Botanists take this for granted. Should the Elgin Marbles and Cleopatra’s Needle be repatriated? Was Dampier a pirate even on this officially sanctioned journey? There are other forms of imperial appropriation at play.The most striking to a non-botanist is the insistence on hierarchy: family, genus, species.This has the great benefit that it shows relationships and, to a degree, indicates evolutionary history, but the hierarchical structure is older than evolutionary theory. It also reflects the strongly hierarchical structure of European society, the Great Chain of Being, where everything and everyone has a place, the chain ascending from the lowest through our common species and ever upwards through the feudal ranks, the angels, the archangels to the Supreme Being. All societies are hierarchical in some measure, with distinctions based on lineage, wealth, age and gender in varying combination, but European societies, including today’s Western democracies, are significantly more hierarchical than most tribal societies, including those that Dampier met on the coast of New Holland. His flowers, these bright and innocent ephemerals, were thus not only to find a new place in the system, in the Great Chain of Being. They acquired a new name, the generic name from a Swiss professor who never saw them dead, nor travelled to the sun-drenched shores of Shark Bay to see them living, and a specific name, C. polyandra, that is Greek (poly: many, and andrus: male flower parts, in this case, stamens). As it happens, these delicate trifles would not be out of place on the sandy shores of Ithaca – mainland Greece and Crete have many flowers of like character, mostly from the closely related family, Caryophyllaceae – but Odysseus never made it to Shark Bay. The Graeco-Latin terminology of the sciences, most familiar in medicine, chemistry, zoology and botany, goes back to the classical roots of science, and the linguistic habit has been maintained, sometimes to mystify the uninitiated but primarily because it offers a ‘universal’ language. Universal? No, European. It works. There is only one valid scientific name for any given plant, and botanists from China to Peru will communicate accurately by using this name. Popular names can be confusing. Some plants have more than one popular name, and some popular names are used

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of more than one plant. The Chinese and Peruvian botanists might have trouble with ‘sweet William’ and ‘lad’s love’, but not with Dianthus barbatus and Artemisia abrotanum. What is worse, some ‘popular’ names in Australia are factitious, coined by botanists rather than arising naturally from popular culture. No one refers in popular speech to golden wreath wattle (Acacia saligna) nor to summer scented wattle (A. rostellifera). Genuinely popular names are often evocative, like cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa), blackbutt (Eucalyptus patens) and paperbark, although the last two refer to several species. Some names that have arisen naturally from popular culture present other problems, like snottygobble (Persoonia elliptica) and blackboy (Xanthorrhoea preissii). One is forced to ask of a ‘popular’ name like ‘blackboy’, ‘popular with whom?’ ‘Blackboy’ has now been replaced with ‘grasstree’. Robert Powell, in a delightful book Leaf and Branch (1990), prefers ‘balga’ to ‘grasstree’, a name that is specific to X. preissii, and wherever possible he uses Nyoongah words as popular names for the plants of south-western Western Australia, just as Maori names are now being promoted as the appropriate popular names by ecologists like Geoff Park in New Zealand. Most New Zealand trees have had three names. The English settlers called one handsome gymnosperm ‘white pine’. Its current scientific name is Dacrycarpus dacrydioides, although that name is ‘younger than most of the botanists who use it’, replacing an older name, Podocarpus dacrydioides. Park is dismissive of Linnaean names, an eighteenth-century imposition when ‘a warehouse clerk in Uppsala, Sweden, was laying his system of binomial nomenclature over the life of the world’ (at the time of publication of the Species Plantarum in 1753, Linnaeus was warehousing knowledge as a professor of botany at Uppsala): ‘“The bitter fruit of the tree of Uppsalan knowledge”, the novelist John Fowles called it’.3 Park is right to reject the settler name; the trees are not pines. But in using only the Maori names he maintains continuity with one culture and sacrifices continuity with another, very much broader one. Calandrinia has an Aboriginal name, parakeelya, a soft and lilting name. It is not, of course an ‘Aboriginal’ word because there is no such language, and I have not been able to learn its origin. It is not a Nyoongah word, like ‘quokka’, ‘Kojonup’, ‘chudditch’, ‘jarrah’; it comes from a more liquid language, probably one of the desert languages. It is not specific, but is used of all the Calandrinia species with relatively large flowers.4 It now seems, alas, that neither of the names Calandrinia and

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parakeelya are likely to endure. Specialists of the Portulacaceae, both in the Americas and Australia, agree that true Calandrinia is found only in the Americas while the species in Australia belong to a distinct genus. The story then becomes complicated, and doubtless tedious to non-botanists, but it does illustrate three important points. One is that accurate nomenclature is of global interest: it is the reverse of parochial. The second is that there is an international system for checking and rechecking every move.The third is that the botanical riches of Australia are still far from fully understood or explored. New species continue to be discovered, and new relationships teased out. The story also illustrates some of the unconsidered costs of war. In 1900 two German botanists, Ludvig Diels and G. A. Pritzel, made extensive collections in the south-west of Western Australia. In 1919, Diels published a new species of saltbush, Atriplex chamaecladum, based on a collection he had made from near Warrungup in the Stirling Range. In 1934, this species was made the type of a new genus Rumicastrum by the German botanist R. Ulbrich, who provided an illustration of the plant. Ulbrich considered that it was closely related to Atriplex. During World War II, the Berlin Herbarium was almost totally destroyed and with it the type specimen of Rumicastrum. The species Rumicastrum chamaecladum had not been re-collected until 1983, when Greg Keighery brought a specimen that he had collected in the Stirling Range to Paul Wilson, a taxonomist with the Western Australian Herbarium.Wilson was involved in preparing a treatment of the family Chenopodiaceae for the Flora of Australia. The plant matched the illustration and most of the original description of Rumicastrum. However, on examining the minute flowers I discovered that it was not a Chenopodiaceae at all but a member of the Portulacaceae, so I sent a portion to Prof. Roger Carolin of Sydney University, an authority on the family, and my wife Margaret drew some further material collected by Alex George from the same area. Roger Carolin recognised the plant as being a member of the genus Calandrinia in the broad sense, the Australian species of which he considered to belong to a distinct genus. He had intended to name the genus, Parakeelya.5

Thus the name Rumicastrum is correct for the Australian Calandrinia species, although the formal process of name change is not yet completed.

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Although it cannot be used formally,‘parakeelya’ will happily continue as a popular name, and so it should, since it has a place in cultural history.Two anthropologists, E. C. Stirling in 1896, and H. Basedow in 1925, have reported that its seeds ‘were ground, mixed with water and eaten raw or cooked into cakes before consumption’ (Stirling) and ‘The leaves were also eaten raw and helped to quench thirst in central Australia’ (Basedow).6 You would need to be very thirsty, and very hungry to collect enough of the tiny seeds to bake a cake.

Da mpier and his reputation Dampier did not report any Aboriginal cake-making. He gave the people he met a bad press, in a much-quoted passage in which he compared them unfavourably with the Hottentots of south-western Africa: The inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the world.The Hodmadods of Monomatapa, though a nasty People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses and skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich Eggs, &c. as the Hodmadods have: And setting aside their Humane Shape, they differ but little from Brutes.7

He was no more impressed by his second encounter in 1699: These New-Hollanders were probably the same sort of People as those I met with on this Coast in My Voyage round the World … these were much the same blinking Creatures (here being also an abundance of the same kind of Flesh-flies teizing them) and with the same black Skins, and Hair frizled, tall and thin, etc. as those were.8

His manuscript account in 1688, however, was more objective: ‘They are people of good stature but very thin and leane I judge for want of food’, but they were at liberty to move around freely ‘for they are not troubled with household goods nor cloaths’.9 His travel books were written to sell and, like so many travel writers, he probably adapted his tale to the tastes of the market. It might also be noted that Dampier had actually encountered the San people (Hottentots) on the south-west coast of southern Africa on one of his many voyages, so at least he was relying on observation, not

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hearsay; and further in his defence, he didn’t fire at or kill anyone, unlike many of his later countrymen. In 1863, after the North West began to be settled (invaded), a station manager, Nairn, gives a very different picture: ‘Saw several natives on the beach, great strapping fellows about 5ft 10in to 6ft 3in, very noisy, but friendly’.10 This description is borne out by early photographs, in which station hands are usually muscular, with good carriage and an athletic and confident bearing. Nairn may well have been appraising them as a potential workforce, which they became in due course, just as the vegetation was assessed for its utility as forage for imported stock. Dampier’s appreciation of the flora of the western third of Australia was not to be repeated for over a hundred years. There is a gap from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. The next British botanist and collector was Allan Cunningham, who sailed with Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid in 1817. Banks and his men were botanising on the east coast from the 1770s, but Dampier stands alone in his time. The first significant European encounter with our flora was his and only his. The price that his pioneer work has paid is that it came too early in the struggle to establish a stable and scientifically acceptable botanical nomenclature. Dampier has had to share this chapter with part of the continuing story of that struggle, which may at last attain stability through the work of molecular phylogenetics.

Sturt pea (Clianthus formosus), watercolour by Percy Stanway Tapp, c.1903; first collected by Dampier in 1699

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t w o

t h e

b o a b

can be read as a dictionary with a changing vocabulary, some words in, some out. The rate of change has been variable, the additions, over time, coming in trickles or floods. The sources of the vocabulary have also varied: the names of the plants put in the antipodean ground can be found in letters, journals, above all in nursery catalogues. The nurseries have always been the midwives, often more. At first the vocabularies of plant names were those that the newcomers brought with them: ‘the rose’ and ‘the violet’, for example, came early and stayed, although the entry for ‘rose’ can then be expanded into a host of sub-entries ranging from ‘Cecil Brunner’ to ‘Peace’ and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a cultural history in itself. Both words were also applied to indigenous plants, an attempt to accommodate a strange environment to an old culture: Dampier’s species of Diplolaena (D. grandiflora) is sometimes called the native rose, although it little resembles a rose. More conveniently, the ‘native violets’ are indeed violets, and Viola hederacea is a common garden plant. The introduction of indigenous plants into the gardening vocabulary has had a complex history. Some came early, and from one end of the continent to the other: the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), the sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) from South Australia, the Geraldton wax (Chamelaucium uncinatum) and other ‘waxplants’ from south-western Western Australia. What is interesting is the way in which they became normalised as part of a Euro-Australian gardening vocabulary, while most other indigenous plants would have been seen as literally exotic (i.e. foreign and alien to this vocabulary). As more and more indigenous plants were introduced into the vocabulary, Australian gardeners turned from the ‘normalising’ process and began to become bilingual, or perhaps bipolar. The Society for Growing Australian Plants movement has itself had many elements and undergone continuous change; at least one such element has been the purist crusade to grow only Australian plants. This is still a force in the land, but when inspected more closely, ‘Australian’ turns out to have a restricted meaning. ‘Australian’ plants meant, for the most part, heathland plants from areas like The Grampians, the plateaux of the Hawkesbury Sandstone, and much of south-western Western Australia. These were the plants that were on a scale to suit domestic gardens, and that ‘put on a show’, i.e. they tended to be colourful in flower (a requirement that, be it noted, still carries back H o rt i c u lt u r a l A u s t r a l i a

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to the imported gardening cultural values). To these were added the trees and shrubs that had already come within the pale. New voices and names appear, for example in John Brock’s Top End Native Plants (1988), not written for the gardening trade but a stimulus to it, so that many new plants are ‘introduced’ to horticulture, and not all of them restricted to the Northern Territory. The word ‘introduction’ continues the paradox that for many years it has been the indigenous plants that needed ‘introduction’. Now bilingualism spreads, and the two seemingly disjunct vocabularies merge. A good way of testing this is to see how ‘native plants’ are no longer corralled off into specialist native plants nurseries, although these still exist, and play a useful role. Increasingly, nearly all nurseries have a substantial collection of native plants, sometimes not even segregated as such but simply part of the general nursery trade. As more native plants are cultivated, motives and justifications also change, from aggressively nationalistic to the practical: a growing consciousness of water limitations and of the consequences of the prodigal use of fertilisers. Much of this history is explored more fully elsewhere in this book. Change and new directions will continue, and some may

Th e

Boab

Esperance wax (Chamaelaucium axillare) photo: Colin Totterdell

45

surprise.This chapter looks at a few recent or impending introductions to horticulture, beginning with the boab (Adansonia gregorii). Chapter 4 tells the story of the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) and the other southern conifers. In doing so, the discussion is expanded from ‘Australian’ to ‘Gondwanan’, which is a more suitable context.

The

gout y-stemmed

tree

On 13 October 1837, George Grey, Captain of the 83rd Regiment and later to be Governor of South Australia, set out for northwestern Australia on a commission of exploration. He arrived at Hanover Bay in the Kimberley of ‘this vast insular continent’ on 29 November with high hopes: The shore for which we pulled was not more than half a mile distant, and we soon gained the edge of a sandy beach, on which I sprang, eagerly followed by the rest; every eye beaming with delight and hope …

The hopes were soon dashed: I could not more accurately describe the hills, than by saying, that they appeared to be the ruins of hills; composed as they were of huge blocks of red sandstone, confusedly piled together in loose disorder, and so overgrown with spinifex…The trees were small, and their foliage so scant and slight, that they afforded no shelter whatever from the burning rays of the sun.

They persisted in their mission, however, and recorded many wonders, including this: There was a very remarkable feature in the appearance of this part of the country, caused by the number of gouty stemmed trees, (a species of Capparis?). These trees grow to a considerable height, and had the appearance of suffering from some disease, but, from the circumstance of all of them being affected in the same way, this was undoubtedly their natural state. I measured one of the largest I here saw, and found that at eighteen inches above the ground, its circumference was about twenty-eight feet six inches. The foliage of this tree was slight, but graceful, and it was loaded with a fruit of an elliptical form, as large as a cocoa nut.This

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The ‘horizontal fruit was enclosed in a rind, closely resembling that of the almond, and inside the rind was a shell containing a soft white pulp, in waterfall’, where the tidal range, already which were placed a species of almond, very palatable to the taste, high, is amplified and arranged in this pulp much in the manner in which the seeds when it is are arranged in a pomegranate. Upon the bark of these trees being constrained by a cut, they yielded in small quantities a nutritious white gum, which narrow channel both in taste and appearance resembled maccaroni; and upon this through a bark being soaked in hot water, an agreeable mucilaginous drink Kimberley gorge was produced. photo: George Seddon This tree is, from this combination of useful qualities, a vegetable production of no slight value, and probably comes near the cocoa-nut tree in value: its worth is well known to the natives, for its vicinity is one of their favourite haunts. Around nearly all of them I have found marks of their fires, and on many of these trees were successive rows of notches, formed in this manner

/////////////// /////////////// //////// All but the last row being invariably scratched out [across].These notches were evidently of different ages, and I imagine must indicate the number of nuts taken each year from the tree.1

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Phillip Parker King had already observed this tree, and had reported in like manner: Mr. Cunningham was fortunate in finding the fruit of the tree that was first seen by us at Cambridge Gulf, and had for some time puzzled us by its immense size and peculiar appearance.… It proved to be a tree of the Nat. Order Capparides, and was thought to be a Capparis.

King also remarks on the gouty stem and the huge girth, and then concludes that ‘It has some resemblance to the Adansonia, figured in the account of Captain Tuckey’s expedition to the Congo’.2 Allan Cunningham, the accompanying botanist, gives a more detailed account: Within an area on this extensive coast, not exceeding four degrees of longitude, on the parallel of 15° south, a tree of very remarkable growth and habit, has been traced, having all the external form and bulk of Adansonia of the western shores of Africa. At the respective time of visiting those parts of the North-west coast, this previous tree had cast its foliage of the preceding year, which is of quinary insertion, but it bore ripe fruit, which is a large, unilocular pedicellated capsule … containing many seeds enveloped in a dry pithy substance. Its flowers, however, have never been discovered, but from the characters of the fruit, it was (upon discovery) referred to this natural family [sc. Capparides].3

Cunningham therefore named it Capparis gibbosa, but had he come across it in flower, he would have assigned it, correctly, to the genus Adansonia. He was especially struck by its shape and size, and on the second visit to the Kimberley he ‘measured the stem of one very remarkable tree of this species, and found it twentyeight feet in circumference, and scarcely twentyfive feet high’.4 Many years later, Jim Willis was to echo Cunningham’s astonishment, describing the genus as containing some of ‘the most intriguing vegetable productions on the globe’.5

The

rel atives

I spent a month in Madagascar in 2003, and endured occasional discomfort of a different kind, waiting for hours in an airport for

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planes that were inexplicably delayed, and bumping over memorably bad roads, more pothole than road – but we were in luxury compared with Grey, King and Cunningham, and we saw not one but six different species of the gouty-stemmed trees. The journey prompted many questions about my own country. Australia and Madagascar have elements in common, first in being two of the world’s largest islands. Like the print of a giant left foot, Madagascar lies some 600 kilometres off the east coast of Africa, separated from it by the Mozambique Channel. At 590 000 square kilometres it is the fourth largest of the big islands: the French called it La grande île. Leaving aside Greenland and Antarctica, which are uniformly bleak, and Borneo, much of which is uniformly hot and wet, Madagascar and Australia, the island-continent, are both the largest and by far the most diverse of the large islands, which intensifies their evolutionary interest. They are also both islands of the Indian Ocean, which extends around three-quarters of Australia’s coastline, from Melville Island in the north to Cape Howe in the south-east, as a good atlas will attest.6 Our coastline fronting the South Pacific is relatively limited, despite the occasional rhetoric of politicians with a limited grasp of geography. If you superimpose Madagascar over the western coast of Australia, other similarities emerge. Both begin at 12°S (near Darwin on our coast). Madagascar then extends 1500 kilometres to 26°S, which takes it to Denham on Shark Bay, four degrees south of the Tropic of Capricorn. The east–west dimensions are very different, however. Madagascar is skinny, only 600 kilometres at its widest point, which takes it to Lake Disappointment and the Tanami Desert. It is thus one-quarter of the width of our continent. Nevertheless, if you give it a good lateral stretch, the similarities re-emerge: a high rainfall east coast, with a narrow coastal plain backed by a steep dividing range, once covered in tropical and subtropical rainforest. There is then an extensive high plateau not unlike the New England Tableland, consisting of Pre-Cambrian granite and granite-gneiss. This then drops down gently to the younger sedimentary rocks on the west coast – which has a monsoonal climate in the north, like the Kimberley, and in the south, arid to sub-arid like Shark Bay. Islands are laboratories for the study of evolutionary patterns. Cut off from the great continental landmasses, they follow their own pathways, making use of what comes to hand through chance events. Both Madagascar and Australia are highly distinctive in both flora

Th e

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49

and fauna. What they share and what they fail to share, given similar physical environments, are equally interesting. One of the shared elements is the genus Adansonia. The popular name in Africa and Madagascar has long been the baobab, shortened to ‘boab’ in the Kimberley, showing our preference for economy irrespective of etymology. According to David Baum, who has contributed an outstanding monograph on the genus, the name has a very long history in Africa, where the single species, Adansonia digitata, was described along with its water storage capacity by the great fourteenth-century Arab traveller Ibn Batuta, and by several European explorers. In 1592, Alpino described the fruits, ‘using the

Adansonia digitata from Zimbabwe in southern Africa photo: George Seddon

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name Bahobab, probably derived from the Arabic “buhiba”, meaning many seeded fruit’.7 The first detailed botanical description and illustrations were made by the Frenchman Michel Adanson in Senegal, and he formally named the genus as Baobab, which Linnaeus in 1753 and 1759 changed to Adansonia to honour his predecessor. The baobabs or boabs are the world’s biggest succulents, plants capable of considerable water storage in their trunks. Despite having the most spectacular of the succulents, Australia, two-thirds of which is sub-arid, is nevertheless almost destitute of succulents other than the halophytes.The latter are the plants of the salt marshes, of which members of the genera Halosarcia and Sarcocornia are the most common, covering huge areas of saltmarsh in Australia, both estuarine and inland. Apart from the halophytes, however, we are poor in succulents compared with Madagascar, southern Africa and the western parts of both North and South America.The reasons for this are addressed later, but first, the baobabs.

The

baobab

species

There are six species of baobab in Madagascar, and one in each of Africa and Australia. The baobabs of Madagascar extend along the whole length of western Madagascar, from Diego Suarez (Antsisirana) in the extreme north almost to Fort Dauphin (Tolagnaro) in the south. Some individual species are quite restricted in distribution: Adansonia suarezensis and A. perrieri to the northern tip and A. grandidieri to the mid-west around Morondava; A. rubrostipa to the southern two-thirds, and A. madagascariensis to the northern third. Only Adansonia za extends from the far north to the extreme south. None of them grows very far from the west coast. Although all of the species require well-drained soils and a mild winter, this range nevertheless embraces a considerable variety of environments – of soils, temperature and rainfall (the latter is usually low, but can range from less than 300 millimetres to more than 800 millimetres a year). In other words, the genus shows a fair degree of tolerance or adaptability, a fact to bear in mind when we come to consider the Australian species and its restricted distribution. Adaptability is shown even more strongly by the solitary African species, A. digitata, which is indigenous to semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa on both the west and the east coasts, from Angola and

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Baobabs (Adansonia grandidieri) near Morondava on the dry mid-west coast of Madagascar photo: George Seddon

south-east Africa to the Sudan and Ethiopia in the north. It has also been spread in Africa by human agency and has been widely planted elsewhere, from the Caribbean and Florida to Sri Lanka and even in Madagascar (coals to Newcastle). Adansonia gregorii, the Australian species, is indigenous only to the Kimberley and the Victoria River basin at the western edge of the Northern Territory, which is its eastern boundary. Its western limit is ‘roughly at the boundary between the shires of Broome and Derby, 100 km east of Broome’.8 Like the other members of the genus, however, it can tolerate a fairly wide range of conditions, provided it has good drainage and is not subject to extreme cold or hard frost. It is being grown in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, and flourishes in both the Zoological Gardens and Kings Park Botanic Gardens in Perth, although it needs some summer water, coming as it does from

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a monsoonal climate with a dry winter and summer rain. This is, of course, a garden situation where really good drainage is provided to cope with the winter rains of Perth. The semi-mature specimens in Kings Park were transplanted from the Lake Argyle area in the Kimberley from land that was to be mined for diamonds. Others, propagated from seed, needed protection for the first few years, and their growth rates have been low, but they were healthy specimens when planted out in the Park.Whether or not they remain in health is uncertain, as all the small specimens that were planted have disappeared, presumably stolen.They may now be slowly taking over suburban Perth.

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A boab (Adansonia gregorii ) at Bell Gorge in the Kimberley photo: Colin Totterdell

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The boabs along the scarp at Kings Park in Perth; they were transported from Argyle, south of the Ord River in the Kimberley photo: Grady Brand

That the boabs can be grown successfully in Perth does not mean that they should be, other than in the Botanic Gardens, which is fulfilling its charter. Here they are a curiosity, very striking in their site on the edge of the southern scarp of Mt Eliza, and thus seen in silhouette against the Swan River at Melville Water. Of course, some private gardeners like both curiosities and challenges, and it would be easier to put a case for its horticultural and design use in southern Australia than it is to defend the common planting of silver birches in Melbourne, or palm trees from the wet tropics needing copious summer water in Perth. To the north of Perth, the case is different: the boab would form a magnificent street tree, as does A. grandidieri near Morondava, and it should flourish as far south as Carnarvon without special attention. It certainly grows well in Broome, where all the boabs have been planted, although Broome is not far outside the natural range of the species. There is a well-known specimen near the old Broome police-station, bearing a plaque indicating that it was planted in 1897. Another well-known boab in the Kimberley, a little south of Derby, has been hollowed out, and was used for a time as a prison; it is now a bizarre tourist attraction.

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The

vagaries

of

taxonomy

Stories attach to the old Broome tree. One is that the German-Swiss botanist Hochreutiner visited Broome in 1905, and described this specimen (in 1908) as a new species, Adansonia stanburyana. The tree would have been about eight years old at the time. It is now a typical specimen of A. gregorii, and the distinguishing features on which Hochreutiner relied would seem to have been juvenile traits.9 There is now considered to be only the one species in Australia, long known as A. gregorii. It belongs to the family Bombacaceae, and grows to about 15 metres high, with thick branches that spring only from the top of the trunk. The swollen trunk can be as much as 20 metres in circumference (most other species are taller, but ours is the goutiest!). It flowers between October and December, with large, fragrant cream flowers with fleshy petals, followed by large, furry gourd-like fruits. Aboriginals eat the pith of the branches, and a drink is made of the sap.10 As noted above, Allan Cunningham, the botanist on His Britannic Majesty’s Cutter Mermaid under Captain Phillip Parker King, came across this tree in the early nineteenth century. He assigned it to the genus Capparis, and so named it (Capparis gibbosa A. Cunn.), but mentioned that it had a superficial resemblance to the baobabs in Africa.11 Both Grey in 1841 and John Lort Stokes in 1846 added further information, but it was Ferdinand Mueller, on the Gregory Expedition to the Victoria River Basin in the Northern Territory, who formally recognised its taxonomic affinity with the African baobab. He thus described it as Adansonia gregorii.12 The priority of Cunningham’s earlier name was recognised in 1985, and formally published by Baum in 1995, from whose work the above account is drawn. However, the naming does not end there.The species has been known as A. gregorii for over a century, and Cunningham’s name was never formally published. There is provision in the code for the conservation of well-established names in such circumstances, and an application was made to do so in 1999 by Paul Wilson and Gordon Guymer, of the Western Australian and the Queensland Herbaria, respectively. The application is likely to succeed, but the formalities are not yet complete, so the formal name is in limbo. If the name is in limbo, the trees are not.The tree marked by the crew of King’s expedition in 1820 and named by Cunningham is still

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Careening Bay in the Kimberley, where Phillip Parker King beached the Mermaid for muchneeded repairs photo: George Seddon

Phillip Parker King’s Mermaid tree, a boab, at Careening Bay photo: George Seddon

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standing, as are the trees marked by Gregory’s expedition near the Victoria River in 1855–56. Members of this genus can be very longlived, and some of the specimens in Madagascar are said to be up to five hundred years old.

Pollination

and

dispersal

The ways in which evolution can make use of the resources to hand is well illustrated by the pollination and seed dispersal of the baobabs. The African species, A. digitata, has long been known to be pollinated by bats, although other visitors, such as bush-babies, may also contribute. Because this has been so well studied, it was assumed for some years to apply to the other species. Recent work has now established that although A. grandidieri and A. suarezensis are visited by moths, bees and the sunbird, they are both exclusively pollinated by mammals; A. suarezensis by fruit bats, but A. grandidieri by a nocturnal lemur, Phaner furcifer (it is possible that both are pollinated by both bats and lemurs, but this has not yet been demonstrated). By contrast, the other five baobabs are pollinated primarily by long-tongued hawkmoths, with some help from lemurs in Madagascar and small honey-eating marsupials in Australia. Dispersal is often by mammals, in Africa, especially by elephants, baboons and our own species, since the fruit is both tasty and nutritious. The Australian boab is also dispersed by terrestrial mammals, in this case by kangaroos, wallabies and by our own species, either involuntarily, by passing of the seeds through the gut, or through conscious planting (e.g. around Broome). Madagascar tells a different story: it appears probable that the baobabs were once dispersed by creatures that have disappeared in the fairly recent past, especially the Archaeolemur, a lemur about the size of a baboon, and perhaps also by the elephant bird, Aepyornis. Both have become extinct since Madagascar was first colonised from the east around 1500–2000 years ago. The baobabs of Madagascar are no longer distributed by the remaining smaller lemurs or by birds, and water now seems to offer the only available means of dispersal. This restricts their possible distribution. Many of the impressive baobabs of Madagascar, like Adansonia grandidieri around Morondava, are old, and there is little sign of regeneration. They are, in effect, living fossils, often now surrounded by degraded

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shrubland, and some stand in paddy fields, where their water storage capacities are grotesquely irrelevant. There are other problems of survival in Madagascar: for example, the long-term survival of Adansonia perrieri is threatened through seed-predation by introduced rats.

Long

distance

dispersal

It has long been thought that since the baobab is limited in its distribution to Africa, Madagascar and Australia, it must be a Gondwanan plant. This is true in the broad sense, that it is found only in lands that were once a part of that super continent, but it is improbable if it is to mean that the distribution precedes the breakup of Gondwana, for at least three reasons. Around 160 million years ago, Madagascar adjoined the south-west ‘coast’ of India on one side and the central east ‘coast ‘ of Africa, roughly centred on the present position of Dar es Salaam, some 500 kilometres north of its present position. It all lay in the tropics. India and Antarctica intervened between Madagascar and Australia, which was much further south as well as east. If the genus had already been in Australia before the break-up, it should also be present at least in India, where there are semi-arid conditions, especially in what is now Pakistan, that are similar to the present habitat in Madagascar. If Adansonia had been present in north-western Australia for 160 million years or more, one might ask why there is only the one species, when in Madagascar there are six, occupying the western coastline for 1500 kilometres, i.e. as far south as Shark Bay.The most likely explanation is that it has not had time to expand and speciate further. Finally, even 45 million years ago, in the middle Eocene, most of the coast of Western Australia still lay between 60°S and 40°S: even Darwin, today at 12°S, was then at the latitude of Bass Strait. Admittedly, Antarctica did not become really cold until the circum-Antarctic current was established in the Oligocene, with a consequent sharp drop in surface water temperature. Notwithstanding, it seems likely that the west coast was not warm enough for the boab before about 30 million years ago. David Baum assumes that it arrived through water dispersal at about that time: the large fruits are transportable by water, although to cross the Indian Ocean and survive would have been a rare event.

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Hypotheses:

an

interlude

Suppose that Nicolas Baudin or Louis de Freycinet had decided to lay claim to the Kimberley in the name of France, having already given a name to Cap Lévêque, Bonaparte Gulf and the Bonaparte Archipelago. It might thus have been a logical extension to their other possessions in the south tropics of the Indian Ocean: the volcanic island known as Bourbon was first settled by the French in the seventeenth century, later renamed Réunion, to celebrate the historic meeting in France of the two revolutionary armies, one from the north, the other from the south. Maurice (Mauritius) was also French for a time – indeed, Flinders was interned there on his way home after his incomparable charting of two-thirds of Australia’s coastline: he had no means of knowing that Britain and France were by this time at war. Madagascar was also to join France’s Indian Ocean possessions a little later, and remained so until World War II. If the Kimberley had been added to this suite of French possessions, it would presumably have been offered the choice given to Réunion: independence, or incorporation into the body of France itself as a département, with Paris as the capital. Réunion chose the latter, which has at least brought it prosperity. Suppose that the Kimberley, by contrast, had preferred independence, as did Madagascar.We might then have the République de Kimberloire, an independent country in our north, the size of France.This did not happen, but it is not inconceivable that it might have. The continent of Australia could well have been partitioned between four or five European powers, as happened in Africa and the Americas, both North and South. It is Australia that is unique, the only nation whose boundaries coincide – roughly – with the boundaries of a continent. The new Kimberley Republic might well then have asserted its uniqueness by exploiting its distinctive baobab, already the logo of our own Kimberley Tourist Commission. Suppose that it goes much further, so that the baobab is on its stamps, on its national flag and planted extensively to line the streets (as it already is in Broome). Children in primary school, a rich Creole mixture of faces, might assemble each Monday morning beside the school baobab tree to sing the baobab song beneath the national flag. The baobab would thus be iconic for the Kimberley Republic. It is probable that the Jardin Botanique de Baudin in Bonaparte, the capital, on the site of

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our Broome, would have a collection of all the species of Adansonia, six from Madagascar and A. digitata from Africa.This would showcase the biological affinities of the new republic, and perhaps also its cultural and political affiliations. Meanwhile, some 2000 kilometres south, the Swane Rivier had been occupied by the Dutch, who had reconsidered their first impression that it was desolate and of no value to them; by the early eighteenth century they saw it as a valuable watering place and anchorage on the immensely valuable route to the Spice Islands. In time, it became the Swane Rivier Republik, still primarily Dutchspeaking. Near the end of the twentieth century, some civic authorities choose, inter alia, to grow a row of baobabs along the cliff edge of their de Vlamingh Botanische Tuin (Konings Parc) in Nieuw Texel, the capital. With skilled gardening, they succeed. However, there is a strong nationalistic mood in this republic, and a number of letters appear in the local newspaper, De West, arguing that the gardens should be concentrating on the rich indigenous flora of the Swane Rivier, rather than introducing exotics from foreign countries.Then one night, the baobabs are vandalised. Not one is left standing, and the gardens are restored to racial purity.

Gardener’s

choice

None of this happened, but the fantasy has elements of truth: it underlines the fact that our unique coincidence of political and geographic boundaries is a matter of historical chance. It might well have been otherwise. If, however, nationalism is a dubious basis for the selection of plants in our parks and gardens, both public and private, then what criteria can guide us? One of the fundamental rights is that of gardeners to choose what plants to grow in their own gardens: this is one of the few areas in which individuals are free to choose their own destiny. Nevertheless, there are some constraints and responsibilities, four of which are: • In general, choose plants that will survive on the natural rainfall, with limited supplementary watering. Everyone will want exceptions, but they should remain exceptions and not become the rule.

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• Choose plants that can flourish without the addition of chemical fertilisers, which contribute to the eutrophication of natural systems. • Choose species that are not likely to become invasive, as garden escapes (a criterion that, alas, excludes many plants that meet the first two criteria with flying colours). • Choose plants that provide food and habitat for the indigenous bird population; birds provide some important maintenance functions in the environment (but note that they are not, as a rule, nationalist: any plant that provides food or shelter is welcome). There are also some more subtle responsibilities and constraints, including both the aesthetic and the utilitarian, such as the provision of shelter, food and fibre. Aesthetic criteria are harder to pin down: plants may be admired for the beauty of their flowers, their foliage, their bark, their form, and their relation to context. How does the boab meet all these criteria? It is undemanding of soils and water, but needs perfect drainage, some summer moisture, and freedom from hard frosts. The aesthetic criteria tend to agree with the horticultural ones: it would look out of place in a lush setting (and would not survive), and its strong sculptural form shows to advantage in a relatively bare context. It is effectively sky-lined in Kings Park, but a simple courtyard with sand-plastered walls might be equally appropriate. To take a quite different example, the European olive would also score well on most of these criteria, especially for the edible fruit and for the compatibility of the silver-grey foliage with the colours and strong light of much of southern Australia. It scores less well in its provision of bird habitat (in my experience, few birds eat the fruit or nest in the olive), and it has become a garden escape in some areas, notably the Adelaide Hills, where it is the worst of the ‘woody weeds’. In short, the olive is appropriate only in certain places.These points are perfectly obvious, but they are made here for two reasons. The first is that the plants from similar Mediterranean regions are often the least demanding of soil and water in comparable areas of Australia, but are also the most likely to become feral. The second is that the ‘nationality’ of a plant is not a sufficient reason for planting it in a specific location – and all locations are specific from a plant’s point of view, since it cannot get up and choose another.

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Spiny trunk of the kapok tree (Bombax ceiba), a member of the Bombacaceae like the boab, along the road to Kakadu in the Northern Territory photo: Colin Totterdell

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Despite the above, we do have some ‘national’ responsibilities. Even though it is a matter of chance that our political and geographical boundaries coincide, the fact remains that they do so.We are thus the sole curators of a continent, and are therefore responsible for its conservation. Many plants are now threatened in their natural habitat, and to them, the ‘use it or lose it’ principle applies. Others have a naturally restricted habitat, but are easy to establish in similar environments. Returning to my initial example, the boab, as well as meeting most of the listed criteria, is ‘ours’, so we are responsible for it. It could probably be grown in much of sub-arid eastern Australia lying in the tropics and subtropics, where there is summer rainfall. It would be at least as appropriate as the ubiquitous pepper tree (Schinus molle), which comes originally from Peru but was brought here during the gold rushes by miners from California. The only major disadvantage of the boab is that it is fairly slow growing, so we would be planting for the future. These words are not intended as a tract for mass planting of boabs, but as a way of exploring an idea. Nevertheless, the greater use of some of our more iconic trees in appropriate places might make us a more distinctive tourist destination, and also strengthen our sense of identity. ‘Identity’? The word and concept raise new questions, to which there are no clear answers. While gardeners in the past have been promiscuous in their choice of plant material, values are changing. Identity requires respect for the locally distinctive, and there is perhaps an emergent sense that the boab belongs where it grows naturally, with only modest extensions south. How far south? Perhaps as far as Shark Bay, the equivalent southern limit of the genus Adansonia in Madagascar. Perhaps further, as far as Perth, bearing in mind that it extends no further south in Madagascar because Madagascar extends no further south. It is at least arguable that it would have extended thus far in Western Australia had it had the time to do so (remembering both that it is a relatively late

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Flower of a Brachychiton sp., also known as the bottle tree and sometimes confused with, though unrelated to, the boab photo: Colin Totterdell

arrival on this continent, and that Australia has been much too far south and cold until the last thirty million years or so for a tree of the tropics to diversify as it has been able to do in Madagascar). In practice, the nursery trade will make the decisions, as it has already done with the Wollemi pine. After the spectacular success of the transplanted, mature boabs in Kings Park, and noting the theft of all the seedling trees grown on site, the trade may conclude that there is a market: the tree could be container grown for some years, and may well appeal to the ‘courtyard gardener’ on a small lot size, now common. It will also pander to the thirst for novelty, for ‘something different’ – so baobabble may thus be heard across the land.

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t h r e e

L e a r n i n g

of Australia can be thought about under three heads: the scientific, the practical and the aesthetic. This chapter is about the scientific and the practical. Scientific collecting and study began in the seventeenth century and blossomed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This flowering came before knowledge of genetics, and thus lacked a theoretical foundation, but it was scientific in that it was orderly and systematic, proceeding by an internationally agreed set of rules – although ‘international’ in this context of course meant ‘European’. It was a part of an imperial appropriation of the earth’s natural resources, and the plant material ended up in European herbaria, beginning with Dampier’s material in Oxford, and continuing, in my account, with George Grey, Phillip Parker King and Allan Cunningham, all of whom reported home to king and Kew (as did Banks from the east coast). Practical knowledge, the subject of this chapter, was concerned with utility: what could be eaten, what not, all the other uses of the flora, for building, for stock fodder and, later, as ecological indicators. For example, ‘jam’ country was considered good for wheat in southwestern Australia, which is to say that a species of wattle (Acacia acuminata) was found to be an indicator of soil quality.This is an area of continuing overlap, as ecological understanding (scientific) becomes a tool of better management (practical). Learning about the practical uses of our flora continues in areas such as pharmacological research, and as certain plants are found to be useful as surface indicators of ore bodies at depth, and so on.This chapter attempts only a few representative samples of learning and of failures to learn, and of the transfer of knowledge from Aboriginal Australia, and the failures to acquire such knowledge. George Grey reappears because he is unusual in bridging the gap between the scientific enterprise, reporting back to base at the other end of the world, yet also very willing to learn practical skills from those who knew the land far better than he.

Knowledge of the pl ants

Learning

the

hard

way

Willem de Vlamingh and his men landed on Rottnest off the mouth of the Swan on 30 December 1696, where they saw ‘rats nearly as big as cats’, killed several, and presumably ate them. These were the

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small marsupial quokka (Setonyx brachyurus). He later reported that ‘the coast is full of fish’, and these too would certainly have been eaten. A few days later, they landed on the mainland, and again supplemented their diet: ‘First, the men observed white green and grey birds, some of which they shot “including cockatoos, parrots with great curved beaks”’.1 There were three landing parties, who initially followed different routes, and then regrouped. At their meeting place, they directed their appetites to the flora rather than the fauna: ‘several men roasted and ate fruit of the Zamia palm (Macrozamia riedlii), which the upper surgeon of the Nyptangh (Mandrop Torst) described as tasting like Dutch broad beans, or, when ripe, like hazelnuts’. However, he recorded that within three

Macrozamia riedlii, the cycad once common around Perth and still found in remaining bushland photo: Michal Lewi

Learning

67

hours after eating the nuts, he and the others ‘began to vomit so violently that there was hardly any distinction between death and us’.2 The fruits of the Macrozamia, a cycad rather than a palm, are extremely poisonous when untreated, as the Nyoongah people were well aware; they soaked them in water for some time before roasting; and after this treatment they were highly nutritious.The early settlers at the Swan River Colony suffered extreme shortages of food in the early years, yet there is little record of their using this very abundant fruit as a foodstuff: a large and readily available fruit tasting like a Dutch broad bean or a hazelnut should have been a welcome addition to the diet.

Aboriginal l and m anagement If one of the primary senses of ‘farming’ and ‘gardening’ is the manipulation of the environment to maintain or increase food production, then it is now abundantly clear that it was practised in varying degrees and ways by the Aborigines. The use of fire as a management tool is now a much-told tale and is therefore given summary treatment here, using only a few representative quotations. In 1791, Captain George Vancouver noted in the neighbourhood of King George Sound ‘very extraordinary devastation by fire throughout the whole country … encouraging a sweeter growth of herbage’.3 In 1838, Sir Thomas Mitchell made a similar observation at the other end of the continent, in what is now the Western District of Victoria: the extensive burning by the natives, a work of considerable labour, and performed in dry warm weather, left tracts in the open forest which had become green as an emerald with the young crop of grass. These plains were thickly imprinted with the feet of kangaroos, and the work is undertaken by the natives to attract these animals to such places’.4

The costs of these practices are not so commonly quoted. For example, the Colonial Surgeon in the Swan River Colony, A. Collie, observed that repeated burning hardened clay soils, reducing their permeability to water. There are also many observations of fires that

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appeared to be out of control: ‘three large fires … too big and spreading for the inhabitants to be near them … very likely lit by them’, or ‘enormous and extensive fires all along the shore … great fires to which they had seen nothing comparable’.5 Among the most observant accounts of the management of vegetable crops are those of George Grey, later Sir George Grey. He is one of the few who profited from the Nyoongah knowledge of foodstuffs. The reader has met him already, exploring the Kimberley, but at the end of that adventure he also carried out some ‘exploring’ north of Perth in the area of the Arrowsmith River, in the company of Kaiber, a Nyoongah guide and companion. Kaiber ‘always slept at a little fire of his own’ and ‘kept a good look out during the night’. Local foods were found and eaten: ‘this evening we found the Bohn or Boh-rne, a native esculent root, and it is the most northern point at which I have met with it’. A footnote annotates it as ‘a small red root, somewhat resembling in flavour a mild onion’. It was welcome, because the party was very short of food by this time: ‘We halted at noon for about two hours, during which time I made my breakfast with Kaiber, sharing my remaining portion’, although ‘tormented by the pangs of hunger, as I had now been for many days’.6 A little later, ‘Kaiber brought in some nuts of the Zamia tree; they were dry, and therefore in a fit state to eat. I accordingly shared them amongst the party’. However, his white companions did not know what Kaiber knew and Grey had learned from him: Several of the men then straggled off to look for more, and were imprudent enough, before I found out what they were doing, to eat several of the nuts that were not sufficiently dried, the consequences of which were, that they were seized with violent fits of vomiting accompanied by vertigo, and other distressing symptoms ….7

– thus repeating the inexperience of the Vlamingh party. Further north, from the fertile lands of the Greenough Valley to the mouth of the Hutt River, Grey has several descriptions of wellmanaged yam grounds: for three and a half consecutive miles we travelled a fertile piece of land, literally perforated with the holes the natives had made to dig this root; indeed we could with difficulty walk across it on that account, whilst this tract extended east and west as far as we could see.

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He concludes that this was: the most thickly populated district of Australia that I had observed, and moreover one that had been inhabited for a long series of years, for more had been done here to secure a provision from the ground by hard manual labour than I could have believed it in the power of uncivilised man to accomplish.8

Colocasia esculenta (taro) from the East Alligator River, Kakadu; like the yam, an edible root plant photo: Colin Totterdell

The manual labour consisted in digging the ground and, in effect, removing competition from other plants (i.e. weeding) so that the yams could grow freely. They were selectively harvested, so that the crop was always renewed. In this passage, George Grey, a man for whom I have an immense admiration, is describing gardening, that form of gardening that is given to food production – in today’s suburban Australia, sometimes known as the ‘kitchen garden’. Sylvia Hallam, in a book that was itself ground-breaking at the time, gives other examples of yam grounds further south, in the Victoria Plains north of Toodyay, and in the Gingin area north of Perth. She concludes: Such intensive and laborious Aboriginal exploitation of plant products includes one of the notions implicit in our European use of the word ‘farming’; the notion of hard work. It involves, secondly, territorial confinement; and thirdly, conservation and husbanding, rather than depletion of a product. If the effect of this were to extend the product outside its original range, as well as rendering it more abundant within that range, Aboriginal exploitation would have included also the fourth element implied by ‘farming’ or ‘cultivation’.9

Failing

to

learn

There must have been a great deal of unacknowledged learning from Aboriginal contact; Grey is unusual in making it explicit, and giving credit where it is due. The failure to learn is much more commonly recorded, and there are some spectacular examples. Burke and Wills died of starvation in a natural open-air restaurant. Coopers Creek is one of the most food-rich areas in central Australia. I know this from

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direct experience, having canoed down it from southern Queensland to the Coongie Lakes some years ago. The bird life is prolific, with great flocks of corellas, finches, plump pigeons, ducks and other waterbirds.There are fish, shellfish and crustaceans in the deep pools, edible gum from the river redgums, tubers and berries, including nardoo.We experimented in moderation, wary of tubers and berries, and also of the shellfish, as there is probably some pollution today. Kangaroos and wallabies (and cattle, nowadays) come in to drink, but we carried neither guns nor boomerangs and throwing sticks. We tried the nardoo, the sporocarps of Marsilea, but found that it took a lot of sporocarps to make one very small ‘cake’, and we could see why this was ‘women’s work’. Still, the food was there; we were well provisioned and had no plans to live off the land, but we did catch and eat fish. The reluctance of the English to learn from the indigenes in lands other than Australia is also on record. One example given already is that of Dampier, who remarked that in the Caribbean, the Spaniards had learned from the ‘Indians’ of tropical fruits, and then noted that when the Spaniards held Jamaica they established plantations of all these fruits, but ‘I never saw any improvement made by the English, who seem in that regard, little curious’. The inability to learn is impressively illustrated in Australia by another explorer, also ‘little curious’ with respect to learning from the indigenes. This story of ‘exploration’ is told at length because, although it now reads like a parody of incomprehension, it is representative of English attitudes of the day. In 1872, the government of South Australia decided that it was time to explore the country between Central Mount Stuart, a little north of Alice Springs, and the coast of Western Australia, so Egerton Warburton was appointed to lead an expedition. Peter Egerton Warburton was born in 1813 in England, entered the army in Bombay as a subaltern in 1834, and served in India for nearly twenty years, ending his army career as a deputy adjutant-general at Headquarters. He then resigned and emigrated to South Australia, where he was appointed to command the police force of the colony. On relinquishing this appointment after thirteen years, he was made commandant of the Voluntary Forces of the Colony of South Australia with the local rank of colonel. Two prominent pastoralists, the Hon. Thomas Elder MLC and Walter Hughes, footed the bill for this expedition, and Elder

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provided seventeen camels, four for riding, twelve for baggage, one spare, and two ‘Afghan’ camel drivers, Sahleh and Halleem. Egerton Warburton made his way north to Alice Springs by way of Beltana and Charlotte Waters, and the party then struck west on 15 April 1873. As well as the seventeen camels, two Afghans, the Colonel and his son Richard, there were Dennis White, who was cook, and assistant camel man, J. W. Lewis, and ‘Charley’, recorded as a ‘native lad’. Given that there were only four riding camels, it seems that Charley, Sahleh and Halleem walked across Australia, unless the camel men were able to ride with the baggage. For eight months, they struggled westward through the MacDonnell Ranges, the Gibson Desert, the southern tip of the South Esk Tablelands, the edge of the Great Sandy Desert and the eastern Pilbara. The Colonel (local rank) later gave his assessment of the country in a letter to his sponsor, the Hon. Tom (Elder): ‘I may safely say no exploring party ever endured such protracted suffering as we have done, nor did anyone ever cross, with their lives, so vast

Spinifex (Triodia) country along P. E.Warburton’s route (Kata Tjuta) photo: Colin Totterdell

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an extent of continuous bad country’. His ‘anyone’ of course excludes the Aborigines, of whom his party encountered almost daily evidence. They were not perceived as ‘anyone’. The most common entry in his diary was ‘bad scrub’; or, more extensively, ‘a flat sandy scrubby country lightly dotted here and there with clumps of casuarina or covered with the never failing spinifex was all that could be seen’. But the hills were no better: ‘the Basaltic Hills, looking very high from a distance, were there, but they were worse than useless, having no water near them’. Nor did the parallel dune country please: ‘the sand ridges here have gum trees of an inferior description growing on top of them’. A week later, ‘the country has not improved, as I had hoped’.10 On 11 December, they at last reached the Oakover, which is the main tributary of the DeGrey, and the contrast was great: ‘the bed is wide and gravelly, fringed with magnificent cajeput or paper-bark trees. How grateful is its lovely and shady refuge from the burning sun after the frightful sand-hills in which we have for so long been baked’. Their troubles, however, were far from over. Both Warburton Senior and his son Richard were seriously ill by now, and barely able to walk.They at last had plentiful water, but: Our difficulties are, to make our meat last [they were eating their camels, having dried the flesh in the sun], though, so far from doing us good, we are all afflicted with scurvy, diarrhoea, and affection of the kidneys from the use of it. We cannot catch the fish, we cannot find opossums or snakes, the birds won’t sit down by us [inconsiderate of them], and we can’t get up to go with them. We thought that we should have no difficulty in feeding ourselves on the river, but it turns out that from one cause or another we can get very little, and we are daily dropping down a peg or two.11

They sent Lewis for help 280 kilometres down the river to the Harper and Co. station on the lower DeGrey. A help party arrived with food and horses sixteen days later, on 29 December. After a five day convalescent break, they at length started down river; Egerton Warburton had to be lifted onto and off his horse for the first few days.The suffering reported in his letter to Elder was real enough. Egerton Warburton claimed to have been the first man to cross the western half of the interior of the continent. Leaving aside the probability that the journey had been made more than once by

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earlier migrants and settlers during the preceding sixty thousand years, Egerton Warburton was demonstrably not the first on the evidence of his own journal. Lewis was. He made the coast, or rather the Harper station on the DeGrey, which was not far from the river mouth, at least a week before Egerton Warburton, who was actually equal second, along with his son Richard, Sahleh, Halleem, Dennis White the cook, and ‘the native lad, Charley’. But the names alone indicate perceived priorities and rank. We learn nothing about J. W. Lewis, most probably a station rouseabout and hardened bushman. He never scores more than his initials. Colonel Peter Egerton Warburton has the full splendour of rank and euphony; two trochees followed by a pair of dactyls has the rhythm appropriate to the names of those English gentry born to command. The cook, unexpectedly, scores a first name, but then food mattered. Sahleh, Halleem and ‘Charley’ scored nothing else. Further identification is hardly necessary; in any case they are barely visible, except, of course, when needed. Warburton succeeded in his remarkable journey, and one key to his success was water – but not of his finding. His diary has this entry, after a day when they were all suffering from extreme thirst: [the party] found a native well with some water, and we soon saw another close by. This discovery caused us immense joy, for we saw the water draining in as fast as we drew it out, and we thought we had now got the key of the country and would be able to get water by sinking in any suitable flat [my italics].

In this last point he was wrong, as his editor goes on ponderously to explain in a footnote: The native wells, on the discovery of which so often hung the lives of the expedition, and owing to which they were eventually successful in crossing the continent, would hardly come up to an English reader’s preconceived notion of a well.They were little holes sunk in the sand with a slight curve, so that the water was often invisible from the surface, and being thus shielded from the burning sun, the evaporation was less, and the liquid cooler. The average depth of the wells was about five feet, though some attained a much greater magnitude. It would be easy to pass within half a dozen yards of these precious reservoirs by daylight and not perceive them, whilst

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at night their discovery was quite impossible. It is curious to speculate on the instinct that enables the degraded inhabitants of this wilderness to find the few spots where the precious element is attainable. The savage has the advantage of the European in this respect. Out of forty-nine or fifty attempts made by Colonel Warburton’s party to find water by sinking, only one was successful, although in the selection of likely spots they brought all their experience and desert-craft to bear. How often, when travelling in the dark, and perishing from thirst, they may have unconsciously passed wells, a knowledge of which would have been as new life and strength to both man and beast, it is impossible to say.12

Warburton himself did learn in time that there was indeed ‘a key to the country’, or at least to getting water. But it did not lie only with the wells; it lay in the skills of the people who knew where and how to make them. Warburton’s problem was then one of finding a way to access these skills. One attempt went like this: On the 30th … we had captured a young native woman; this was considered a great triumph of art, as the blacks all avoided us as though we had been plague-stricken. We kept her a close prisoner, intending that she should point out native wells to us; but while we were camped today the creature escaped from us by gnawing through a thick hair-rope, with which she was fastened to a tree.We were quickly on her tracks, directly we discovered our loss, but she was too much for us and got clear away.

Five days later, they tried again when they came across a native camp: Could not catch a native there, they being too quick for us; not far, however, from the camp a howling, hideous old hag was captured, and warned by the former escape, we secured the old witch by tying her thumbs behind her back and haltering her by the neck to a tree. She kept up a frightful howling all night, during which time we had to watch her by turns, or she would have got away also. I doubt if there is any way of securing these creatures if you take your eyes off them for a minute.

However, they let her go at the end of the next day because:

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she had been no use to us whatsoever, and her sex alone saved her from punishment, for under pretence of leading us to some native wells, she took us backwards and forwards over heavy sandhills, exhausting the camels as well as my stock of patience.13

She was ‘no use to us’: a potential resource that their key did not fit, which warranted her punishment, averted only by Warburton’s gallantry towards a dark member of the fair sex. The next well they came across was in the opposite direction from the one in which she had led them. The score to date: zero to the brave explorers, ten to the old hag. Warburton’s mindless assumption of superiority is a mark of the inferior; it never dawns on him that he is shutting out information that is vital to his needs, and the contrast with Grey is startling. Grey not only took it for granted that Kaiber was a friend and an equal; he learnt his language, and later was to publish a Nyoongah dictionary, a slender volume that was nevertheless a publishing success. It was first published in Perth in 1839 as Vocabulary of the Aboriginal Language of Western Australia. But this 28-page summary was followed in 1840 by a substantial volume of 140 pages, with the more accurate title, A Vocabulary of the Dialects of Southern Western Australia, published in London by T. and W. Boone. His interest in Aborigines and their languages persisted in South Australia, as evidenced in a collection of reports and letters about the Aborigines of the Moorundie area to Grey from E. J. Eyre.14 Warburton’s impercipience was, by contrast, unfailing. Another story concerns the ‘untutored native’, Charley, whom they had brought with them from South Australia. They owed their salvation to him on several occasions ‘under’ – as Warburton piously observed – ‘the guidance of the Almighty’. Charley went off on his own one desperate night and ‘for fourteen miles followed up the tracks of some blacks, though fatigued by a day of severe work, and receiving a kindly welcome from the natives, he had hurried back, unmindful of his own exhausted condition’. So the rest followed him back to the camp, arriving at 6 a.m. in the last stages of exhaustion. Warburton knew that he could not have gone on further without more food and water, so he thankfully acknowledged ‘the goodness and mercy of God in saving my life by guiding us to a place where we got both’. Actually it was Charley who did the guiding, but that confusion is nothing to the moral obliquity that follows, for at the

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camp, where he and his men and his seventeen camels made the best of the native well, there was a problem: ‘There are so many natives that they drink more of their own water than we can well spare them’. Apparently the untutored savages had no proper understanding of European priorities.15 Grey and Egerton Warburton represent the extremes: one of them eager and able to learn; the other not only incapable, but so obtuse as to endanger himself and his party, and to be wholly blind to the moral outrage of his behaviour.

Learning

difficulties

When problems arise in a new environment, it is both natural and sensible to turn to remedies from the old. New experiences are assimilated by filing them under known categories, as is strikingly apparent in the naming of plants and animals. The ‘native cat’ (Dasyurus) is not a cat, but a marsupial; the ‘native rose’ (Diplolaena angustifolia) is not a rose, nor much like one, and remote botanically. These names mislead by minimising real differences, but they are not so serious as the occasions when analogical thinking turns out to be both irrelevant and costly. When stock were poisoned in the Swan River Colony, the plants that might have caused it were tested systematically, but the last to be tested were from the pea family, to which the culprits (Gastrolobium and Oxylobium) belonged. The legumes in Europe have few poisonous members, and the clovers, lupins and medics are among the most desirable pasture components. ‘Leguminous plants are particularly suited for the food of animals and the human race’ said Ludwig Preiss, a distinguished German botanist who was visiting Western Australia at the time of the poisoning outbreak. ‘To prove his point, Preiss drank a wineglass of diluted fluid extracted from the leaves of York Road Poison [Gompholobium calycinum]’. Suffering no ill effects, he recommended the plant to stockholders as ‘the very best thing they could cultivate as artificial food for stock’.16 Not only was the pea family well thought-of; many species of Gompholobium and Oxylobium were in fact palatable to stock, despite being highly toxic – they lacked the acrid taste and fetid smell of most English poisonous plants, which are either cyanogenetic or alkaloidal. The toxic agent in Gompholobium and Oxylobium is monofluoracetic acid;

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its presence in nature was not demonstrated effectively until 1943, but it is very potent, and went on to be used as the rabbit poison known as ‘1080’.

Using

the

pl ants

The early uses of plants around Sydney town were driven by necessity. Some historians have taken the view that settlement was a process of wanton destruction. Leading the charge, W. K. Hancock said in Australia (1930) that ‘the invaders hated trees’. In The Colonial Earth (2000), Tim Bonyhady shows that there was always a contrary view, and that conservation concerns are far from new: The protection of the continent’s native flora and fauna, pollution of its rivers, degradation of its pastoral lands, planning and improvement of its cities, preservation of beauty spots, retention of public reserves and access to the foreshore were all major issues in the colonial era.17

The national capital setting standards; land clearing in Canberra photo: Colin Totterdell

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However, Bonyhady also shows that attitudes to the environment have always tended to divide on class lines. A telling example is that of the proposal by the Sydney Harbour Collieries Company to acquire the foreshore from Cremorne to Mosman, in the comfortably middle-class North Shore. Public outcry defeated this proposal, but the outcome was that it shifted operations to workingclass Balmain. He also shows that enlightened conservation legislation was often ineffective, beginning with the inability of Governors Phillip and Hunter to police the prohibition against the polluting of the Tank Stream. Thus Bonyhady concludes that ‘The history traversed in this book … suggests that the environmental aesthetic is as deeply embedded in the culture as is resistance to putting environmental ideals into practice’.18 Practicalities, need, and the acquisition of adaptive skills were, nevertheless, dominant in the early years. ‘The first instruments to be used in investigating the flora around Port Jackson were the hoe, the axe and the pit-saw’. Trees had to be cut to clear the ground for a settlement, for planting food crops and for use as firewood and construction. The timber proved often to be gnarled, rotten at the core and depressingly hard.The surgeon, John White, records that the tools ‘were worn out by the hardness of the timber’, while John Hunter noted that the timber would not ‘swim’, i.e. was not suitable for boat building, although it was not long before boats were being made of the same timbers once properly seasoned.19 A similar story was later to be told at the other side of the continent about Swan River mahogany (Eucalyptus marginata, or jarrah), a magnificent timber that is resistant to termites and teredo (marine borers). It was exported almost from the earliest days from a colony acutely in need of income, loaded at Masons Landing on the Canning, and from Rockingham. The first shipment to arrive at Southhampton was unloaded according to custom: the logs were dropped over the side.They sank, as expected, but they did not then float to the surface, as was customary. Wood floats, and this ‘was contrary to nature’, i.e. to all previous experience. Jarrah that is not fully seasoned has a specific gravity of 1.1, so these logs, duly recorded in the charts, lay on the bottom of the harbour for one hundred years. During World War II, when timber of all kinds was in short supply, an inspection was made of a sample log, which was found to be unblemished apart from some surface encrustation, so the whole consignment was raised and put to good use. Jarrah is one

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of the most durable of all timbers, and much of central London is to this day paved with jarrah blocks, although now hidden by layers of bituminous resurfacing. Learning at Port Jackson was sometimes quick, as it had to be in a settlement that was so isolated and chronically under-provisioned. Before long, the various species of casuarina were pressed into service; its fruiting cones were thought to have some resemblance to English acorns, so it was called ‘she-oak’. Huts were soon being built with uprights of she-oak or ‘pine’, presumably Callitris rhomboidea. The walls could easily be put in place with the trunks of the cabbage-tree palm (Livistona australis), which grew in abundance about the lower part of the harbour. The walls were then plastered with clay, thus making ‘a very good hovel’. She-oak was also used in boat-building, and in 1802, Governor King gave permission to Baudin and his French crew to buy such a boat to assist them in their explorations:‘this was the 45-ton schooner bearing the name of the timber principally used in her construction – the Casuarina’.20 The cabbage-palm proved to be especially useful, as the leaves were used for thatch, and also for making hats (Flinders had one in 1799).21 The pith was edible and used for pig food and for survival by escaped convicts, and the growing apex was almost a delicacy, the ‘cabbage’ of its popular name. The palm was therefore soon cut out around the settlement. Other building practices were to use wattling, the weaving of flexible twigs and split branches between the uprights, and then plastering with clay. The species commonly used were Callicoma serratifolia and those such as Acacia decurrens which also have suitably flexible stems – the practice of wattling gave the genus its common name of ‘wattle’, as every schoolchild once knew. The casuarina, which splits easily, was soon used to make roof shingles; effective and attractive but labour intensive, they were restricted to the better buildings such as the new hospital, ‘using pegs made by the female convicts’.22 They were not, however, long-lasting – there are a few remnants of such shingles in the house where we live in Fremantle, but the shingles were covered with corrugated iron about twenty years after the house was built in 1884. Rushes were also used for thatching, and they had the virtue of providing good insulation against heat and cold, and are therefore still so used in Britain and also in South Africa, both in kraal, rondavel and up-market housing for Europeans. Thatch was also

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widely used in the early days of settlement in Western Australia. As late as 1870, census figures show that of roofing material used, 66 per cent of the houses in the colony were shingled, usually with she-oak, and 33 per cent were thatched, only one per cent having slate, tile or iron roofing.Thatch was especially common in country areas, 42 per cent as compared with 8.2 for the Perth area, where 90 per cent of buildings were shingled.23 The plants used for thatching at Port Jackson were diverse, ranging from blady grass (Imperator cylindrica), the grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea hastilis) and some of the salt-tolerant rushes such as Juncus maritimus, which was cut (by convicts) at what soon became known as Rushcutters Bay, now very expensive real-estate. Thatch roofing dropped entirely out of favour in Australia, mainly because it was seen as a fire hazard. This is not true of good tight thatching, where lack of oxygen soon inhibits fire, but Australian examples did burn, probably because of inferior thatching material and poor workmanship. Ingenuity in making best use of what was to hand marked the early years. It was soon found, for example, that hollow logs had their uses, as water pipes and drainage culverts. ‘Wild celery’ (Apium australe?), ‘parsley’ (Apium tenuifolium?) and ‘spinac’ (Tetragona expansa) could be used as antiscorbutics, and were a welcome addition to the standard salt provisions.24 ‘Red gum’ was added to the pharmacopoeia, this being the kino from several of the local eucalypts such as Eucalyptus gummifera and E. resinifera and, according to the surgeon, John White, it worked without fail for ‘a great number of patients in the dysentery’.25 The sweet tea plant (Smilax glyciphylla) was discovered early and used freely in a colony where sugar was scarce, and its substitute soon also became scarce in the immediate settlement, although it is still to be found in some foreshore reserves. The native hops (Dodonea spp.) were used for brewing; the acid berry or native currant (Leptomeria acida) was employed at first as an antiscorbutic, then found useful in counteracting the alkalinity of salt meat, and for making tarts and jellies. Of all these early supplements and remedies, only a few remain in common use, especially tea-tree oil and eucalyptus oil. Their production requires distillation, and therefore a still, which was not permitted in the colony in its early years. The surgeon, D’Arcy Wentworth, made the mistake of requesting one from England without sending the essential accompanying information to the

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Secretary of State (with a copy to Sir Joseph Banks) that it was needed ‘for Distilling Essential Oils from the Native Plants’, so his application was unsuccessful.26 As it turned out, however, the prohibition against the import or construction of stills showed more wisdom than practicality. It was not long before stills were in common use, but not for the distillation of the fragrant and beneficent oils of the tea-tree and eucalyptus. Beenleigh rum is still with us, and as a plant product it was once, I suppose, a form of bush tucker where sugar cane is indigenous, but it is not our bush and not my tucker.

Gardening

in

the

suburbs

It is a far cry from the yam grounds and the pioneering days to the suburbia of today’s Australia, where most gardening is carried out for motives other than food production, but the leap raises some questions. Gardens now are for the display of taste or wealth, for pleasure, for the exercise of the right to do what one pleases on one’s own piece of land, for exercise, for fun, for delight in the beauty of growing things – even, perhaps, from spiritual longings of one kind or another, which might include the affirmation of individual or cultural identity. The latter has in fact dominated the Australian gardening scene until very recently; most gardens reject the local environment. This lengthy gloss on ‘gardening’ for reasons or motives other than food production is needed even to ask whether any of these senses is applicable to Aboriginal culture. Since both plants and animals had totemic significance in Aboriginal societies, the answer is clearly that plants could be regarded as having spiritual meanings for some cultures, indeed have done so for most pre-modern cultures. Gardening also generally carries an element of manipulation or change of the natural environment, but there are some exponents today of non-interventionist gardening, even if this seems a contradiction in terms. Robert Powell and Jane Emberson have a standard quarter-acre block in Wembley Downs, a near-coastal suburb of Perth.Their garden is very different from the neighbouring standard suburban gardens of roses and buffalo lawn. They inherited a fragment of natural bushland on Cottesloe sands with some limestone outcrops, which supports several habitats and includes a

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small sample of tuart woodland and shrubs like cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa) and native dusty miller (Spyridium globulosum). They pull out exotic weeds that come in from their neighbours and thin out some of the indigenous plants like wallaby saltbush (Threlkeldia diffusa) that grow too well in the absence of the grazing wallabies. They have also introduced some plants that in their view would once have been present, but were no longer. One such introduction was pellitory (Parietaria debilis), important to them because it is a preferred food of the very attractive yellow admiral butterfly (Vanessa itea). They therefore manipulate the environment, which is to say, garden, but their motives include the promotion of butterflies, indigenous insects, small reptiles and a range of birds. Since fallen logs and dead branches are a part of a natural system, so they are not cleared away. This example goes further than the Aboriginal yam grounds, although at the time that Sylvia Hallam was writing (1979), most white Australians would have thought that she was extending the meaning of the word ‘gardening’ to an improbable extreme. The present example goes further because the management is not for food production, at least for our own species. One might claim that the motive is ecological integrity, but that is not the whole story. Robert Powell and Jane Emberson enjoy their garden; it is to give them pleasure, the same primary motive of most suburban gardeners. The means differ, the product differs, but the motive is the same.This garden is not alone; it is a representative sample of what is now a national movement, right round the continent. The movement is strong in the sand-belt of Melbourne around Mordialloc, where there is a strong ‘grow local’ movement, as Powell has called it.27

Castle

Crag

On Sydney’s North Shore, the natural bushland is a strong presence, although its maintenance may require substantial control of invasive exotics. Its retention as a suburban setting has been valued for many years, going back at least to Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony. There is a fine account by Tim Bonyhady of Castle Crag and the battle of Mahony and Griffin to conserve it.28 Years before Castle Crag, there had been many like Georgiana Molloy, who fell in love

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with the flora around her home at Augusta in the extreme southwest of Western Australia. There can be no doubt that the attraction for her of the bush flowers was essentially aesthetic, but her practice was amateur scientific, collecting, pressing, and sending her specimens back to the scientific establishment in England, which gave the only respectability to her efforts available at the time. Marion Mahony and Burley Griffin were quite different; they were working in a suburban environment less than seven kilometres from central Sydney, surrounded by miles of the red-brick bungalows and desolate yards that were typical of much of Australian suburbia. Castle Crag was to be different.The Griffins had control of the ‘subdivision’, although the term itself is misleading, in that not a plant was to be destroyed other than the bare minimum for the foundations of the house, and boundaries were not marked in any way, so that the natural bushland was a continuous garden. They did more than conserve, however; ‘The upper areas of the estate were “almost entiredly denuded of vegetation”, having been “the happy hunting ground of all who wanted soil, firewood clothes props and the like” ’ wrote one of the residents.29 The Griffins established a nursery and replanted the area with the local flora, and they also practised an ingenious technique for repairing newly ringbarked eucalypts. Like Robert Powell and Jane Emberson, they were gardening, in a tradition they brought with them from the mid-west of the United States, where the ‘Prairie School’ had already begun a movement to ‘plant local’ and avoid alien introductions.

Local

and

alien

In a very different context, the anthropologist David Trigger has given an example of ‘gardening’ in the negative sense of wishing to maintain the vegetative status quo, resisting the introduction of ‘alien’ plants, but on grounds that are neither aesthetic nor ecological, at least as these terms are understood in European cultures. The concerns were those of disturbing the integrity and the spiritual significance of the ‘natural’ environment in northern Australia. His example comes from a novel, Plains of Promise (1997), by Alexis Wright, an Aboriginal writer. Within the first few pages, a poinciana grown from seeds brought by the first missionary, seen by him as ‘God’s celebratory

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poinciana tree’, is presented as something resented among Aboriginal residents: they ‘thought the tree should not have been allowed to grow there on their ancestral country’. As the missionary’s pleasure increases along with the development of the seed into a large and graceful plant, so too do the spiritual ancestors of the novel’s Aboriginal community grow more and more disturbed by ‘the thirsty, greedy, foreign tree intruding into the bowels of their world’. The uprising fluid carried away precious nutrients; in the middle of the night, they [spirit ancestors in the ground] wake up gasping for air, thought they were dying, raced up through the trunk into the limbs and branches, through the tiny veins of the minute leaves and into the flowers themselves. There, they invited Cousin Crow to sit along the branches and draw the cards of death.30

The poinciana (Delonix regia) is a native of the west coast of Madagascar, like most of the baobabs. The boab is a chance arrival along the Kimberley coast, of fairly recent origin. The poinciana might just as easily have arrived in the same way, and it then would be an ‘indigenous’ plant; it certainly thrives in the Kimberley, in a monsoonal setting that closely resembles its ‘natural’ home. The above passage, however, is not about either evolutionary history or logic, but about attitudes, as is amply illustrated by the history of the tamarind on the same coast.The true tamarind (Tamarindus indicus), a member of the Caesalpiniaceae, seems to have been introduced to suitable sites along the coast of the Kimberley and the Northern Territory by Maccassan traders. The fruit is palatable, and there is no evidence that it was ever resented as an alien, even though there are also two native tamarinds in northern Australia, Diploglottis australis and D. cunninghamii (Sapindaceae), of which the latter also has edible fruit.

Bush

tom ato

ka sundi

I recently gave a talk to the Department of the Environment in Perth on water and energy consumption, of key concern here as elsewhere. Age has some advantages, though few: I was able to remind them that for well over one hundred years, European people

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lived here comfortably enough without either air conditioning or garden reticulation, and that these are lessons that we will have to relearn very soon. Our current water corporation employs two ‘garden gurus’ (their term) to persuade us to confine ourselves and our gardens to those plants that can survive our summers when watering is restricted to two 20-minute periods each week. Such plants are called ‘water wise’. My idea of ‘water-wise’ plants are those that can survive our summers without any supplementary watering, once established, and there is a huge choice.The preceding week a handpicked group had come down to our 1846 cottage and garden to report back to the larger group about ways in which this could be done, which they did with skill and enthusiasm. After the talk to the department, I was rewarded not with the customary bottle of wine but with foodstuffs. The first my wife and I opened was labelled ‘Bush Tomato Kasundi’ from Margaret River. The ingredients are labelled as ‘ground akudjura bush’, along with vinegar, onion, garlic and chilli. I don’t know what ‘akudjura’ is, but the product, I assure you, is delicious. There is at least one way in which Australians have become expertly multicultural, with a keen eye both for variety and quality, and that is in their tastes in food.

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f o u r

t h e c o n i f e r s

A

Gondwanan

conte xt

Two hundred million years ago, all the world’s continents formed one supercontinent, Pangea, the Australian section of which was near the South Pole. Soon after, in the mid-Jurassic, Pangea split into northern (Laurasia) and southern (Gondwana) supercontinents: Gondwana was a name first used in this sense by the nineteenth century Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, derived from a Sanskrit reference to an ancient Indian people.The name was inspired by the Gond kingdoms, as caretakers of sites in peninsular India (the Narbada Valley) where the first of many fossils typical of the southern continents had been discovered. The Gondwanan rocks range from 350 to 150 million years in age and are replicated in seven major landmasses – India, Africa, Madagascar, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. … Geologists H. B. Medicott and W.T. Blandford, in their Manual of the Geology of India, noted the abundance of fossils, particularly of ancient seed-ferns (Glossopteris) in Carboniferous-Permian coal measures from peninsular India, and adopted the term Gondwana for the whole series of fossiliferous rocks. … Suess extended the term to the southern supercontinent. … the split of Pangea … set in train two separate evolutionary pathways for the world’s modern biota – northern and southern. The effects of this monumental continental divergence are evident today in the geographical distribution of plants, animals and microorganisms and underpin the second significant shift in scientific conceptual understanding we wish to highlight – the development of a Gondwanan understanding of the biota of southern continents and islands, especially Australia.… As the sciences of ecology, genetics, palaeontology, systematics, molecular biology, ecophysiology and conservation biology have developed, particularly over the last three decades, an exciting new understanding of Australian and other southern continental ecosystems has emerged.Almost daily, studies are published revealing new insights into how Gondwanan organisms and ecosystem/evolutionary processes differ from or are similar to those of the northern hemisphere.…This growth of knowledge underpins a new sense of Gondwanan heritage and is the primary focus of this volume.1

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The concept of Gondwana, outlined in a stimulating introductory essay in Hopper et al. (eds), Gondwanan Heritage (1996), has thus been a very useful explanatory tool, especially in helping to free us from European paradigms, in which, for example, the Ice Age looms large both in explaining current plant distribution and as a great renovator of soils, neither applicable in Australia. English models of governance have served us well, as David Malouf has illustrated recently in Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance (2003). English models of land-use have served us ill, as our better resource scientists have been pointing out for the last few decades. The concept of Gondwana helps us to look afresh. The concept, like most such interpretative schema, also has its limitations and imprecisions, although some of the supporting data are clear-cut.The Glossopteris flora of seed-ferns, of Permian age and now extinct, has been found only in India, Australia, Antarctica etc. – in the lands that were once a part of the Gondwanan supercontinent – and nowhere else. Note, however, that fossil evidence is positive, but cannot be negative; the Glossopteris ‘flora’ (i.e. an association of leaves, rare reproductive structures, anatomical fragments and palynomorphs) may yet turn up somewhere in Laurasia, although it now seems unlikely. Almost the only other clear-cut example is that of the Araucariaceae, which includes the kauri and species such as the Norfolk Island pine. The living members of the Araucariaceae are found today in Australia, some of its island neighbours such as New Zealand and New Caledonia, South America, with fossil representatives in Antarctica, all once a part of ancient Gondwana. The preceding sentence, however, conflates past and present distribution with origins, and thus includes a range of meanings of the word ‘Gondwanan’. At one extreme, there are the families that had their origin in the supercontinent, and at the other, families like the Proteaceae that have their primary distribution in the lands of Gondwanan origin or, as in the opening quotation, families that are predominantly confined to the southern hemisphere. Queries arise. Families are a taxonomic construct, as are genera and species. Actual plants can only be individuals, but no extant plant can be Gondwanan in the sense that it has persisted unchanged through the millennia. The Wollemi pine is now assigned to a genus (Wollemia) in the family Araucariaceae. Does that mean that it is Gondwanan? As an interpretation, yes – but with qualifications. Its

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fossil record is through its pollen, Dilwynites, that goes back only to the Tertiary, post-dating the Gondwanan break-up, and there is no guarantee that the plants of which Dilwynites was the pollen much resembled Wollemia nobilis. All we know for sure is that they had very similar pollen – yet the Araucariaceae are one of the least problematic of the Gondwanan families. ‘Southern hemisphere’ is also misleading. India is the prototypical land of the Gonds but, although it was once in the southern hemisphere, it certainly is not now, and it tends to drop out of discussion of Gondwanan heritage. Neither is half of Africa in the southern hemisphere, nor one-third of South America, nor have they ever been. When plant distribution is under discussion, the limits of ‘the southern hemisphere’ seem to be elastic, extending at times well north of the equator and, in the northern hemisphere, sometimes north of the Tropic of Cancer. This in part reflects the asymmetry of the global distribution of the landmasses, with the northern continents stretching to the North Pole, while only South America approaches the South Pole, with most of the ‘southern’ landmass pushing north to and beyond the equator. This asymmetry is reflected by plant distribution; the podocarps, for example, are primarily southern, but nevertheless extend to Japan. Other families like the Taxodiaceae and Cupressaceae among the conifers are more northern than southern, yet Callitris, so distinctively and uniquely Australian, belongs to the southern hemisphere, and has quite a long fossil record in Australia. King Billy pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides) is uniquely Tasmanian, but belongs to the Taxodiaceae, primarily northern. Finally, valuable though the concept of a ‘Gondwanan heritage’ undoubtedly is, it also tends to deflect attention from the uniqueness of Australia. Of the larger landmasses from the Gondwanan jigsaw, only Antarctica, Madagascar and Australia are now islands (although India was an island for much of the Mesozoic and Australia became so only when it separated from Antarctica in the Late Cretaceous). Only India and Australia have undergone major changes in latitude. Only Australia has been affected by both factors. It is for this reason that the Hooker identification, in the nineteenth century, of three major elements in the Australian flora still has explanatory value: the Antarctic, the Indomalesian and the autochthonous. His scheme precedes the Gondwanan concept, but

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in part anticipates it. Hooker’s Antarctic flora included the primarily Tasmanian and eastern mainland conifers and the Tasmanian Nothofagus, or southern beech, which extend south-east to New Zealand and South America (although some elements such as the podocarps also extend well to the north and west). The ‘autochthonous’ elements comprised the Proteaceae, Myrtaceae and Fabaceae, not necessarily originating in Australia, as the term literally implies, but having undergone massive speciation in the mid-Tertiary, and now making up so much of what is distinctively Australian. Finally, the Indomalesian elements are those that Hooker supposed to have originated further north and then migrated south into Australia’s tropical north. Leaving aside the genetic implications, ‘Indomalesian’ is a useful descriptive label for the part of our flora that now lies in the tropics and has relatives to the north, even though some of them may also have ‘autochthonous’ or Gondwanan links, given the geologic past of India itself. The history of the eucalypts, members of the Myrtaceae, illustrates some of these complexities well. According to the pollen data, the eucalypts, now so ubiquitous and so diverse in Australia, first

The deciduous southern beech (Nothofagus gunnii ) in the Tasmanian highlands photo: Colin Totterdell

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appear only in the Oligocene (45-25 million years BP) as a component of a flora still dominated by rainforest species such as Nothofagus. The Myrtaceae are primarily tropical and subtropical in distribution. Myrtus communis, the classical Greek myrtle from which the family takes its name, is widely distributed across southern Europe, but it is something of an outlier. The Myrtaceae includes some of the most valued spices, all tropical: cloves and clove oil from Syzygium aromaticum, allspice from Pimenta dioica, and oil of bay rum from P. racemosa. Eberhardt Brunig (1966) has described an unusual site in Borneo that illustrates the pathway from rainforest towards a relatively impoverished environment. The site is in a high rainfall area of tropical rainforest.The trees around had all the characteristics of such an environment: abundant epiphytes, lianes, buttress roots, ferns and mosses, a dense canopy and exuberant growth combined with the rapid decay of fallen timber. In the midst of this typical rainforest, however, he came across a different forest of trees, many belonging to the Myrtaceae, such as species of Eugenia and Tristania (which is halfway to being a gum-tree).This forest was different in that there were few big woody climbers, the canopy was uniform, and reddish colours prevailed in the upper foliage. The trunks were sometimes peeling, shedding their bark, and the ground was littered with it, like the ground around the base of, say, a sugar gum. The leaves were usually smaller than the leaves of the lush dipterocarp forests nearby. Often they were thickened and harsh, well on the way to becoming sclerophylls, hanging almost vertically, reducing water loss.There was also evidence of considerable leaf shedding under stress, and there was none of the exuberant understorey so typical of tropical rainforest. Why was this happening; what was different from the surrounding rainforest? He concluded that the difference was a response to the soil, which was a pod of fine, water-repellent sand. Elsewhere in the forest, he found several similar pods with a similar response. Despite the high annual rainfall, even in such areas there are periods of drought – not long-lived, but when there is no rain for three weeks, a tree on such meagre soils experiences water-stress. The shed bark and leaves would have some value as mulch, and since the sand was also acutely nutrient deficient, it was a way of returning nutrients to the soil. It also seemed to act as a keep-off sign to the understorey flora, inhibiting competition for scarce moisture and

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Nothofagus moorei in southern Queensland photo: Colin Totterdell

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nutrients, presumably because of elements in the chemical composition of bark and leaves. Brunig’s term ‘heidewald’, originally named in 1914 by Winkler, has been translated as ‘Heath forest’,2 but ‘heath’ suggests something less than forest.The local word is ‘kerangas’, but the formation is now recognised as widespread in other rainforests, including the Amazon, where there are pockets of nutrient-deficient soils that cannot retain water. The interest of this formation for Australians is that most Australian soils are nutrient deficient, and many have a limited capacity to retain moisture. It is easy to see from Brunig’s example how trees that are closely related to rainforest genera can develop the sclerophyllous characteristics of the eucalypts. This hypothesis has been developed independently by several Australian botanists, including N. C.W. Beadle.The beauty of Brunig’s example is that he saw it happening. His example also anticipates the next change in the eucalyptus group as their habitat became increasingly arid: littering the ground with dry bark and leaves in a dry rather than a generally moist environment invited fire. Despite their beginnings in a warm, moist environment therefore, the eucalypts in Australia proved highly adaptive to environmental change. The great radiation of the eucalypts began in the Miocene, some 17 million years ago, as Australia became increasingly arid, whereas the genus has long been extinct in South America and New Zealand – although the latter has been aggressively recolonised in recent times.3 This story has no end. Research goes on apace. Increasing refinement in analytical techniques, new field data and new fossil evidence accumulate, and much of our current knowledge of plant origins, affinities and past distribution are tentative. Hopper concludes: Put another way, historical contingency has played a significant role in determining evolutionary processes. Ecological and morphological patterns evident today are ‘not only a consequence of adaptive processes, but also influenced by phylogenetic constraints, historical effects and sorting processes’.4

So the character of the Australian flora is the outcome of many forces. Gondwanan origins played a part, but continental isolation,

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increasing aridity and various historical contingencies have also led to major modifications. Thus the conifers, the main subject of this chapter, are seen as descendants of a flora that goes back to the later Mesozoic, one that is in part, but only in part, of Gondwanan origin.

The

Araucariaceae

The best known family is the Araucariaceae, which includes three genera. The kauri (Agathis) is represented in Australia by three species, Agathis robusta, A. atropurpurea and A. microstachys, all naturally restricted to near-coastal sites in Queensland, but the genus is majestically represented by other species in places such as Borneo and New Zealand.The second genus, Araucaria, is the best known. It includes the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), planted along our coastal suburbs from Manly in the east to Cottesloe and Geraldton in the west. The bunya pine (A. bidwillii) and the hoop pine (A. cunninghamii ), also with a restricted natural distribution, are quite widely planted in parks, gardens and around many country homesteads where the rainfall permits. The third genus in this family has only one species, found recently in an almost inaccessible site in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The genus is Wollemia and the species is the Wollemi

A giant kauri (Agathis borneensis) in Borneo. photo: George Seddon

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The Father of the Forest, a giant kauri in the north of the North Island of New Zealand.The title is given first in Maori, Te Matua Ngahere, on the accompanying plaque.This tree still stands; it was regarded with veneration by the Maori, and has since been protected.This makes an interesting contrast in values with the tree in Borneo, which was assessed for its monetary value by the International Union of Foresters during a congress and field trip in the region.That tree no longer stands. photo: George Seddon

pine (Wollemia nobilis). In the last decade of the twentieth century, a few trees were found in a deep canyon. In June 1994, David Noble had abseiled with four friends into a Wollemi canyon in an area little visited; although not far from Australia’s largest city, the Wollemi is, in terms of access, remote. So began a scientific ‘whodunit’ of the first order. They found an unfamiliar tree. The initial sighting was followed by a second visit on 15 October with Wyn Jones, a naturalist of the National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales. This visit led to the dawning realisation that the strange trees – only twenty-three adults in this grove – might be ‘new to science’. Then followed the gradual process of identification of a new genus

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and species, Wollemia nobilis, in the Araucariaceae. The tree was quite new, but the family has long been familiar, with an impeccable Gondwanan pedigree. It is not a true pine, but then neither is the Norfolk Island pine, the cypress pine, nor the celery-top pine in Tasmania: they are, however, all conifers, as are the Pine family. The latter family is not represented in the indigenous flora of Australia, but we do have a good range of conifers, in the families Araucariaceae, Taxodiaceae, Cupressaceae and Podocarpaceae. More of these later. A book was to follow the discovery, filling out the details. The Wollemi Pine is a scientific thriller, as we are told by the publisher on the back cover. It might seem hard to go wrong with such a ripping yarn, one that can follow a natural sequence of successive discoveries. A writer could, however, fail through an inadequate grasp of the scientific complexities, or from lack of personal credibility. James Woodford, a young science and environment writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, achieves personal credibility by talking at length with all the major players and by visiting key sites to see plant fossils that suggest the ancestry of the Wollemi pine – including even Mt Sirius in one of Antarctica’s rare ice-free areas, other plant-fossil sites in western Tasmania and Victoria, and eventually the Wollemi site itself. Here he was blindfolded on the way in to maintain security, and on arrival had to jump from a helicopter onto a ledge. After identification came the search for more sites (only one more was found, in the same canyon); and for the evolutionary history and past distribution. Pollen analysis led to comparison with fossil pollen that had been named Dilwynites, pollen from a plant that had once been widespread in Australia and Antarctica. So at this point, the Wollemi pine became a ‘living fossil’, a survivor from the Cretaceous and the Age of the Dinosaurs. In this, it joins company with the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) and the coelacanth, both of which had been known in fossil form well before they were found living. The next chapters of the story take us in two directions. One is about seed collection and propagation; the other is about the analysis of DNA. Seed collecting turned out to be tricky, since the seedcones are at the top of the trees at the end of long and fragile branches. The use of trained monkeys was considered, inter alia, but the only successful method so far has been to dangle a National Parks and Wildlife Service ranger at the end of a cable hanging from

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a helicopter, hovering between the canyon walls. Once the seeds had been collected and germinated however, the plants thrived, and the mortality rate in the greenhouses at the Mt Annan annexe of the Sydney Botanic Gardens was almost zero, whereas for most Australian plants it is around 5 per cent. Moreover, they thrive in a range of experimental conditions. It is becoming clear that they are not especially delicate plants and that the canyon that is their only natural habitat is far from optimal; there is very limited light penetration, and the soil is both meagre and very acidic. Its key offerings would appear to be moisture at the root zone and freedom from fire. The ‘adventure phase’ is now past. Commercial propagation has taken over, and the horticultural future of Wollemia nobilis looks rosy, although it is too soon to be sure. Kew Gardens in London already has several specimens, and all the world’s major botanic gardens will want them. Not only the botanic gardens. The trees will make big money, as has the dawn redwood. The Queensland Department of Primary Industries has won the right to grow the plant commercially, and a facility has been established at Gympie. Trees will shortly be released on the market, and sales of two million pines a year have been estimated. Many will be for export. The publisher’s blurb to Woodford’s book adds that ‘soon we will all be planting Wollemi pines in our back yards’. This hyperbole is countered by John Benson of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney: ‘People who put them in their back yard will soon have no back yard’. The commercial propagators assume that the Wollemi pine is likely to thrive in a variety of environments, given a little care in establishing it. If so, it will parallel the Norfolk pine, which has a very restricted natural habitat but is a great survivor. It flourishes even along the coasts of metropolitan Perth, on very infertile soils, with high summer temperatures, prolonged drought, and searing salt-laden winds. The Queensland plum pine, Podocarpus elatus (of the family Podocarpaceae and not Araucariaceae, but both families are ‘southern conifers’), will also thrive in these conditions, remote from its natural home in rain forests. If the Wollemi pine does prove to be so easy-going, then the mystery of its restriction to small sites is increased, like the case of Ginkgo biloba, which is extraordinarily adaptable yet equally limited in its natural occurrence (if, indeed, it had any natural occurrence at all: it was found by the first European collector in the grounds of a

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temple in China). As the genetic scientist Rod Peakall remarked when he first saw the Wollemi pine in situ, it is emphatically not a species that is struggling to survive. It is flourishing. Rather, it is highly localised. Peakall has been carrying out DNA studies on the pine, and has made the most intriguing discovery of all. He has been able to discover no genetic variability between different specimens from either site, and none between sites one and site two.They were identical. This is quite exceptional among organisms that can – and do – reproduce sexually. Many organisms can reproduce asexually, making exact copies of themselves, and this is well suited to a stable environment but can be fatal in a rapidly changing one. The whole point of sex from an evolutionary point of view is to create variety that allows for change and new adaptations. Peakall speculates that the all-purpose genome of the trees may represent a pathway to survival that is an alternative to the dependence on genetic diversity as the basis for natural selection. He is also forced to the conclusion that these pines must have been extraordinarily similar genetically before environmental changes restricted them to their narrow canyon. One of the most stimulating aspects of both the Wollemi pine story and of Woodford’s book about it is that it highlights how much we still do not know about evolutionary pathways, and how uncertain and insecure is the interpretation of available evidence. If the Wollemi pine has been given privileged treatment in this chapter, that is why. The flora of the northern hemisphere is very well documented, and although discovery is the life of science, it is less likely that anything so dramatic as this one will be made there. Scientific knowledge of the Australian flora, its history and its linkages is still, in part, exploratory. The apparent adaptability of the Wollemi pine, despite its very restricted area of natural occurrence, is also striking. It is paralleled in this by several other ‘southern gymnosperms’. The explanation is presumably to be found in our evolutionary history, past climates, past rainfall and, in the case of the southern conifers, fire history, but there is much that can only be guessed. On the whole,Woodford communicates these uncertainties well, and he repeats a caution from one of his interlocutors: ‘It is a golden rule of palaeobotany to be cautious about interpreting data’, and it is therefore dangerous to assume that because pollen identical to a species alive today has been found in a fossil record, it comes from a

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similar tree and similar habitat. So the Late Cretaceous and Palaeocene plants of which Dilwynites was the pollen may have had little resemblance to Wollemia nobilis, and in any case, the pollen evidence must be interpreted with caution. Dilwynites is not highly characterised, and other conifer groups (e.g. Callitris), and even angiosperms, produce similar grains. This somewhat undercuts its promotion as a ‘living fossil’, but rightly so. It may be a window on our Gondwanan past, but we still see this past through a glass darkly.

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Ta xodiaceae

photo: Colin Totterdell

The Taxodiaceae is a small family, represented in Australia by only one genus, Athrotaxis, with two species, both restricted to moist upland slopes in western Tasmania: King Billy pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides) and the Tasmanian pencil pine (A. cupressoides). Both are rare in cultivation in Australia, with the exception of a few botanic gardens which are able to meet their preference for cool, wet, rocky, acidic soils, but they are grown horticulturally in Europe. They flourish in Ireland, for example, where cool wet, rocky, acidic soils are as plentiful

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King Billy pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides), of the yew family, restricted to the moist upland slopes of Tasmania

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as they are now scarce on the Australian mainland – a reminder that Australia is a relative newcomer to its current dry latitudes. These two species of Athrotaxis are the only representatives of the Taxodiaceae in the southern hemisphere, and in this they differ sharply from the Araucariaceae family, which is primarily southern, Redwood (Sequoia although it crosses the equator into Malaysia. The Taxodiaceae now sempervirens) in has a very restricted natural distribution, mostly in a cool temperate Humboldt State habitat and, apart from the two species in Tasmania, all in the Park, California. northern hemisphere. Many of its members are greatly prized A northern hemihorticulturally. Perhaps the most famous is the dawn redwood sphere cousin to the (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) which, like the Wollemi pine nearly sixty King Billy pine, it is years later, was known as a fossil from Oregon some years before it restricted naturally was found alive in 1941 in China. to the well-watered The Californian redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and the bigtree coast north of or Wellingtonia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are both also very San Francisco. restricted naturally, but they too are popular in gardens that are large photo: George Seddon

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enough for them. So is the swamp cypress (Taxodium distichum), from the marshy Everglades of the south-eastern United States: there is a magnificent specimen in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, where the Sequoia, Metasequoia and Sequoiadendron are also represented. It is a little surprising that many of these trees, sometimes referred to as ‘living fossils’, and so restricted in their natural occurrence, are so amenable to cultivation.The University of Western Australia has a dawn redwood, a much admired grove of Norfolk Island pines known as the Somerville Auditorium and, much less well known, a smaller grove of robust and thriving kauri. All need a little summer water, but they survive a few days every summer that reach 40°C. Microcachrys tetragona on the central plateau of Tasmania; a member of the Podocarpaceae, our largest family of conifers

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Podocarpaceae

photo: Colin Totterdell

The Podocarpaceae are the third and by far the best represented in Australia of these three conifer families, with seven genera out of a global total of eighteen, and around sixteen species, most of which belong to Podocarpus.5 The remaining six have only one or two

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species each. The celery-top pine (Phyllocladus aspleniifolius) is restricted to Tasmania, but the genus has species in New Zealand and extends north into New Guinea, Borneo and the Philippines, and has a fossil record that shows a wider distribution on mainland Australia in the past, reported from New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. The genus is so distinctive that it is considered by some botanists as constituting a family of its own, the Phyllocladaceae, with only the one genus. The other three small genera are Microcachrys, Microstrobos and Lagarostrobos. Microcachrys has only one species, M. tetragona, which is a small prostrate shrub that presses closely to rocks rather in the

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Huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) photo: Colin Totterdell

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manner of Cotoneaster horizontalis. The genus is now restricted to Tasmania, but fossil evidence from the mainland indicates that it was once more widespread. Microstrobos is also a shrub, and can be either prostrate in habit, or erect to 2.5 metres.There are two species only: one, M. niphophilus, from the Tasmanian highlands; the other, M. fitzgeraldii comes from the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. Like Microcachrys, Lagarostrobos has only one species in Australia, the Huon pine (L. franklinii) but, unlike Microcachrys, it is well represented by closely related genera in the Dacrydium group in New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Caledonia, Fiji and Chile, and it was formerly also widespread on mainland Australia, according to fossil evidence. The Huon pine was once well represented in the high rainfall areas of Tasmania, primarily on the west coast, extending from sea level to 700 metres in altitude, but its distribution has been reduced by logging and by the activities of the Tasmanian Hydroelectric Commission in drowning some of its prime habitat for water storage. Huon pine has long been valued as a timber, being easy to work, long-lasting and virtually weatherproof because of its fine grain and oil content, which has made it popular for outdoor furniture and cabinet work. There were also more mundane uses, primarily in Tasmania and southern Victoria, like the construction of wooden buckets, wash-tubs and draining boards, which seems now like making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. Huon pine (and the celery-top pine) have also been used as ornamentals, although more in Western Europe than in Australia. Podocarpus differs greatly from the previous three genera, which appear to be a relict flora, whereas Podocarpus has about one hundred species. In addition to the usual ‘Gondwanan’ sites such as southern Africa, New Zealand and South America, it also extends to Korea, China and Japan, and north from South America to Cuba and Mexico. Most of these sites are reasonably well watered, but there is a great variation in soils and climate. There are eight or nine Australian species, mostly in coastal northern New South Wales and Queensland, but there is one species in the humid south-west of Western Australia, Podocarpus drouynianus, which was originally named and described by Ferdinand Mueller. Fossil evidence indicates that the genus was once widespread, along with Nothofagus, the southern beech, extending even across the now bare wastes of the Nullarbor Plain.

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Rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) from New Zealand, and closely related to the Huon pine photo: George Seddon

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Totara (Podocarpus totara) in the Peel Forest near Canterbury, New Zealand photo: George Seddon

There is a group of species that is not well known except to Queenslanders and specialist growers: Podocarpus grayi, P. dispermus, P. spinulosus, P. ladei, P. amarus, the last two of which do not have the fleshy receptacle that characterises the first three, along with P. elatus. P. drouynianus and P. lawrencei. These and other differences have led some botanists to propose that the genus be broken up into several new genera, so that they now become Prunopitys ladei and

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The moss-encrusted trunk of Podocarpus lawrencei at Goonmirk Rocks in eastern Victoria, the only known place where this usually diminutive alpine species reaches the size of a significant tree photo: George Seddon

Sundacarpus amara. Other new generic names are Halocarpus and Afrocarpus for species like the well-known South African once known as Podocarpus falcata. Most of the podocarps are trees and a few are large trees, with a distribution that is predominantly in warm temperate to tropical climates, but there are exceptions. One is Podocarpus drouynianus, a shrubby version in the extreme south-west corner of Western Australia. Another is P. lawrencei the mountain plum pine.This species is found on exposed rocky screes in subalpine country in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. It typically grows as a low, straggling shrub to around 1.5 metres, with a similar spread, and has the gnarled and twisted stem that is found in many alpine shrubs. However, there is one locality in which it assumes a tree-form, the Goonmirk Rocks on the Errinundra Plateau in Victoria, north-east of Orbost, where trees of great age can attain a height of 10–17 metres.The Goonmirk Rocks are 1200 metres high, with a rainfall of 1190 millimetres a year and, although off the beaten track, they offer a memorable experience, worth describing for two reasons. The first is that the area comes near to providing another window on old Gondwanan ‘Australia’, with three families that first appeared in the later Mesozoic (Podocarpaceae, Proteacae,Winteracae).The second reason is that it may dispel some misconceptions about that past.

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photo: George Seddon

The forest at Goonmirk Rocks is ‘subalpine mossy thicket’, although some specimens of Podocarpus lawrencei rise well above the prevailing canopy to a maximum height of 17.5 metres. The dense low canopy is made up of Podocarpus, Pittosporum bicolor, Prostanthera lasianthos, Leucopogon maccraei and two species of Tasmannia (T. lanceolata and T. xerophila). The banksia family (Proteaceae) is well represented, with three genera (Persoonia, Lomatia, Teleopea), and since this is a high wet site with cold winters, it is a useful corrective to the popular misconception that the banksia family belongs in a dry, warm, sandy coastal environment. Also remarkable are the mountain peppers, the third group (Winteraceae) with an authentic Gondwanan lineage and an interesting history. When Francis Drake sailed around the world in 1577–80, he was accompanied at first by four other vessels; by the time he had rounded Cape Horn, however, only one remained – the Elizabeth, under Captain Winter. A storm separated them; Drake in the Golden Hind sailed on, but Winter returned to the Straits of Magellan, and set a course up the east coast and then for home. Presumably he had sickness on board, and at some point sent a boat’s

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Goonmirk Rocks in eastern Victoria

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crew ashore in search of medicinal herbs. They succeeded: he brought home with him the bitter, aromatic bark of a tree he had discovered, and for centuries afterwards Winter’s bark was highly esteemed in the medical world as a remedy for scurvy. Captain James Cook was among those who used it (after removing the acrid taste by steeping it in honey), and the shrub received its official name of Drimys winteri from the naturalist who accompanied Cook’s second voyage of discovery in 1772–75, John Reinhold Forster. The living plant, however, was not introduced to England until 1827. The Winteraceae is a small family with a long history, now distributed around the southern hemisphere, just crossing the equator into Borneo, the Philippines and Mexico. Its major distribution is in South America from Tierra del Fuego north to Colombia and Mexico; one species in Madagascar; and in New Caledonia, New Zealand, and eastern Australia from Tasmania to Cape York. The two species at Goonmirk Rocks are Tasmannia lanceolata and T. xerophila (or Drimys lanceolata and D. xerophila; some botanists reserve Tasmannia as the name for the Old World species, and use Drimys, which is Greek for acrid, for the New World species – and the Madagascan species has had a new generic name proposed!). The family is usually placed in the Order Magnoliales, which is one of the most primitive of the angiosperms. One unusual character is that the wood of Tasmannia has no vessels, so it has limited capacity for water transport, but there is an abundance of oil cells, and the glabrous leaves are intensely aromatic (hence the names mountain pepper etc.). The low-branching, often springy stems of alpine pepper (T. xerophila) make this thicket almost impenetrable, resembling the ‘horizontal scrubs’ of Adontopetalum proliferum, the bane of bushwalkers in Tasmania. Mosses and lichens cover living limbs and fallen branches at Goonmirk Rocks, and it is partly to them that the place owes its eerie, enchanted quality, enhanced by the character of the sassafras forest nearby. Sassafras (Atherosperma moschatum) forms a few almost pure stands in this area, and its conical form is reminiscent of the conifer forests of northern Europe, Russia and North America, where the form is adapted to snow-shedding. Snow is not uncommon on the Errinundra Plateau and the Central Highlands in winter, but if the conical form is indeed an adaptation to snowshedding, it developed in an earlier, cooler and wetter climate when

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the continent was in higher latitudes. Sassafras seed is dispersed by wind, as in the northern conifer forests, and in this is atypical of Australian angiosperms, which usually depend on insects, birds and small marsupials. Forests similar to the podocarp thickets at Goonmirk Rocks have been called ‘elfin forest’ and ‘cloud forest’, the most celebrated examples being on high mountains in the tropics. In the Philippines, for example, Mounts Banahao and Makiling near the University of the Philippines at Los Baños both have ‘elfin forest’ at about 2300 metres. Mount Banahao, an extinct volcano, also has a species of podocarp (Podocarpus imbricatus), and the similarity between the two sites, so far apart, is uncanny. The great age of some specimens of P. lawrencei at Goonmirk Rocks is apparent to the casual observer; they have not been dated precisely, but are estimated to be 400–600 years old.This implies that these thickets have escaped fire for a very long time. Podocarpus lawrencei is familiar to bushwalkers in the Snowy Mountains, and it is sometimes used by gardeners as a semi-prostrate shrub in rockgardens, a use to which it is well suited. The bestknown Australian species of podocarp, however, is the plum pine or she-pine (Podocarpus elatus), which is surprisingly adaptable in the garden. In our Fremantle garden, on a limestone substrate with a few centimetres of water-repellent fine white sand as topsoil, it grows rapidly, fruits prolifically and germinates readily. There are self-sown seedlings all over our garden. Hot dry summers seem not to be an inhibition, and its success suggests that its real enemy in the natural environment is fire, as with many so-called ‘rainforest’ trees. Although classified as a ‘conifer’, there is no cone; it has an edible fleshy structure before the ovule, known as the receptacle. This is the ‘plum’, in the case of P. elatus, purple-black like the ovule. It is edible, but not especially palatable, with an astringent after-taste. A relative in New Zealand was known by the Maori as the kahikatea, which also has a purple-black ovule, but in the case of the kahikatea the ‘plum’ is bright red.The kahikatea was the great tree of the lowland swamp forest of the North Island, and at the time of European colonisation it formed stands that must have borne a resemblance to the Mesozoic Gondwanan forests. The television series Walking with Dinosaurs used natural settings mostly from New Zealand and southern Chile, where there are extant forests of both Podocarpus and Nothofagus, although no longer of kahikatea.

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The New Zealand ecologist Geoff Park has given an imaginative recreation of a Gondwanan environment in Nga Uruora,The Groves of Life. Like most New Zealand trees, the kahikatea has three names. The English settlers called it white pine. Its current scientific name is Dacrycarpus dacrydioides, replacing an earlier name, Podocarpus dacrydioides. The podocarps as a family are well represented in New Zealand, including rimu, matai, miro and totara. The family is older than the flowering plants, and the New Zealand species are tall, straight, soft-wooded, easy to fell and burn, and narrow leaved, although the leaves are not reduced to needles, as with the true pines. Geoff Park builds up a powerful sense of the tree as a living presence, through his own words and those of others. Cook’s party measured one ‘that girted 19 feet 8 inches, 6 feet above the ground … I found its length from the root to the first branch to be 89 feet’.6 Mature trees may reach heights greater than 50 metres. They were very tall trees by European standards, tall by Australian ones, with boles that are massive by any standards, further pushed out by plank buttresses at the base, as is typical of swamp trees. Kahikatea are ancient survivors from a world ‘in which huge ammonites stalked the sea-floor and pterodactyls the air’ (traces of kahikatea pollen and leaves have been identified by palynologists and palaeobotanists in rocks from the Jurassic, some 160–180 million years ago. ‘Kahikatea persists from an old, swampy, worn-down, tropical archipelago, utterly different from the cool young mountainous New Zealand of today.You can find it in the hills, but it only prospers in the swamps. It would vanish without them’.7 These forests are ‘the groves of life’ of Park’s title: the small fruit (koroi) are superabundant and highly nutritious. The birds ate them and flocked for miles to do so. ‘Go into a lowland kahikatea forest in autumn when its koroi are ripening, lie under the towering trees listening to the cacophony of birds and the constant patter of the inedible bits hitting the leaves around you, and you’ll know what “the groves of life” mean’.The birds ate the koroi: the Maori ate the koroi and the birds. In 1841, in autumn, the botanist James Bidwill – for whom one of our araucaria is named – saw the ‘“enormous” kakikatea “loaded with their beautiful scarlet and black fruit” … which …“formed a great part of the food of the natives during the season” ’. He counted sixty large baskets of them in one village, although their gathering must have been hazardous.8 There is a

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Maori epigram to the point: He toa piki ràkau kahikatea, he kai na te pakiaka (the kahikatea climber is food for the roots). Now they are gone from the lowlands of the North Island, except for a few small remnants; there is pocket in the South Island in the midst of suburban Christchurch, Riccarton Bush, there because of just one family who loved it, and still a wonder and a sanctuary from its mind-numbing context. But the cold wet west coast of the South Island is their only major refuge, one in which they do not reach the grandeur of those of Hauraki. Cook and other naval men thought they would be a great naval resource for masts and spars, but they proved not to be durable, and most of the warm forests were felled for butter boxes when the refrigerated export of butter became feasible from Australia and New Zealand in the 1880s. New Zealanders have little feel for the reality of their loss, says Park.‘Mention of Nga Uruora today is like raising something from the dead’. Why? ‘One of the world’s youngest and least populated societies, we are also one of its most demanding. We like others to imagine New Zealand as pristine and untarnished. Yet many New Zealanders remain blind to the enormity of their culture’s destructiveness. For a culture faced with living sustainably in a finite world, these plains of our beginnings are a landscape of warning’.9

The

Cupressaceae

The Cupressaceae is an unusually cosmopolitan family with a worldwide distribution in habitats that range from arid to alpine. Most species are confined to the northern hemisphere, where the family ranges across almost all of North America, Europe and Asia. The family has been divided into two subfamilies. The Cupressoideae comprises all the trees, like the cypresses and junipers, which are confined to the northern hemisphere (but make very successful garden subjects in Australia).The Callitroideae incorporates nearly all the species in the southern hemisphere, including Callitris itself, which is widely distributed throughout Australia and extends to New Caledonia. The other two genera are both geographically restricted, Diselma to Tasmania and Actinostrobus to Western Australia. Diselma has only one species, Diselma archeri, restricted to alpine habitats in Tasmania, where it grows as a shrub or small tree with thick and obtuse leaves tightly appressed to the stems, as is common

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in alpines. It is occasionally grown in conifer collections in temperate Europe and North America, which can replicate its natural habitat more easily than the Australian mainland. Actinostrobus, by contrast, has three species, all restricted to the south-west of Western Australia, two of them small, shrubby trees, and the third a shrub (A. pyramidalis, A. arenarius and A. acuminatus). Actinostrobus is rarely grown in gardens, but Callitris, to which it is closely related, is a different story. There are about sixteen species, of Callitris preissii of which some fourteen occur in Australia.The qualification arises from taxonomic disagreements and uncertainties, especially in relation to the Cupressaceae, a family with a three of the most common species, Callitris intratropica, C. columellaris world-wide and C. preissii. Callitris timber is resistant to termite attack, and the distribution that tropical species C. columellaris, from the Northern Territory and Queensland, is used for weatherboards. Other species are used for ranges from arid to flooring. In the early days of the colonies, C. preissii was used alpine – these are at extensively, especially for fences. Photographs of early buildings in Coogee Beach,WA, in an environment Perth often show a fence of Callitris pickets sharpened at the apex, far removed from close-spaced and simply pushed into the ubiquitous sand. It was also that of all the sometimes used for roofing, but Casuarina shingles were more preceding examples common, being easier to split. of the conifers Callitris is a useful garden plant today. The pyramidal form and photo: George Seddon dark, black-green foliage make it very suitable in a Mediterranean

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Callitris endlicheri at Molonglo Gorge, near Canberra photo: Colin Totterdell

climate.The Rottnest cypress (C. preissii ) has the practical advantages of surviving comfortably without any supplementary watering, and on soils of low fertility. Given the natural distribution, however, there are Callitris species for almost every garden environment, including species like C. macleayana, which occurs naturally on good soils with a high summer rainfall, the obverse of our conditions in Fremantle.

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Associations Rachel Henning was an English visitor to New South Wales in the 1850s. Like many young women of her class, she had some interest in botany, or at least, flowers. She enquired of Sir William Hooker if ‘there was any flora of Australia yet published’. As there was not, Hooker sent letters of introduction to ‘two botanical friends of his in Sydney’ in case Miss Henning should wish to pursue this interest. Her reasons for not doing so are given in a letter, written from Appin in New South Wales on 29 March 1855 to the Rev.T.W. Boyce: I hope I shall not be long enough here to make any collections, and I do not care enough about the Australian flowers to take such trouble with them. I often wonder what can be the difference. I suppose it is the want of any pleasant associations with them. I often see very pretty flowers in the bush and just gather them to take a look at them, and then throw them away again without any further interest, while at Home every wildflower seemed like a friend to me.10

Clearly she was homesick when she wrote these words, but the force of association is real, and underwrites much Australian gardening practice to this day, although less so as the years pass. The flora of Australia has been a challenge, not just to the casual gatherer of wild flowers but also to European systematic botanists, from the beginnings of contact: The Gondwanan origins of much of the flora, combined with an extended period of insular evolution during the Tertiary, resulted in a flora so different and strange to European eyes that misclassification and misunderstanding often occurred for some groups.11

Many of the resultant problems are still under review. A case already noted is that of the parakeelyas, known for many years as members of the genus Calandrinia, but now it seems that we have to call them Rumicastrum. Researchers now bring new resources to bear on some of these problems: For example, it has only been since the recent advent of DNA sequence studies and other modern data sources that a reasonable

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understanding of the distinctiveness and relationships … among the lilies has been realised.12

photo: George Seddon

The lily relatives in Australia include some very unusual members like the grasstrees (Xanthorrhoeaceae) and the bloodroots (Haemodoraceae), which include the kangaroo paws. The kangaroo paws are very familiar in south-western Australia, and the grasstrees, restricted to this continent, are so much a part of the landscape as to seem iconic, as is the boab for the north-west – illustrating clearly that to be familiar and well known is not the same as being well understood. Neither is the same as wholesale absorption into a culture, where knowledge can operate without conscious reflection. The enduring form of possession is imaginative possession, which is fed by knowledge, understanding, associations, stories and images, affections and, finally, incorporation of the environment into the self, until it becomes part of our sense of personal identity. We have yet to fully possess Australia in this sense – we have alighted rather than settled. It takes time, but we have made a beginning. Time is significant on another scale: geologic and evolutionary time. The geological history of all the continents is helpful in understanding their present, for example the impact of the Ice Age on Europe, with its dual legacy, the relative poverty of its flora and the beneficence of its nutrient-rich post-glacial soils. But only India and Australia have experienced a major change in latitude since the Mesozoic, and in Australia’s case, continuous and continuing change as it moves steadily north.Thus the relics of our flora that have survived the dissolution of the Gondwanan landmass are especially important in understanding where we have come from. It is time that the key sites were all formally recognised and linked as a set of national reserves, constituting our Green Museum. Knowledge of the sites as a whole, and preferably experience of them, should be a part of the identity of Australians. The list should include the Bunya Mountains for Araucaria bidwillii, Norfolk Island for Araucaria heterophylla, perhaps Lakes Eacham and Barrine for kauri, and Coopers Creek in far north Queensland, south of Cooktown. Further south along the east coast, the Wollemi pine site in the Blue Mountains, the Goonmirk Rocks for Podocarpus lawrencei and the west coast highlands of Tasmania for the Huon pine, King Billy pine and its other floral riches.

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Daintree rainforest at Coopers Creek, North Queensland

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Professionally conducted tours of Gondwanan Australia are possible, but limited sites are vulnerable, no matter how well managed, so it is equally important that some of these associations be recreated in our gardens, both public and private. Canberra Botanic Gardens has made a courageous beginning, but on an inhospitable site. Adelaide Botanic Gardens has a good collection of Araucaria, and it is valuable to display the Gondwanan links in this way, indicating relationships. The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne has also made moves in this direction, as have most of the botanic

Richea scoparia, of the Epacridaceae, in Tasmania photo: Colin Totterdell

Waratah (Telopea truncata) in the Hartz mountains, Tasmania photo: Colin Totterdell

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gardens, but in a small way, and there is little attempt as yet to recreate entire habitats. The Kings Park Botanic Gardens has wisely concentrated exclusively on the floral wealth of Western Australia. The University of Western Australia has an auditorium of Norfolk Island pines, a small Jurassic garden along the west side of Geology–Geography, and an Eocene garden along its north face. The Jurassic garden is not restricted to Gondwanan species. It has a good range of cycads in the understorey, the cycads being cosmopolitan.The canopy is provided by five specimens of Cupressus, a genus of the northern hemisphere. The Gondwanan representatives are Podocarpus elatus and the ferns such as Blechnum and Cyathea. A small reconstruction, the Eocene Grove is mostly Gondwanan, however; there are well-developed examples of the conifers Podocarpus and Callitris, in association with seed-plants, including Casuarina, palms and proteaceous shrubs. The understorey comprises cycads and a diversity of ferns, among which large specimens of the tree-fern Cyathea cooperi are prominent. Nothofagus was not included in the planting as it was considered that it could not be grown under local climatic conditions on a north-facing site. Both of these reconstructions are due to the enterprise of one man, Dr Basil Balme, a palynologist and polymath. These are beginnings. Learning what it might mean to be Australian is a journey that recent immigrants have just begun.

The Wishing Tree: an epitaph for a communal effort Araucaria heterophylla was brought early into cultivation. In 1814, D’Arcy Wentworth presented a pine that was planted at the intended entrance to the new Government Garden at Farm Cove (later, the Royal Botanic Gardens). Others had been planted in the Domain two years earlier and, according to a family tradition, more pines were planted by Major Henry Anthill, the governor’s aide, and probably also by Governor Lachlan Macquarie himself when the gardens were begun. One of these was apparently the later celebrated Wishing Tree, set at the intersection a little to the east of Botanic Gardens Creek, near the present visitor centre. This became a giant tree which fascinated children, and the site was ‘hallowed by the wishing ritual of thousands’, but decay led to its removal in 1946:

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Joseph Henry Maiden, Director of the Gardens 1896–1924 … discovered several stories about the planting of the Wishing Tree, which by 1906 was ‘about 100 ft high’. It was variously claimed that it had been planted in 1817 by Major Anthill (or, rather, replanted from the immediate vicinity of Government House at Mrs Macquarie’s request, by Charles Fraser, superintendent of the Garden; by Ned Shakely, a convict later employed at John Baptist’s Surry Hills Nursery; by John Higgerson, ranger of National Park … by John Richardson in Mrs Macquarie’s presence; by Mrs Macquarie herself ’.

Maiden reconciled the accounts as follows: I propose to adjust these claims in the following manner: Ned Shakely dug the hole, Johnny Higgerson handed him his spade and helped him generally, Mr Fraser turned the plant out of its pot to see that it was all right, and Major Anthill planted it with due ceremony.Then Mr Fraser trod the earth about it, staked it, watered it and tended it during its early days’.13

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f i v e

t h e b a n k s i a s

Kunzea baxteri, with bottle-brush red flowers, from south-western WA photo: Colin Totterdell

is one of the larger plant families, and one that is called ‘primarily southern’, but as with the Myrtaceae and several other ‘southern’ families it is found north of the equator in all three major landmasses, Africa, South and Central America, and Asia, where it extends north to southern China and India. There is a rich diversity in the physical appearance of the different genera: the banksias, proteas, waratahs, grevilleas, hakeas, kunzeas, dryandras, lomatias, and so on. It is often said that this gave rise to the name of a family so outstanding in its diversity of forms, Proteus being the Greek god of the sea who could assume many shapes. This is not accurate; the diversity shown by the Proteaceae is matched in a number of other large families. The name was originally given to a

The Pr oteaceae

Grevillea eriostachya, native to the central coast of Western Australia, one of the grevilleas with striking plumes photo: Colin Totterdell

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Telopea mongaensis, the Braidwood waratah from near-coastal New South Wales

few South African species that have since been transferred to Leucadendron, and thus referred to diversity only within that small group. In time, the name then became established for the genus Protea, closely related to Leucadendron. Later still, Protea became the type genus for the family, and thus gave its name to the whole family.

photo: Colin Totterdell

The

banksia s

Scents, sights, sounds – all can stir memories. There is a story of the arrival by ship at Port Jackson, in the early years of settlement, of a pot of primroses in flower, causing a great outbreak of sentiment and nostalgia. Many years ago when I was in damp green England, a friend sent me a dry eucalyptus leaf in a letter. I crumbled it in my hand and the smell of the sun came out. I was home again for a brief moment. The British have centuries of associations that enrich their awareness of their land: its soils, geology, plants, birds, wild animals (of which there are still remarkably many, coexisting within a humanised landscape).Two hundred years since arrival at Sydney Cove have not

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been enough to forge such strong links and associations among Australians of European origin, but there are beginnings. Care for the heritage of our natural environment needs legislative protection, but it needs much more: knowledge, affection, associations, stories, so that awareness is part of the fabric of our consciousness. If the scent of a eucalyptus can be iconic, so can the acacia, especially when in flower, when it becomes ‘the golden wattle’. It does this more emphatically in the east than in the west, with species like the Cootamundra wattle (Acacia baileyana) and the blackwood (A. melanoxylon), which can approach incandescence in full flower. In south-western Australia, however, it is the banksia that lights up the world. Not only there, of course – the very name of the genus celebrates that of the most generous patron of the natural sciences that Australia has seen. A stylised banksia is the masthead of the title page of Australia’s only journal of landscape design, Landscape Australia. All of the species have been painted by Celia Rosser in a work of world renown, unparalleled in Australia. But the banksia is dominant in the West. There are species in spectacular bloom throughout the year, which makes them invaluable in the garden as in the wild. As I write, in the scorching February of a Perth summer, Banksia prionotes is in flower along road and rail reserves, and in odd pockets of bushland and park. The inflorescence is at first a creamy white, but as the individual flowers open, moving up the cob, their brilliant orange colour is revealed, showing the reason for the popular name, the acorn banksia. From a gardener’s point of view, the banksia is the show-pony of the family, while the grevillea is the workhorse. Some grevilleas are equally spectacular in flower, like the plume and pine grevilleas (Grevillea leucopteris and G. excelsior), the handsome tree species from coastal Queensland, the silky oak (G. robusta), and G. concinna, sometimes known as the pretty grevillea, handsomely illustrated as early as 1827. There are also many species valued by the gardener primarily for their dependability in a range of soils and aspects. G. olivacea, for example, is almost indestructible, and needs no attention whatsoever in our garden; it is pleasant rather than spectacular in flower, but the birds like it, and the grey-green foliage is its main attraction, along with its stoic independence.The groundcover species are also invaluable: we gave up our grass lawn a few years ago, and now have a lawn of Proteaceae, with species like G. thelemanniana, G. dryandroides, G. lanigera and G. bipinnatifida, all dependable, and two

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Grevillea concinna Sweet (1827), drawn by E. P. Smith, engraved by L.Watts and published by Ridgway, London.

specimens each of five of the prostrate banksias, which appear to be thriving, although they have not yet reached the maturity to flower. What we have not yet succeeded in doing is to grow any of the small tree banksias in our hyper-alkaline soil. Some of them are breathtakingly elegant, among them Banksia coccinea from the Stirling Range with its velvet grey flowers overlaid with scarlet styles, enough to outface the Grenadier Guards. Banksia speciosa is another

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knockout from the south coast around Esperance, with pale yellow flower spikes set off by designer-leaves. There are many other beauties. The requirements of most of them appear to be singularly undemanding: very free-draining sand, low in nutrients, with a neutral or slightly acid pH. This we cannot provide, much as we would like to grow them.

The r oll of honour: collectors, ta xonomists and botanical artists The banksias engaged the attention of many of the great botanists and artists of the day for over a century, and their evolving practices are as much a part of this story as are the banksias themselves. It is for this reason that full botanical citations are used. Banksia marginata Cavanilles (1800), for example, gives us the species name, the author of its specific description (in this case, a Spaniard), and the date of its publication. The date of collection (by Thadeo Haenke and Luis Née) was some years earlier, in this case 1793, in the course of the Spanish Malaspina expedition. It was also important for serious readers to know as much as possible about the illustrations in the days before the camera, so that they could evaluate their reliability. In older illustrations, at the margins of the drawing, one looks for such information as ‘W. Finch del et lith’ and ‘Vincent Brooks Imp’, meaning that it was delineated (drawn) by and engraved on stone (lithographed) by Finch and (im)printed by Brooks. Today, there is sometimes only the name of the photographer. There is still a role for hand-drawn detail of stigma, stamens, ovary structures and other fine taxonomic detail, but even that is being overtaken by analysis of gene structure, not evident to the naked eye but the basis of future taxonomy. This chapter is therefore a record of and tribute to an era that is coming to an end. The exquisite botanical artistry stretching from Ferdinand Bauer to Celia Rosser is unlikely to be repeated. The specific names given to the banksias are a record of nearly all of the major players, the collectors, nurserymen, taxonomists, and some of the illustrators. Not many genera record their history so fully through their nomenclature. It is a little surprising that Ferdinand Mueller is not on the list; he described and named four

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species, including two of the prostrate species from the south coast of Western Australia, and although he was not a major contributor to knowledge of the banksias, he was a pre-eminent botanist. It is less surprising that Alex George, author of thirty-one taxa, is not so honoured: his contribution is unchallenged, but he could hardly name a species for himself. The players in the story, and the species named for them, are as follows: Banksia ashbyi, B. baueri, B. baxteri, B. benthamiana, B. brownii, B. burdettii, B. caleyi, B. canei, B. candolleana, B. cunninghamii, B. elderiana, B. gardneri, B. goodii, B. hookeriana, B. lemanniana, B. lindleyana, B. lullfitzii, B. meisneri, B. menziesii, B. rosseri, B. solandri – and, by association, B. dryandroides. More than half of these names, which will recur in the following pages, belong to the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first two of the nineteenth; they are representatives of The Enlightenment, which is our good fortune.There was a great interest in natural science, and Linnaeus’s works on classification had been published long enough to gain acceptance. The practically useful concepts of genus and species were thus well established by the time that professional botanists undertook the investigation of the Australian flora, although its evolutionary significance had to wait for Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Lacking such a framework, botanists who believed in the fixity of species vied for new discoveries, which led to overlap and the later need for careful revision – but the groundwork was there.

The

ea st-coa st

banksia s

Three of the east-coast banksias were formally named by a Spanish taxonomist, Antonio Cavanilles, and the type specimens are thus in Madrid. The species are the silver banksia, Banksia marginata Cavanilles (1800); B. oblongifolia Cavanilles (1800); and B. robur Cavanilles (1800) – all of which were collected by Thadeo Haenke and Luis Née on the (Spanish) Malaspina expedition in 1793. Cavanilles himself never set foot in Australia, but he ‘described a number of Australian plants between 1791 and 1799, including the genera Angophora and Bursaria’.1 He was trained by the Jesuits, studied at the University of Valencia, and then worked in Paris with some of the leading taxonomists of the day, including Antoine

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Laurent de Jussieu. He returned to Madrid in 1789, becoming Director of Madrid’s botanic gardens for five years until his death. Banks and his botanist, Daniel Solander, had already collected B. robur in 1770 in the Botany Bay area, with the intention of publication, but were pre-empted by the Spaniards. This would have been of little concern to Banks, however, to whom the advancement of botanical science was more important than personal fame. The rapport within the scientific community of the time is beautifully illustrated by another story: like Flinders, who was detained by the French in Île Maurice (Mauritius) on his way back to England because war had broken out between the two countries, Labillardière had the complementary fate of being detained in Java. He eventually made his way back to France, and his collections, several large crates of plant material, were returned to him, unopened, through the good offices of Sir Joseph Banks. Most species of the east-coast banksias were found in the course of early exploration, with only five new species added to the tally since 1805.2 There are fourteen species in all, their distribution ranging from the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia to the Cape York Peninsula in far-north Queensland. The tropical species is Banksia dentata, which extends further north into New Guinea and the Aru Islands, the only species to extend beyond Australia. It is found right across most of the ‘Top End’ from the Kimberley, the Northern Territory and down the coast of North Queensland to south of the Bloomfield River. Banks and Solander first collected it from the Endeavour at the Endeavour River in 1770. Two of the fourteen east-coast banksias are found also in Tasmania. The silver banksia (Banksia marginata) is widespread in the south-east and found elsewhere, and on Kangaroo Island and the other islands of Bass Strait. Banksia serrata is restricted to the northwest corner of Tasmania, and extends up the east coast to southern Queensland. It too was collected by the Banks expedition in 1770, this time at Botany Bay. B. serrata also has the distinction of being one of the favoured candidates for May Gibbs’s celebrated Banksia Men. It is hardly surprising that the genus has inspired some of the world’s greatest botanical artists, from Ferdinand Bauer to Celia Rosser, whose plates are ‘the finest botanical illustrations produced in Australia by an Australian, each a work of art in its own right: in grace and minute attention to detail they are worthy to stand alongside the Australian flower paintings of Ferdinand Bauer’.3

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Bauer sailed with Flinders in the Investigator in 1801, along with Robert Brown, the botanist. In visiting the Australian coast, Bauer differed from several other major botanical artists who illustrated banksias by working with material grown from seed collected in Australia, principally William Baxter in the early nineteenth century. Banksias grew and flowered in England and Ireland in dry-heated glasshouses (when the glasshouses turned to steam-heating, the banksias died). For example, there is an exquisite rendering of the red swamp banksia by Constans, a French botanical artist, based on a plant grown at Glasnevin, Dublin’s botanic garden. The seed was donated by the Archbishop of Dublin, who got it direct from King George Sound. South-western Australia has most of the species, 63 out of the current total of 77, but the ‘classic’ species and their illustration come nevertheless from Botany Bay, where Banks and Solander collected the first four species, and Sydney Parkinson painted them.The genus was duly named for Banks, but things might have gone differently: the son of the world’s most prominent taxonomist, the Swede Carl Linnaeus (the younger, cited as Linnaeus filius, fils. or f.), used the name ‘Banksia’ for ‘Terra Australis’, i.e. as the name of the country, in a letter to John Ellis in London in 1771. We could all be singing ‘Advance, oh Banksia Fair’ if Linnaeus had prevailed. But the name of the genus is enough to honour Sir Joseph. May Gibbs gave the banksia a bad press, some say. I disagree: her achievement was to imprint the banksia indelibly on the Australian imagination. It may yet bring us fame and fortune, both from tourism and the cut-flower trade (although Israel has a headstart in growing banksias, dryandras and other Australian plants for the European cutflower market). At the Chelsea Flower Show in 2000, Kings Park and Botanic Garden had an entry made up of Western Australian wildflowers, including banksias, all presented in mint condition, some having been skilfully coaxed to flower at the wrong time of the year. It was a prizewinner, more likely to entice tourists (they come to Chelsea from all over) to visit Western Australia than a Miss McPherson who has been doing some advertising for us recently. The bad news, however, relates to ecology, conservation, and the diseases to which the banksias are susceptible (not only Phytophthora; there is also a particularly nasty canker). The conclusion is that we will probably not be able to see many banksias in their natural environment in Western Australia in one hundred years time, not

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even in the National Parks and Reserves. A few species appear to be disease resistant. For the rest, we shall have to go to The Banksia Farm at Mt Barker (WA), which is growing all the known species, or the botanic gardens at Black Mountain in Canberra, Cranbourne outside Melbourne, or Kings Park, or domestic gardens, which can make a critical contribution. We are used to seeing the wild animals of the world interned in prison camps. Next the plants. … But I cannot imagine a world without banksias growing in the bush: their beauty is so fine; the detail so elegant; the whole, so strong.

T h e b a n k s i a i n a rt, fr om Ferdinand Bauer to Celia R osser If our grandchildren are no longer able to see many of the banksias growing in their natural habitat, at least they will be able to look at them on the walls. In the following pages, a sample of the species is illustrated, along with notes on both the artist and the history of discovery and recording.This history is a part of our own history, an intersection between a land newly explored by Europeans, and the best of European culture of the day. The story has a pan-European caste, of men who co-operated freely in the interests of their science, even when their countries were at war. Linnaeus (the younger) was a Swede, as was Solander. Labillardière was French, Mueller was German, Cavanilles was Spanish, and Ferdinand Bauer, with whom we begin, was Austrian. By contrast, in the second period of botanal illustrations, from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, women stepped in as collectors and artists.

| FERDINAND

B AU E R

Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific says that Bauer ‘sought in his drawings to reveal both the beauty of the plant and its scientific structure. Although he laboured with infinite care upon detail, he never lost sight of the plant as a unified whole, so that he avoided both the dryness of science and the sweetness of sentiment’.4 This comment indicates three criteria that a great botanical artist must satisfy: first, the work must have the double focus of being scientifically accurate and aesthetically pleasing; second, the work

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must somehow ‘come alive’; and third, it must avoid the cloyingly sweet and sentimental – always a possibility with ‘flower painting’, as such work tends to be called, in depreciation. There are some additional concerns and queries in the assessment of botanical illustrations, such as the quality and medium of the original work (engraving, lithograph, woodcut). Who did it, and how well? Was it hand-coloured later? If so, by whom? Whether the artist produced the finished drawings is a necessary question, because this was sometimes not the case – in fact Ferdinand Bauer, who undertook the entire process, was exceptional. Finally, the quality of reproduction in a book or other publication is critical – this can vary from the original, especially in relation to colour. Wilfred Blunt and William Stearn consider the Bauer brothers the greatest exponents of botanical drawing in England. Franz/Francis Bauer never left Europe; he worked at Kew, where he made use of the microscope in recording the fine detail of floral structures, as did his brother. Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826) was born in Austria, the son of Lukas Bauer, court-painter to the Count of Lichtenstein. Ferdinand and his brother Franz were trained in botanical draughtsmanship by Baron Niklaus von Jacquin, himself an accomplished botanical artist. In 1786, Ferdinand was employed by the English botanist, John Sibthorp. Their tour of the eastern Mediterranean culminated in Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca, described by Stearn as ‘the most beautiful and costly book devoted to any flora’. This made his English reputation. At the suggestion of Joseph Banks, the British Admiralty then appointed Bauer as natural history painter with Matthew Flinders in the Investigator in 1800, along with the distinguished botanist Robert Brown. Banks paid Bauer’s salary, of £300 a year, and provided for his rations. It was five years before Bauer and Brown saw England again, luckier at least than Flinders, who was interned by the French at Mauritius and died shortly after his return to England. Bauer and Brown had remained in Australia; Bauer returned to England in 1805, where he worked for another six years preparing finished drawings from his many field drawings. He used this work in his own publication, Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae (1813–16). For this he had to engrave and colour his own plates, of which he was able to include only fifteen because of the cost, due to his insistence on perfection and to limit the cost to the buyer. ‘Moreover, the moment was not propitious for such a venture; for war had

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Banksia speciosa Robert Brown (1810), the showy banksia, drawn and engraved by Ferdinand Bauer. Type collection from Lucky Bay, east of Esperance, WA, collected in January 1801 by Robert Brown. First collected by Jean Labillardière in 1792.

impoverished the patrons, who were in any case growing a little weary of the endless succession of costly botanical works which appeared year after year’.5 This work is now almost beyond value. One of his remarkable illustrations is of Banksia speciosa, the showy banksia. Banksia speciosa R. Brown (1810) was collected by Robert Brown in 1802 at Lucky Bay on the south coast of Western Australia east of Esperance, and published in 1810.

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Banksia serrata Linnaeus f. (1782), the saw banksia, originally entitled Leucodendron serratifolium, S. Parkinson del 1779 J. F. Miller pinx. G. Smith sculpt. Plate 285. Botany Bay, 28 April – 6 May 1770. A common eastcoast, near-coastal species, extending from Cooloola, Queensland, south to Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, with an outlying population at Sisters Creek, north-western Tasmania.

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| SS YO DL ANNE DY EPRA)R K I N S O N

( A N D DA N I E L

The ‘classic’ species and illustrations are from Botany Bay and Banks’s voyage. Sydney Parkinson was the artist with Cook and Banks on the Endeavour in 1770, together with Solander, the botanist. Banks and Solander collected the first four species at Botany Bay, and dried and pressed their specimens. In July, they found another species by the estuary of the Endeavour River where Cooktown now lies.The first four eventually were classified and formally named by the son of Linnaeus. Thus they become B. serrata Linnaeus f. (1782), the saw banksia; B. integrifolia Linnaeus f. (1782), the coast banksia; B. ericifolia Linnaeus f. (1781), the heath-leaved banksia; and B. spinulosa Smith (1793), the hair-pin banksia, although the last named was not described from the material collected by Banks and Solander. The tropical banksia (B. dentata) was also classified by Linnaeus in 1782. Sydney Parkinson (1745–71) was born in Edinburgh, where he was a woollen-draper by profession. Botanical drawing was a secondary occupation until he was befriended by Banks, who employed him in 1767 to illustrate his natural history collection from Newfoundland. The following year, Parkinson joined Banks, Solander and the anthropological artist Alexander Buchan as the natural history artist on Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific (1768–71). When Buchan died in Tahiti in 1769, Parkinson was the only artist on board. His workload doubled, and he was unable to proceed beyond sketches of plants. He died of dysenteric fever in Batavia on the return voyage in 1771. His illustrations lack the elegance of Bauer’s art, but they are workmanlike, and the species are recognisable from his drawings, for example Banksia serrata Linnaeus f. (1782). His finished work is of specimens from Tierra del Fuego and the Society Islands (Tahiti).The Australian sketches were worked up by others in London, but his original rough sketches, now in London, are nevertheless much admired.6 Parkinson’s name is not commemorated by a species of banksia, but Daniel Solander was thus honoured by Robert Brown. Banksia solandri was collected by William Baxter in the Stirling Range in 1829, and the name formally published by Brown in 1830. Solander was born in Sweden in 1733, and went to Uppsala to study medicine and natural history under (the elder) Linnaeus. In 1760 he travelled to England to give instruction in Linnean methods, and was ‘soon

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appointed Assistant Keeper at the fledgling British Museum’. Throughout this period he also led a double life as a Swedish agent. Banks invited him to join the Endeavour complement of naturalists; unlike Parkinson, he returned to England in 1771, where he died in 1782. ‘Although Banks failed to publish the botanical results of the Endeavour voyage, Solander’s descriptions (and some manuscript names) were appropriated by other naturalists’.7 Banksia spinulosa was the last of the four species common around the first settlement at Port Jackson. It was collected and illustrated in about 1792 by John White, the Surgeon-General with the First Fleet – which emphatically was not equipped with a trained botanical artist, as Governor Phillip lamented in his first despatch to Lord Sydney on 15 May 1788: … my Lord, I must beg leave to observe, with regret, that being myself without the smallest knowledge of botany, I am without one botanist, or even an intelligent gardener, in the colony: it is not therefore in my power to give any more than a very superficial account of the produce of this country, which has such variety of plants that I cannot, with all my ignorance, help being convinced that it merits the attention of the naturalist and the botanist.8

The formal description of B. spinulosa was made in England by the English botanist James Edward Smith. In Specimen of the Botany of New Holland (1793–95), he described twenty-seven new species, and this book was the first solely devoted to the flora of Australia.

| MADE

IN ENGLAND

Several artists worked in England from plants flowered there in the early dry-heated greenhouses, the seeds having been collected for that purpose. William Baxter, a Scottish Highlander, was ‘the first privately financed plant collector to be sent to Australia’. As gardener to the Comtesse de Vandes, presumably one of the French aristocrats who had been able to escape revolutionary France, Baxter ‘raised many of the plants illustrated in early volumes of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine ’. He made his first trips along the southern coasts of Australia in a whaler, at a time when sealing and whaling were major industries. By 1826, he owned a schooner, in which he made a second voyage

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Banksia dryandroides Baxter ex Sweet (1828), by Edwin Dalton Smith.The type collection was gathered in 1823 by William Baxter on the south coast of Western Australia near King George Sound.

to the south coast of Western Australia, where he again collected seed that was later propagated in Britain. ‘Australian plants were at the height of their popularity when Baxter’s plants become available’.9 Edwin Dalton Smith was a botanical artist. A typical example of his work is the hand-coloured engraving Banksia dryandroides Baxter ex Sweet (1828) from Robert Sweet’s Flora australasica 1827–28. He worked from specimens grown in England from seed collected

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by William Baxter in 1823. (It had already been collected by Labillardière at Esperance Bay in 1792, and again by Robert Brown in 1801–02.) The Botanical Magazine was begun by William Curtis in 1787, and is still extant, although incorporated since 1984 in the Kew Magazine. Until 1948, its high quality plates, of which Banksia baxteri (mislabelled as B. victoriae in Curtis) is an example, were hand coloured. The true B. victoriae, the woolly orange banksia, was collected by James Drummond in 1850–51 and formally described by Meissner in 1855. It is restricted to a small area between the lower Murchison River and Northampton, and Drummond probably collected it near the Hutt River, where the annual rainfall is 350 millimetres.10 It is a handsome species, related to B. prionotes. Walter Hood Fitch (1817–92), who never left Great Britain, was the most prolific of all botanical artists, with nearly a thousand known lithographs. His working life began as a Glasgow calicodesigner’s apprentice. He then worked for the Hookers for much of his life, contributing, for example, to Sir Joseph Hooker’s Botany of the Antarctic Voyage (1844–59):

Banksia baxteri R. Brown 1830, image by Walter Hood Fitch, mislabelled as B. victoriae Meissner (1855), the woolly orange banksia Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in pl. 4906, 1856. Courtesy of the library of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium

Fitch had a marvellous power of visualising plants as they lived and of retaining their image in his memory. This emboldened him to treat his originals as sketches, rather than to work them into finished

Walter Hood Fitch Courtesy of the Museum of Natural History, London

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pictures, with the result that when finally drawn on stone they underwent a certain generalisation in which the type of the species came to life and took the place of a photographically true portrait. His colouring was equally bold, which must have been a veritable boon to the colourists, who could mostly get the desired effect with simple washes.11

His illustration of Banksia baxteri R. Brown (1830) was prepared in Britain from plants grown from seed collected by Baxter, this time on his second trip to King George Sound in 1829. The species was named after him by Robert Brown in 1830.

Banksia occidentalis R. Brown (1810), drawn by Louis Constans.The red swamp banksia was collected in 1801 by Robert Brown near King George Sound; it extends along the south coast as far east as Cape Arid.

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Louis Constans was French; working about 1840–50, in the French tradition of Redouté, he produced work of ‘miraculously fine quality’.12 His illustration of Banksia occidentalis R. Brown (1810) was published in Paxton’s Flower Garden (1850–53). The specimen of the red swamp banksia from which he worked was grown from seed in the Dublin Botanical Gardens.

| MARIANNE

N O RT H

Marianne North (1830–90), an extraordinary woman, was one of the eccentrics of independent means occasionally thrown up by late Victorian society. She travelled the world hunting spectacular plants, which she painted in oils, in their natural surroundings; for example, she went to Chile to paint Araucaria, and later to Borneo and the Seychelles. She was in Australia in 1880. She made sure that her paintings were displayed at Kew by donating a gallery specifically for them. But her generosity could not guarantee a favourable critical response: her painting is almost wholly lacking in sensibility. The disagreeable impression made by her pictures is enhanced through her determination to display 832 paintings in a gallery barely capable of showing fifty to advantage. Moreover, her work, being painted in oils, is almost unaffected by light and remains perennially gaudy.13

Some of the plants she illustrated appear to have been grown in Europe from seed, for example Banksia grandis, which was formally named by Willdenow, a German taxonomist. In this case, seed had been collected at King George Sound on Captain George Vancouver’s Discovery expedition (1791–95).

| EDGAR

DELL

Edgar Dell (1901–84) was a Londoner who arrived in Western Australia in 1924. My copy of the Wildflowers of Western Australia is dated 1959, with no indication of earlier editions, but it seems to have first appeared in 1935, following the serial inclusion of sheets in the Western Mail. The 1959 edition was published by W.A. Newspapers with text by H. F. Parkinson and C. A. Gardner, the Government Botanist of Western Australia from 1929 to 1960. The photographs,

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Banksia ilicifolia mostly by Gardner, were taken against a black velvet background, and R. Brown (1810), they were accompanied by some 90 plates by Dell, who did the work drawn by Edgar as an ‘extra curricular activity’ (‘hobby’ is demeaning?) over a number Dell.The hollyof years, beginning in the 1930s for supplements in the Western Mail. leaved banksia was He nevertheless had a sound professional background – his father had yet another of the been a nurseryman, and he appears to have trained as a botanical artist 14 His work is meticulous, approaching species collected by in London before emigration. Robert Brown at the photographic. Perhaps more interesting, it was intended from the outset for public consumption. Appreciation of the unusual quality King George Sound, but it has a quite and the beauty of the Australian flora has a long history, but not wide distribution always a continuous one, and not one that has ever been fully down the southtranslated into effective conservation practice, as the current status of west coast, and is the Banksia genus in Western Australia indicates all too well.

| MARIAN

E L L I S RO WA N

Marian Rowan (1847–1922) was born in Victoria, the daughter of Charles Ryan, who created the garden at Derriweit, Mount Macedon. In 1873, she married Frederick Charles Rowan, a British naval officer and subsequently a Melbourne businessman. She met and admired the redoubtable Marianne North, and followed in her footsteps, pursuing an independent career that involved much travel. At first she went to places like far north Queensland, and after her husband’s death, to the far corners of the globe, subsidising her travels from the sale of her work. She wrote for the newspapers, and had many exhibitions; she was a knowledgeable botanist, and maintained contact with Mueller. Her best remembered work is A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand (1898). Among her better known banksia paintings are Banksia robur Cavanilles (1800) and Banksia menziesii R. Brown (1830). B. robur is one of the coastal species discovered early; it ranges south from Cooktown to Wollongong, but not continuously. The trivial name robur means strong, but this was a misinterpretation on the part of the Spaniard, Cavanilles, who had never seen it in situ. B. menziesii was collected at the Swan River by Charles Fraser, the Colonial Botanist of New South Wales, who accompanied Charles Fremantle and James Stirling on their exploratory expedition of 1827. It was named by Brown for Archibald Menzies, the surgeon-naturalist on Captain George Vancouver’s Discovery expedition (1791–95). It has an informative popular name – the firewood banksia.

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fairly common around Perth, where it is often called parrot-bush.The name comes from the resemblance of its leaves to ilex, the European holly.

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Banksia ashbyi E. G. Baker (1934), by Celia Rosser.The type collection was gathered near Yuna, WA in about 1930 by Edwin Ashby, a South Australian grower of wildflowers, and named after him. It is limited to the central west coast in dry country from North-West Cape to the latitude of Carnarvon and Mullewa.

| MARGARET

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Margaret Stones was born in 1920 in Colac, Victoria, went to England in 1951–58, where she became the principal contributing artist to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and worked at Kew. She also contributed plates for Winifred Curtis’s outstanding Endemic Flora of Tasmania (1967–78). Her work approaches the quality of Ferdinand Bauer and Celia Rosser, which is the highest possible praise. It has been recognised by two honorary doctorates, one from Louisiana State University (1986) and the other from the University of Melbourne (1989), where the then Professor of Botany, Carrick Chambers, regarded her skills to the point of awe.15

| CELIA

RO S S E R

Celia Rosser is also a Victorian, born in 1930, and trained at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The Banksias (1981–2000) has the Celia Rosser plates and a text by Alex George; ‘The Banksia project’ was established by Monash University in 1974, when Rosser was appointed University Botanical Artist; she has painted 76 species, published in three volumes.They represent one of the major publishing events in the history of Australia, and the first time that a genus of such size has been illustrated in a single set of volumes anywhere. Her work is outstanding not only for its quality but for its completeness, covering the entire genus. All of her portraits are so fine that any choice here is arbitrary. Among my favourites are two groups, both of them of ecological interest, and both of them Western Australian.The first is that of the prostrate banksias, of which there are six species, all but one of which come from the south coast of Western Australia; the exception, B. chamaephyton, comes from that other ‘hot-spot’ of species richness, Mount Lesueur-Mogumber area, to the north of Perth. The other species are B. goodii, B. gardneri, B. repens, B. blechnifolia and B. petiolaris. These are the only prostrate forms, and this is in marked contrast with other members of the family, especially the grevilleas, which have many low-growing species.The distribution of the prostrate species is so highly localised that there is probably a physiological explanation. There are no naturally occurring prostrate species in the eastern states, but the western species are not especially difficult to grow in Victoria. Nurserymen

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and plant-breeders have also succeeded in growing prostrate forms of several species that do not have this form in nature.Their limited natural occurrence is therefore puzzling. The second group of species is that of the dry-country, neardesert species. Nearly all of the banksias from eastern Australia are coastal or near-coastal, although a few of them come from areas of

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low rainfall, for example, B. marginata and B. ornata, which extend to the Eyre Peninsula. The latter is also found in the Little Desert in Victoria. Most species in Western Australia are also coastal or near-coastal, but sometimes in areas of rainfall of 250–350 millimetres, like B. lindleyana, which is found between Northampton and Shark Bay, and B. ashbyi, a very handsome species which extends right to the North West Cape.There are also several species that extend well inland into near-desert conditions, like the recently discovered species named for Celia Rosser, Banksia rosseri. Other examples are B. audax, found near Southern Cross, while B. elderiana, also a handsome species, extends to the Great Victoria Desert, where the rainfall is erratic, with an average of around 200 millimetres.

Other decorative uses of Australian flora and fauna Many major artists painted flowers from time to time. Such work is by those known simply as ‘artists’ rather than as ‘botanical artists’. Some of the most famous are Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and, notorious in Western Australia, Irises, which adorned the walls of the Bond Corporation for a time. Van Gogh made no claim to scientific accuracy, but his sunflowers have enormous vitality, instinct with a craving for the south and its strong clear light that perhaps only a northerner from a damp, grey climate could fully experience and evoke. Major works by Australian artists are few, among them the woodcuts of Margaret Preston (1875–1963). Her stylised portrait of Banksia prionotes makes no attempt at natural colour, and the plant is presented with a brittle rigidity, but also with great strength. The banksia and the Australian flora and fauna have had some use as motifs; for example, B. menziesii and B. ilicifolia appear in iron work in Perth’s Karrakatta Cemetery chapel, of which Reginald Summerhayes was the architect; the friezes were incorporated from an earlier (1937) chapel, and some friezes were recast by George Stock. Kookaburra and lyrebird motifs were incorporated into castiron balustrading in Melbourne and Sydney in the late 1880s, and

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are now valued collector items. We have an old kangaroo footscraper of cast iron, but this, like much use of such motifs, has an element of kitsch. Why? Because the use is highly selfconscious, with aggressive nationalistic overtones. This is a problem of the cultural milieu as much as of the individual artist. Much of our culture remains Eurocentric. Such representations are most effective when there is an element of cheerful self-mockery, which characterised the brilliant pageantry of the Olympic Games in Sydney, at its best when tongue-in-cheek, not taking itself too seriously. Literature has had an easier path. There are several good books, for example, by Coral Lansbury (1970) and Brian Elliott (1967), on the way in which an Australian poetic idiom was forged in the nineteenth century, so that words like ‘wattle’ or ‘gum-tree’ could be used unselfconsciously. It happened first with language, but it has been a slower process with images. The outstanding popular graphic use of the Australian flora and fauna has been by May Gibbs, whose work is well known. She was born in Surrey in England in 1877; her family emigrated to South Australia in 1881. Later her father took up land with his brother George at Harvey, but moved to Perth in 1887, joined the Lands Department as a draftsman, and lived at ‘The Dune’ in South Perth, where they remained. May removed to Sydney (Neutral Bay) in 1913 at the age of fifty-six, but she would play for Western Australia in a state-oforigin match. Snugglepot and Cuddlepie was published in 1918: her work is full of carefully drawn Western Australian plant material, including Leschenaultia formosa and Eucalyptus todtiana. The Banksia Men, however, are problematic. On the author’s own authority, they are Western Australian. ‘When I was out walking in Western Australia with my cousins [i.e. at Harvey], we came to a grove of Banksia trees, and sitting on almost every branch were these ugly little, wicked little men that I discovered and that’s how the Banksia Men were thought of ’.The details of the drawings, however, do not closely resemble the cobs of any banksia she was likely to have seen at Harvey. The nearest candidate there is Banksia attentuata, which retains the protostigmas shown in her drawings, but they are closer to B. serrata, the saw banksia, which she would have had near to hand in Sydney. In a sense, May Gibbs might seem to have given the gentle

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banksia a bad press, but this is misleading. She played a key role in helping generations of Australians towards an imaginative possession of their own environment, a continuing learning for all of us.

A

footnote

It is tempting for Australians to appropriate Sir Joseph Banks, given the commemoration of his name by one of our most valued and distinctively Australian genera, the scale of his support for botanical exploration, and his personal involvement. In actuality, his activities and support were not at all restricted to our shores, as the following example shows (and this is far from an isolated case). In 1816, Mr Clarke Abel (1780–1826) was appointed as surgeon to Lord Amherst’s Embassy to the Emperor of China at Peking [Beijing]. He was keenly interested in natural history and was anxious to make some collections on the journey through what was, to Europeans, almost unknown country.This project was encouraged by Sir Joseph Banks, who arranged for him to be supplied with a plant cabin for the preservation of living specimens, a botanic gardener from Kew to look after it and to collect seeds, and an assistant, Mr Poole, who was Abel’s brother-in-law. The diplomatic mission of the embassy was a failure; the journey back from Peking to Canton, made almost entirely by river and canal, was strictly supervised by the Chinese and afforded few opportunities for botanising, and for parts of the time, Abel was confined to his cabin from illness. Nevertheless, he managed to procure a considerable number of plant specimens; Hooper, the gardener provided from Kew, amassed more than 300 packets of seeds. All were lost when the Alceste was wrecked on the homeward voyage, on a pirate-infested reef in the Gaspar Straits; and though no lives were lost, Abel had the mortification of hearing that the cases containing these seeds had been brought up on deck and emptied of their contents by one of the seamen, to make room for some of the linen of one of the gentlemen of the embassy. After establishing a precarious footing on shore, a party returned next day to the wreck; Abel found one collection of plants, seeds and minerals still in a great measure uninjured, but the sight only mocked the vexation of the owner, who saw no chance of preserving it.

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This case was eventually put on a raft – which was burnt with all its contents by the hovering Malay pirates. All that could be retrieved from the ill-fated expedition was a small collection of plant specimens that Abel had given to Sir George Staunton at Canton, which was generously returned to him; and it was one of these that Robert Brown, Sir Joseph Banks’s librarian and taxonomist, named with ‘friendly partiality’ Abelia chinensis.

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s i x

Mediterraneity

or more, I have been urging people to grow the plants in their gardens that come from comparable soils and climates. For thirty years and more, I have been wrong, for these are the plants that are most likely to leap the garden wall, to get ‘out of bounds’, as they are now doing at an accelerating and frightening rate. A change that has been taking place since the European invasion of the continent has gained momentum quite massively in the last few decades.That change is the introduction of exotic plants, animals and pathogens that make a takeover bid in their new environment. In the words of Alfred Crosby, European immigrants did not arrive alone in the new lands: they were accompanied by ‘a grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzzing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche’.1 As for the animals, so for the plants. Early in the last century, especially in semi-arid South Australia, the cultivation of wheat was attempted in country that was far too dry, in the mistaken belief that ‘Rain follows the plough’. In reality, weeds follow the plough.Wild oats (Avena spp.) arrived with the first wheat seed, and is now to be found wherever there is disturbed ground in southern Australia, smothering what is left of the indigenous plant cover, and ready to burn with the first cigarette butt in summer. Everyone knows about the blackberry and the prickly pear.What is not known so widely is how quickly new ‘garden escapes’ are now invading natural bushland, and with what serious long-term consequences. In the last century, the weeds were ‘a trickle into a sea of bush’,2 whereas they are now ‘a flood into islands of bush’. Weed plants are now naturalising at the rate of 20 to 25 a year.Victoria has 1221 weed species, and they constitute 28 per cent of the total flora. Western Australia has 1003, only 11 per cent of the total flora, but the rate of increase is very serious. Our agricultural history is so short in much of Australia; there were only 500 square kilometres of cleared land in Western Australia by 1890, but by 1968 there were 130 000 square kilometres, following an orgy of clearing in the two preceding decades, when some 70 000 square kilometres were cleared, that is, 140 times as much as in the first sixty years of settlement. The case against weed species is not invariably conclusive: for example, the willows that have replaced the indigenous riparian species in much of eastern Australia have been defended on the grounds that willow-dominated stream banks retain more sediments and nutrients than eucalypts can,3 but there are many counterarguments. That introduced plants can provide habitat and food for

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birds is a safer case; the two large and introduced old coral trees (Erythrina sykesii ) in our garden are immensely popular feeding sites for a range of local birds, who desert our many native trees when the coral tree is in flower. It is also beyond argument that both nutrient status and water availability are so changed in large cities that indigenous plants are often disadvantaged. Undisturbed bush and heath is a different matter, and this is where most damage is occurring. It originates, moreover, from the cities. Many of the weeds are garden escapes. Bulbous species from Southern Africa have become some of our worst weeds: they include Watsonia spp., the Cape tulip (Moraea flaccida), Guildford grass (Romulea rosea), Sparaxis bulbifera, Freesia x leichtlinii and, one of the worst, the Arum lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica). Some recent escapes, like the two Dietes species, are precisely the plants favoured by landscape architects and home gardeners alike (including me: we searched for such plants when we began establishing a new garden in Fremantle fifteen years ago. Awareness of the rapidly increasing rate of weed invasion was minimal at that time). Such plants are favoured because they can survive on modest or no supplementary water in low nutrients soils. Many of them come from Southern Africa, California or the Mediterranean. Some of them are toxic to stock or to native animals. Others, like capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) from southern Africa are not toxic, but are not palatable to stock and spread aggressively, suppressing more useful pasture plants. Most of these introduced plants are aggressive competitors and, in time, also suppress the natural flora. Weeds are amongst the most serious threats both to primary production and to the natural environment in Australia, and the threat is amplified every year. Attempts to control or eradicate them are not the outcome of a misplaced biological rationalism or xenophobia, but an informed awareness by biological scientists of the costs of ecosystem instability.The natural flora is one of incomparable interest and richness, our real heritage and responsibility, in global terms. Introduced plants from similar climates are thus a major and increasing threat to the natural environment.

What

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Mediterraneit y?

Weeds are only a part of the story. There is a whole nexus of ideas associated with the concept of the ‘Mediterranean’ that needs

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scrutiny. The advertising world has used versions of the concept to create a flattering but profoundly misleading self-image.Tuscan villas proliferate in Perth, and although they are unlike anything to be seen in Tuscany, neither they nor their supposed prototypes are appropriate to the realities of our climate (the early settlers who built houses with verandahs all round had a much better understanding of our fierce summers). The problem with being enamoured of ‘the Mediterranean’ is that it deflects attention from the very significant differences between southern Australia, especially south-western Australia, and all other places that are considered to be a part of the Mediterranean climatic zones – Cape Province in South Africa, southern California and central Chile, as well as the Mediterranean Basin itself. ‘Mediterranean’ is a profoundly ambiguous word. First, it is used of the lands that border the Mediterranean Sea, although even then it is applied erratically. At least in the English-speaking and northern European world, and almost exclusively by gardeners, it is applied to Italy, Provence and the south coast of France, the east coast of Spain, Greece, and the offshore islands. It is rarely used for Syria or Egypt or Morocco, although they are technically among the Mediterranean lands. As a broad classification of climate, it refers to places with a warm to hot dry summer and a mild to cool wet winter. However, all the world’s Mediterranean climatic zones except one are on the west coast of their continent facing a major ocean, and at latitude of around 33° north or south.The one exception is the climatic zone of the Mediterranean itself, where the lands surround an east–west inland sea, most of them at higher latitudes. Climate, moreover, even if it were uniform between these zones, which it is not, is only one of a number of factors influencing the way plants grow.

‘Mediterranean’ gardens and their physical conte xt When the word is applied to gardens, it may mean a garden with certain kinds of plants, those from the Mediterranean climatic zones, with the Italian ones central to this use; the cypress and olive above all. Agaves and yuccas are included, but not so much because they are

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from the climatic zone (most of them are not, in fact) as because they are a common sight in pots in Greek, Italian and Provençal gardens, whereas Xanthorrhoea preissii and Banksia menziesii, which do come from a wet winter, dry summer climatic zone, are assuredly not ‘Mediterranean plants’ as the gardening literature goes. The phrase ‘Mediterranean garden’ can also intend a certain style of garden. This set of meanings is interactive with the set of climatic meanings, in that the style is one way, although only one, of responding to physical circumstances. It is also one that is strongly mediated by implicit cultural conditioning. Five sites that can be taken as representative of Mediterranean climates relative to the plant world, and especially the gardening world, are: Marseilles, Nice and the French Riviera; Cape Town; Perth; Los Angeles; and Valparaiso in Chile. They are not definitive, representative merely, and not exclusive. A meteorologist would extend the list considerably. They will serve for comparison because these are the kinds of place popular gardening literature has in mind when writing of ‘Mediterranean gardens’. The choice of rather large cities to compare is also deliberate; places like these are where most of the gardeners and their gardens are to be found. The most obvious difference between them is in latitude; the Riviera is close to 45°N, most of Provence 46°–47°N, while the other four range from 32° to 34° north or south. The effects of the relatively high latitude of the Riviera is, of course, counteracted by the Gulf Stream, to which it owes the warm dry summers it enjoys, but this has no impact on the other consequence of latitude: daylength. The Riviera has very long warm summer days and quite short cool days in winter, whereas all the other sites have much less variation. The average sunrise and sunset for the midsummer and midwinter months July and January, depending on the hemisphere, are given below for three convenient latitudes: 45ºN, 40ºN and 30ºS. Venice, the queen of the Adriatic and of the eastern Mediterranean for three centuries, is 45ºN; Minorca, which is mid-Mediterranean, is 40ºN, and Jurien Bay, 150 kilometres north of Perth, represents 30ºS (see Table 1). In brief, therefore, Venice has about an hour and a half more daylight in summer than Jurien Bay, more than an hour more than Perth, and an hour less in mid-winter. It is dank and dark in Venice in midwinter, as I discovered when I worked there for a time, setting up a tertiary programme in environmental planning.

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Table 1: Length of day at various ‘Mediterranean’ latitudes

Venice (45ºN) midsummer day-length, 15.33 hours midwinter day-length, 8.50 hours July sunrise at 04.17 hours; sunset at 19.50 hours January sunrise at 07.38 hours; sunset at 16.28 hours Minorca (40ºN) midsummer day-length, 14.58 hours midwinter day-length, 09.23 hours July sunrise at 04.35 hours; sunset at 19.33 hours January sunrise at 07.22 hours; sunset at 16.45 hours Jurien Bay, WA (30ºS) midsummer day-length, 14.03 hours midwinter day-length, 10.14 hours January sunrise at 05.02 hours; sunset at 19.05 hours July sunrise at 06.57 hours; sunset at 17.11 hours Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology .

Day length is a significant component of plant ecology and evolution. For another comparison of latitude, Hobart, our most southerly capital, is the equivalent of Rome (which it does not otherwise much resemble), while the equivalent of Nice, 2 degrees north of Rome, is way off our map, well to the south of Tasmania, and comparable with Milford Sound in New Zealand. The other four sites are similar in latitude, although at 32°S, Perth is nearer the equator than Cape Town and Los Angeles, both 34°(south and north respectively). On the west coast of South Africa, Perth’s latitude takes one to Lambert’s Bay, well on the way to the arid coast of Namibia. There are other highly significant differences, in tectonic setting, geology, soils, topographic setting, rainfall, and off-shore ocean temperatures (see Table 2). Perth – and for that matter, Adelaide and Melbourne, also mid-latitude wet winter, dry summer cities – are

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part of an old continent with soils of generally low fertility. All of the other four sample sites are in geologically younger settings, backed by mountains – the Maritime Alps, the Sierras, the Andes, Table Mountain. The last is the least, but still a mountain compared with the low Darling Plateau or the Adelaide Hills. The first three cordilleras capture winter snows, which are released in summer to the dry plains below. Perth, therefore, with south-west Western Australia in general, and to a lesser degree Adelaide and Melbourne, are strongly anomalous, just as is the Mediterranean, and for much the same reason – ocean temperatures. The Mediterranean is warmed by the Gulf Stream, and then by the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is landlocked, relatively shallow, and spared the worst of the northern winter blasts by the protective shield of east–west mountain chains, primarily the Alps. South-western Australia has its very own Gulf Stream, known as the Leeuwin Current, ‘a surface stream of warm, low-salinity tropical water that flows at around 2 km/hr southward against the climatological mean equator-ward wind, from North-West Australia to Cape Leeuwin and then eastwards towards the Great Australian Bight’.4 It is, conveniently, strongest during autumn and winter, when it can be responsible for a temperature difference of 5ºC from colder water further offshore to the core of the Leeuwin Current, a Latitude

Temperature (ºc max/min) Winter

Summer

Rainfall Table 2: Latitude, temperature and rainfall for five ‘Mediterranean’ sites

Marseilles

43ºN

11.6 / 0.6

25.5 / 14.4

589.28

Marrakech

32ºN

18.3 / 4.4

38.3 / 19.4

238.76

Los Angeles

34ºN

17.7 / 7.2

26.4 / 16.6

325.12

Cape Town

34ºS

17.2 / 7.2

25.5 / 15.5

508.00

Perth

32ºS

17.2 / 8.8

29.4 / 17.2

861.38

Valparaiso

33ºS

15.5 / 8.3

22.2 / 13.3

505.46

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service, US National Climatic Data Center, Ashville, North Carolina.

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huge differential. The relatively high and reliable rainfall of Perth is largely the gift of the current.Were it to fail through some change in the patterns of oceanic circulation, the rainfall would probably drop from 860 millimetres to around 250 millimetres. Long live the Leeuwin Current. Without it, the climate of Perth would compare closely with that of Marrakech or Baja California in Mexico. All the other west-coast sites at a similar latitude have cold currents. Cape Town has the Benguela Current, famous for its nutrient-rich upwellings around Walvis Bay further to the north. Valparaiso has the Humboldt Current, which streams north along the arid coast of Peru until it swings west to the Galapagos. The west coast of North America also has its cold current, as the chilly North Pacific Drift turns south and becomes the California Current. I first learnt of it doing a course in Marine Biology at Dillon Beach just north of San Francisco. It was midsummer, and the water was icy cold. All of these cold currents have their benefits, notably that cold, nutrient-rich waters support fish in plenty. They can also generate fog when the chilled oceanic air meets the summer-warmed air over the land. Summer fog brings enough moisture to maintain the redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) at Muir Woods, just out of San Francisco, and further to the north of coastal California. They do not, however, augment the winter rainfall, as does the Leeuwin Current; being strongest in winter, it also moderates winter chill.The coastal strip around Perth is frost-free, although heavy frosts can occur at sites like York further inland. There is one other distinctive feature about Australia, noted earlier in other contexts. With the exception of India, it is the only major landmass that is on the move from pole to equator – which means that most of our flora began its evolutionary story at higher latitudes. The distinctive character of southern Australia and its differences from other so-called Mediterranean lands has been explored at some length because it is against the pressure of the advertising world, which moulds popular culture. Because plants grow in similar climatic zones elsewhere does not mean that they will necessarily prosper here without the provision of supplementary water, nutrients, mulch and soil conditioning – and if they do flourish without any of the above, then they may well be dangerous. This applies especially to the bulbs that make their growth during our mild winter, flower and die down in spring, like the watsonias, or die down and flower in the early autumn, like the amaranths.

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The truth of the above was illustrated by a phase in the development of the botanic gardens at Kings Park. Along the southern scarp, with its superb views over Melville Water, there were a series of Mediterranean theme gardens; from the Mediterranean itself, from the Cape, and from southern California. At the time, this seemed an intelligent educational tool, but it was not a success. Most of the plants from the Mediterranean proper struggled, primarily because of the low nutrient status of the soils. Few survived. The same was true of many of the plants from the Cape and from California, with the exception of the bulbs and the succulents. They survived all too well, and began to colonise the steep slopes below. These beds were discontinued, and the botanic gardens now concentrate solely on Western Australian plants, but the Park Authority is still working to remove the escapees from the lower slopes.

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A recent real-estate brochure has the following about a new subdivision on a rehabilitated quarry site in Fremantle:

A l l i n a nam e Everything about Salentina Ridge – the name, visual identity, style and design – has been created carefully to reflect a Mediterranean inspired life-style. The name echoes the scenic beauty of the land’s surrounds and reflects its elevation, which provides views from every lot. The logo captures the essence of multicultural Western Australia and Fremantle, with the blend of water, hillside and the iconic significance of olive trees. Its lush greens and blues mirror the sweeping gardens, parklands and nearby ocean. Extensive care with landscape, infrastructure design and planning is being taken to ensure Salentina Ridge complements the beauty of the area and lives up to its Mediterranean inspiration.5

The map of Italy looks like a boot. The Salentina is the southernmost tip of the ‘Tacco d’Italia’, the heel of Italy, south of Bari and Lecce in Puglia. Its history is an overlay of many cultures: settled by the Greeks as part of Magna Graecia, later conquered by

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the Normans and became part of the Kingdom of Sicily, fought off the Turks at Otranto; later again, became a part of the Spanish realm and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ruled from Naples, and is now a part of Italy. Its claim to a multicultural identity is therefore beyond question. The steep limestone ridge at the end of the ‘heel’ of Italy runs south-east; it has a south-west face to the Gulf of Taranto and a north-east face to the Adriatic Sea. The core consists of Mesozoic and Tertiary true deep-water crystalline limestones. Our ridge behind Fremantle was once also a ‘limestone’ ridge facing west, although more properly described as a calcarenite, a sandstone One of the few weakly cemented with calcite. It has been heavily quarried, so the remaining outcrops ridge will be a re-creation. It will have some differences from its of the so-called namesake, which has a latitude of 40ºN as against 32ºS for coastal limestone Fremantle. It has more fertile soils and a milder climate, although the in Fremantle, mostly rainfall is lower, and it is never lush or green. The latitude of the a calcarenite with Salentina is that of King and Flinders Islands in Bass Strait, and of some hard calcitic Wanganui near the southern tip of the North Island of New caprock Zealand, just north of Wellington. The climate is buffered by the photo: George Seddon Mediterranean, of course, and there is sea on three sides of the

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narrow peninsula. It is very different from the calcarenite ridges of Fremantle, which face winter gales off the Indian Ocean and blistering summer heat from the setting sun on west-facing blocks. Sea views sell well, but the rational orientation for buildings in this climate is never west, but north for the living areas, with overhangs calculated to exclude the summer sun but welcome winter warmth The two sites may have olive trees and an intensely blue ocean in common, but the similarities will stop there. The architecture of individual houses and urban style are unlikely to have anything in common with Italy of the Mezzogiorno. Harmony between neighbouring building styles is not, as yet, a part of the Australian Dream. This may well be a subdivision with high standards, but it will still look like Australian suburbia and not like the Salentina. Molfetta, a few kilometres to the north of Bari in Puglia, is a sister-city of Fremantle, and the birthplace of many members of our Italian community. Further to the south, Lecce is a city with a magnificent architectural heritage, and an old university that includes within its offerings, courses in Australian Literature, presided over until recently by Professor Bernard Hickey, a redoubtable Australian expatriate.There are strong cultural links with Australia. The families from Molfetta will know the Salentina – but the advertising is not addressed to them; the target market will be young professional couples with the current tastes of that group, superficially those Australians of Anglo-Celtic origins, although in fact their ethnic origins may be Vietnamese or Malay, Chinese from Hong Kong or Singapore, Greek, or indeed, second- or third-generation southern Italian.The qualification is needed because southern Italians who left after the miseries of either world war are not likely to romanticise the land they left in this way, and they would also be well aware of the spuriousness of the comparison. The location of the Salentina in Puglia is not identified, and that is not needed; a diffuse Mediterraneity is being invoked for commercial purposes. This is common practice, and also part of a long tradition in Australia. Our towns were given names like Grafton, Newcastle, Lorne, Newtown, Launceston, Penrith, York, none of them in the least resembling their namesake in Britain; Italian Australians are now entitled to some nostalgic naming. It is not the name that is the problem. The olive is proffered as an icon. I like olives – fruit, oil, tree.We have one that is more than one hundred years old in our garden, and

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we treasure its gnarled distinction, grey-green leaves silvering in the breeze, and the fruit, most of it picked by Italian friends.The olive is rich in associations, religious, literary, historical; evocative of Homer’s wine-dark sea, the grove of betrayal, the bringer of news of receding flood in the beak of a dove, the symbol of peace, of Olympian victories. It is also a serious invader of the Australian countryside and bushland in areas like the Adelaide Hills. It is already a part of urban Melaleuca lanceolata Fremantle, however, with little scope for further invasion. on Phillip Island, It is iconic, beyond doubt, but of what? Another hemisphere, Victoria.The rounded canopy and other cultures, the evolution of Western civilisation. We share these cultural values, they are equally a part of the background of many of dark green foliage are evocative of the us, but it is not iconic of Australia. It might be time to redirect our dreams. We are here, and not somewhere else. There are design and Mediterranean, but planting alternatives. this species has a wide range along the south coast of Design Australia; it is known in Western Australia The Boboli Gardens in Florence have a magnificent avenue of Italian as the Rottnest cypresses sweeping down the slopes of the valley of the Arno, as do Island tea-tree. photo: George Seddon

many of the great gardens of Tuscany. Our own cypress, Callitris

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preissii, could be used to create a similar effect, and without any recourse to added fertiliser or supplementary water – but I have not seen it attempted anywhere in Australia, although it is often used as a background plant. It also responds well to clipping, and can be kept to a globe or ball, a form much used in Italian design. We have one on our street verge that I began clipping when it began to obscure visibility of oncoming traffic from the driveway exit; we now rather enjoy the ornamental effect – and it is never watered or fertilised. Another tree with a strong form and dark, almost black foliage that evokes the Mediterranean is Melaleuca lanceolata, variously known as ‘moonah’ and ‘Rottnest tea-tree’, found in coastal sites from Perth to Phillip Island in Victoria. It fills a design role close to that of the A fountain in Roman pine (Pinus pinea), not quite as big, but equally sharply Fremantle, defined. Both would flourish and meet the design criteria for the Mediterranean in Salentina estate described above, again without summer water or both style and literal fertiliser. provenance, but A strong case for using indigenous plant material in our gardens unlikely to invade can be mounted by pointing out the dangers of the alternatives.This neighbouring does not necessarily hold for design, however. There is no bushland incompatibility in using indigenous plant material in a ‘formal’ photo: George Seddon / setting, with paving, fountains, intersecting linear axes, the use of Simon Griffiths

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Gossypium sp., plants in large pots to mark strategic sight lines, the use of terracing, a member of the of water features such as fountains, the use of grey foliage and white Malvaceae, can, like flowers to cool, and dark foliaged evergreens to define. its cousin the The most common use of Australian plants so far has been in hibiscus, produce ‘bush gardens’, which generally aim at ‘naturalness’. As block sizes grow smaller, however, courtyard gardens become common, and this large silken flowers – but can do it encourages focus on individual plants, to which many natives are in a semi-arid well suited. Pittosporum phylliraeoides, for example, has very slender, environment. almost black, drooping branches. They have a Japanese delicacy that photo: Colin Totterdell displays elegantly against a bare limestone wall in a courtyard. Small groups of grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea spp.) and some of the cycads are also used in this way for dramatic effect, focusing on the character of Pittosporum the individual plant.The horticultural needs of Australian plants have phylliraeoides, as become much better understood in the last decade or so, and the graceful as the range and availability have increased substantially, but their design use willow but not so is, as yet, under-explored. thirsty, will survive This chapter lays the ground for the last two, but it is worth a chapter on its own because we are so easily deluded by the months without rain. photo: Colin Totterdell advertising world into somehow thinking that we are like Provence

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Blandfordia nobilis, or Christmas bells, is related to the lilies and, like them, is an attractive ground-level plant. photo: Colin Totterdell

Caladenia flava in the Stirling Range, WA.The terrestrial orchids, like this one, evade drought rather than endure it by flowering in spring and dying down until the next winter rains. photo: Colin Totterdell

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or Tuscany. We are deluded because we want to be, but are not The creamy spikes of like them, not in the least, other than that we have dry summers Melaleuca huegelii on and wet winters in southern Australia, which includes Perth, the slopes of Kings Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart and Canberra. We would be better off Park: a very attractive forgetting the term ‘Mediterranean’ altogether, and concentrating local shrub that on the many and significant differences rather than the meagre flowers generously correspondences if it were not for one item; we have much to learn in early summer from the best of Mediterranean design. photo: George Seddon

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s e v e n

o n

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d e c i d u o u s

have deciduous teeth. Our species gets one free replacement. Sharks and horses do better – their teeth continue to grow as they wear, at least for many years. All trees lose their leaves, but some do it continuously and replace continuously, and are known as ‘evergreens’. Even though they may never be really green, as with many eucalypts, they are never, if an ‘evergreen’, leafless. Deciduous trees shed their leaves in a month or so, after first withdrawing the nutrients in the reverse succession to the new leaves: chlorophylls, the green pigments out first, then the anthocyanins, the luminous yellow, orange and red ones last. These are the splendour of the Fall, as autumn is known in North America – a dramatically fitting name and a reminder of Puritanical origins. It is also etymologically proper. The word ‘deciduous’ has Latin roots. ‘Cadere’ is ‘to fall’, and ‘decidere’ is ‘to fall down or off ’. The Latin has given rise to several closely related words in English. All but one are specialised. ‘The Deciduata’, for example, are ‘all placental mammals that have a decidua’,1 a ‘decidua’ being ‘the lining membrane of the impregnated uterus in certain Mammalia’ [including our own species]; it forms the external envelope of the ovum, and is cast off at parturition’. ‘Deciduity’ is ‘a casting off ’; some insects, female ants for example, have deciduous wings that fall off after copulation. Many ungulates have deciduous horns that undergo annual replacement.‘Moulting’ is also a deciduous process. Trees may have deciduous leaves, bark and branches; the latter two are characteristic of many Australian trees, less common elsewhere.The lemon-scented gum (Corymbia citriodora), for example, grows its tall, elegant trunk by withdrawing the nutrients from its lower branches, which ‘die’, drop off cleanly at the base, and their drop-off point is then neatly repaired as the cambium grows in to fill the gap. Deciduous bark is one of the charms of many Australian trees. If a tree is said to be deciduous, however, the term refers to leaf-loss. There are many deciduous species in Australia, but they are not the majority, as in much of western Europe and eastern North America. Words such as ‘Deciduata’, ‘decidua’, ‘deciduity’ ‘deciduous’, are not of great age in our language; they begin to appear, coined from the Latin root, in Dr Johnson’s and Isaac Newton’s day, the later seventeenth century, as new attempts were made to understand and classify natural phenomena. As often happens, their use is not

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entirely consistent. It depends on when the ‘falling off ’ occurs. All trees lose their leaves through continuous loss and replacement. This is a common strategy. Without programmed cell death, or apoptosis, humans would have no fingers or toes. Instead, the distal limb-buds in the developing foetus would mature into plates, akin to the flippers of a dolphin or perhaps the web-feet of a water bird. Our skin is deciduous, constantly flaking off and being renewed. Our hair and our nails are ‘dead’, inert matter, but they continue to grow at their point of origin. ‘Life’ means many things; we are alive while our ‘vital organs’ function (i.e. the ones that are essential to life) – so that life is a macro-phenomenon, while at the microscale, cells die and are replaced all the time. We can be ‘brain-dead’ while the body still functions. We can be pronounced ‘clinically dead’ while there is still a multitude of living functions going on as usual in our bodies. What, you may ask, has all this to do with trees? It has to do with understanding processes, evolutionary strategies, and the intricacies of language, which can both clarify and confuse. It can help in thinking about differing environmental responses, especially in relation to the Australian vegetation compared with that of much of the northern hemisphere. Most of the conifers are evergreen, but their leaves are usually reduced to needles, and the northern ones are shaped to shed snow, with a dense, relatively even canopy, arrow-shaped in profile; they are well engineered to sit out the cold winters. Further south, in England, France and points east, most of the trees are angiosperms, and they are deciduous. The winter is too cold for growth, and they return their leaves annually to the soil beneath them, where they mulch, help keep the ground surface from freezing hard, decompose, and then release their nutrients for renewed spring growth.These are the latitudes in which the sciences were reborn, flowered anew in the Age of Reason, and later gave birth to genetic and evolutionary theory. In early thinking, deciduous trees were unconsciously taken to be the norm.They are not: even the oak, the nearest equivalent in the northern hemisphere to the role of the eucalyptus in Australia, has far more evergreen species than deciduous ones. We have three evergreen oak species in our own garden, where the soil is too alkaline to grow eucalypts. One is from Spain (Quercus suber), one from Italy (Q. ilex) and one from California (Q. agrifolia). Being deciduous is not always a fixed characteristic, either; there are some species which are evergreen where there is no seasonal

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variation, but deciduous where there is a marked seasonal change in rainfall and temperature, like the jacaranda ( Jacaranda mimosaefolia). That is within a single species; there are many genera with both evergreen and deciduous species, and the eucalypts (Eucalyptus and Corymbia) belong here.They are unusual in at least two respects: they can be deciduous of leaf, bark and branch, more so than any other group, and especially where bark is concerned; and as members of the Myrtaceae, they have an essentially tropical origin, yet have shown an exceptional capacity to adapt to dry and nutrient-poor environments. The great radiation of the eucalypts began in the Miocene, some 17 million years ago. Fossil evidence of the genus has been found recently in both South America and New Zealand, where it has long been extinct.2 In Australia, by contrast, the eucalypts prospered and began to develop a range of adaptive responses to soils of low fertility as their humid environment became increasingly arid. They also became at first fire-tolerant and, later, fire-demanding, which gave them a major competitive advantage over the plants that could not respond in this way. They are now an aggressive coloniser of many lands outside Australia, including parts of New Zealand, South Africa, the Mediterranean and California.

Deciduous

bark

Eucalypts have had a popular classification based on bark character from the early days of the First Fleet; the gums have deciduous bark, Eucalyptus tereticornis, the woollybarks and blackbutts, overcome with modesty, fail to or the forest redcomplete the full Monty, stripping only to the butt. The ironbarks gum, is closely have a dense hard furrowed bark, the trunk often a slender black related to the river stocking looking a little like Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge as red-gum and is painted by Toulouse-Lautrec. The function of the two stockings is distributed along dissimilar, however; one pair is designed to draw attention to their the east coast from termination, while the other is like an asbestos protection, designed Gippsland to New to char rather than burn. Combustion requires oxygen, not on offer Guinea.The bark is from these densely packed fibres. shed in strips, Then there are the stringybarks, which have stringy bark; the leaving a relatively peppermints, named for the distinctive odour of the crushed leaves; smooth trunk. and the boxes, which have a finely tessellated bark. Finally, the photo: Colin Totterdell minni-ritchis, which are in a class all on their own, discussed later.

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These crude classifications are still in use because they are still useful, although they break down in northern Australia,‘where there are too many Eucalypts which do not fit properly into any of these classes’.3 Another group, the bloodwoods, have rather coarse bark that may exude red kino (the ‘blood’) from lesions in the bark, but these are now in the genus Corymbia rather than Eucalyptus. These distinctions can be simplified further; there is deciduous bark and persistent bark, and they perform very differently in relation to fire.The species with a thick, dense persistent bark sit out fire, and even though they may lose their crown in a fierce fire, most of them recover through epicormic budding, a rare talent in the vegetable world (I believe that one pine species in New Jersey on the east coast of North America has this capacity). Most trees are killed by intense fire, as are eucalypts like the mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans). Its recovery strategy is at the opposite extreme from that of the resilient stringybarks and ironbarks. ‘Come, lovely death’, it pleads. Young trees will not flourish within a mature forest of mountain ash, only on a graveyard. After an intense fire, the whole forest is destroyed, and new seedlings then germinate and grow rapidly in the gift from the death of their progenitors – full daylight and a nutrient-rich ashbed. There are styles in stripping, and degrees of pyromania. The more provocative shed their bark in great long ribbons. Eucalyptus viminalis, the manna gum, is also known as the ribbon gum in New South Wales.The old bark persists on the lower trunk, but it sheds its upper bark in very long streamers, which frequently hang from the branch forks, almost pleading for a match. The woodlands east of Hyden in south-western Australia have some wonderful ribbonbarked eucalypts – E. georgei, E. pileata, E. sheathianea. Often the ribbons hang for half the height of these delicately slender trees and blow gracefully in the wind. Another group shed their bark in plates and flakes, of which the karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor) from the wettest corner of southern Western Australia is one example, and the sugar gum (E. cladocalyx) is Epicormic growth is regrowth from the another. The sugar gum has a limited natural distribution of diverse trunk after fire, a and isolated sites, from the southern end of the Flinders Ranges in capacity that is South Australia, where it is seen at its best, both around Melrose in almost unique to nature and in many of Hans Heysen’s paintings. It also turns up on the eucalypts. Kangaroo Island and as a stunted version on the eastern margins of photo: Colin Totterdell the Eyre Peninsula. It has been one of the most widely planted of the

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Corymbia maculata, a close relative of C. citriodora photo: Colin Totterdell

eucalypts, in parks, as a street tree, for farm shelter and as a plantation timber. It has also been extensively planted overseas, especially in the drier parts of Cape Province in South Africa. A few gums decorticate by shedding flakes or scales, of which the lemon-scented gum (Corymbia citriodora) is the best known. The shed scales leave behind them a voluptuously white trunk, often marking their departure with seductive dimples on the surface. Finally, there are the minni-ritchis, small mallees, of which there are seven species, all but one of them restricted to inland Western

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Minni-ritchi bark photo: Brian Snape

Australia. The exception, Eucalyptus minni-ritchi, is found over the border in central Australia. I first encountered this bark form a decade ago, by chance, in a dry streambed in the Pilbara south of Marble Bar. I thought it some of the most beautiful bark I had ever seen (it turned out to be E. ewartiana Maiden).The bark peels back from the slender trunks in minutely fine strips, sometimes gently undulating, that curl back on themselves, revealing their paler underside, thus highlighting by contrast the lustrous sheen. One of the few minni-ritchis that is well known to gardeners is E. caesia or gungurru. Eucalyptus caesia is regarded as ‘one of the best of all the flowering Gums’,4 an odd statement, since all gums are flowering.The intention is clear, however; they mean really flowering; eye-catching showstoppers, as this one is.The blooms are carried in generous drooping clusters of rose-pink and silver-pink, the latter from a subspecies, E. caesia Benth. subsp. magna Brooker and Hopper.This is known in the nursery trade as ‘Silver Princess’. The capsules are a mealy white, the young stems are a clear red, sometimes with a white dusting, and the leaves a glossy green.The decor, in short, is impeccable, but it is often planted, from the customary preoccupation with sexual attractants, to display only the flowers. It should be grown to display the whole tree, and especially the elegance of its bark, as should its companion species; thus, no underplanting, and clear space around it, as it grows in its natural environment, usually on granite outcrops in a dry landscape where it could not tolerate competition at the base.

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Gardeners have always valued some trees especially for the beauty of their bark; traditionally, the silver birch (Betula pendula), the crepe myrtle (Lagerstromia indica), a few of the prunus species, perhaps two of the relatives of the Irish strawberry tree. Arbutus andrachne from Greece and Arbutus menziesii from the American west coast both have deciduous bark that peels to reveal a burnished red satin trunk. Among Australian species, the paperbarks have always had their place. One of the most elegant small native trees is Flindersia maculosa, sometimes known as the leopard tree for its mottled yellow, white and brown bark. Flindersia spp. are generally rainforest trees, but this one is drought resistant and is found in open sunny situations west of the coastal ranges, although it is restricted to the better soils (it is said to have been used by early settlers as a cure for diarrhoea). But the strippers, with which we began, often have the best limbs, perhaps more for the finale than for the stripping process.The new bark on some of our species is intensely beautiful; Black sally (Eucalyptus stellulata) has at times an exquisite jade-green bark,

Eucalyptus rubida, or candlebark, an apt name for a tree that decorticates in ribbons, leaving a trunk that colours as richly as do the maples in New England, USA photo: Colin Totterdell

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Eucalyptus salubris, or gimlet, also with a trunk burnished like the flanks of a racehorse photo: Colin Totterdell

sometimes seen against the white snow with its reflected light. Corymbia torelliana is another species with a beautiful bark, persistent at the base, but deciduous above, revealing a slate-green surface. It has a limited natural distribution around Cairns and the Atherton Plateau, and is unusual for the genus in that it grows in competition with rainforest. It grows in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, enough to show the beauty of its new bark, but it seems to be cut back by the winter, which is hardly surprising. The rose gum (Eucalyptus grandis), this time from the southern coast of Queensland, is another gum with a short persistent stocking, but an upper trunk that sheds its bark in long strips to leave a powdered surface that is often a subtle green, although it can also be white and pale grey.The salmon gum (E. salmonophloia) in the goldfields of Western Australia earns its name from the rich sheen of the trunk colour, especially in late autumn; its rippling silken sheath is more like the limbs of a chestnut racehorse than its fishy eponym. Australian eucalypts have some of the most beautiful trunks of any trees anywhere.

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Evergreen trees do their sums (environmental factors do them for them) and conclude that it is a sensible investment to continue photosynthesis throughout the year. Deciduous trees and shrubs conclude that it is not, that it makes more sense to close shop for a few months, that the returns from photosynthesis do not compensate adequately for the stress costs. In Australia, these are not the winter chill, as in Europe, but winter drought, the Dry.That is why most of our deciduous species are in the Top End. The exceptions are few: Nothofagus gunnii in Tasmania is one. There are only three species of Nothofagus, the southern beech, in Australia. N. moorei is a magnificent evergreen rainforest tree of limited distribution in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. N. cunninghamii is a higher altitude tree in high rainfall areas in Victoria and Tasmania. N. gunnii, however, is endemic to Tasmania, a deciduous shrub or small tree that ‘turns’ in autumn, which is to say that the leaves are an elegant, almost translucent red, orange and yellow before they fall. Its needs are so specialised, however, that it is uncommon as a garden plant in Australia, although it is sometimes cultivated in the northern hemisphere, as it deserves to be. There is also a group of winter-deciduous trees in coastal New South Wales and southern Queensland, of which Melia azedarach is probably the best known in parks and gardens. This species, said to have originated in the sheltered valleys below the Himalayas, is quite widely distributed in southern Asia, as its popular names indicate: Indian lilac, Indian bead tree. In Perth, it is known as the Cape lilac; it is not native to the Cape, but has long been grown there, and may have been brought thence to the West, as with many early plantings. The Australian subspecies is usually known as Melia azedarach australasica (some taxonomists give it species rank). Despite its origins, it is tolerant of hot, dry summers, and was once a common street tree in southern Australian cities, especially Perth and Adelaide. It seems to have lost favour in the streets, but is still a handsome parkland tree, and is useful in being winter-deciduous. Another well-known tree from the east coast is the Illawarra flame tree (Brachychiton acerifolia), not, however, winter-deciduous. It drops its leaves just before flowering in early summer, when it

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becomes a cone of bell-shaped sprays.This deciduous behaviour is an aesthetic boon – it is all flower – but it is a specialised form of deciduous behaviour. The tree seems to summon up all its resources for the flowering, and dispenses with the leaves.The pattern is much more common in northern Australia, where, for example, the spectacular kapok tree (Bombax ceiba) is usually leafless when it flowers. Most of Australia’s deciduous and semi-deciduous trees and shrubs are in northern Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Kimberley, but not many are found in southern gardens. The erythrinas are probably the best-known exceptions, especially the bat-winged Erythrina vespertilio; sometimes Owenia verrucosa, Terminalia spp. and Erythrophloeum chlorostachys are grown. I am constantly surprised at how many tropical species are to be found in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, but few seem tempted to leap the fence into suburbia. In the Top End, many of the eucalypts and the bloodwoods are deciduous in the Dry. Corymbia bigalerita is sometimes known as the

Corymbia bigalerita, a winter deciduous ‘eucalypt’ from the Northern Territory photo: Colin Totterdell

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Corymbia bleeseri, another ‘eucalypt’ that by the end of the Dry has lost most of its leaves photo: Colin Totterdell

poplar gum because of its large heart-shaped glossy green leaves, which may be over 10 centimetres long. C. bigalerita is one of a group of eucalypts belonging to the subgenus Symphomyrtus, which has seventeen representatives in Kakadu. C. bigalerita is one of the species that loses all or most of its leaves. Just before the end of the Dry, however, it puts out bright green foliage against a cream or salmon bark, bearing little resemblance to the grey-green eucalypts common to the south. The ability to put out new leaves just before the rains is a feature of a number of the trees in the Top End, giving an uncanny sense that the trees know in advance. Of course they do, but from subtle atmospheric indicators that the Gagadju people had a name for, and is now often known as ‘the build-up’. Blakella is another eucalypt subgenus, predominantly tropical in distribution, and quite unlike the southern eucalypts. The best known is the ghost gum (Eucalyptus papuana), which has a wide distribution and is also one of the most graceful. Two spectacular species are more restricted to the far north, E. confertiflora and E. grandiflora.They are conspicuously deciduous, and their new foliage is also conspicuous, the large and wine-red leaves again appearing towards the end of the Dry. Their most botanically interesting characteristics, however, lie in their flowering and fruiting time, which just precedes the onset of the monsoonal rains. Flowering is followed quickly by the formation of thin-walled fruits. All other

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eucalypts have woody fruits, but the paper-fruited bloodwoods, as they are known, shed their seed within a few weeks of flowering, and are thus synchronised to the climate – they are timed to germinate and establish themselves as seedlings during the fourmonth wet season.To set seed later would miss a part of this optimal period for renewal, while seeds that are set earlier and lie around on the forest floor during the Dry, risk predation by birds and the ubiquitous ants. Both in their appearance and their adaptive behaviour, these eucalypts resemble the deciduous and semideciduous trees of the wet-dry or monsoonal tropics of India, Thailand and Africa more than they do the more familiar evergreen, woody-fruited eucalypts of the south. Corymbia is now accepted as a distinct genus, known popularly as the woody-fruited bloodwoods. Some of the northern species can be semi-deciduous towards the end of the Dry, but this is not general. Their main distribution is in the north, but they extend southward along both the west and east coast. They are rare in Victoria and South Australia, and do not reach Tasmania. The marri (Corymbia calophylla) and the red-flowering gum (C. ficifolia) from the extreme south of Western Australia are two of the most admired of all eucalypts for parks and gardens, for their deep green glossy leaves as much as for their handsome flowering. The marri in the west betrays its essentially tropical origins by flowering heavily towards the end of a hot, dry summer, when the tree is already under stress, presumably with memories of a monsoonal past that it has not yet wiped from the memory bank. Darwin woollybutt (Eucalyptus miniata) and Darwin stringybark (E. tetradonta), neither of them deciduous, are the two most common eucalypts in the northern part of the Northern Territory, and they are usually found together. They belong to the subgenus Eudesmia, which is poor in number of species in the north, yet richest in number of specimens. Both are easy to identify; stringybark has a fibrous, stringy bark that is persistent to the smaller branches. The fruit has four prominent external teeth (hence tetradonta), thought by some taxonomists to be a primitive character relating it to Angophora. Both species have dull green leaves, more or less pendant, and to southern visitors they look like rather scraggy versions of the more familiar southern species, in contrast with the large-leaved, colourful deciduous species, some of which get brilliant wine-red new foliage. Nevertheless, the forest and woodland dominated by Eucalyptus

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miniata and E. tetradonta is deceptive. It may read as monotonous bush to the speeding traveller, but it is not at all like southern forests in detail. The understorey is made up in considerable part of ‘rainforest’ species, closely related to species from the pockets of closed monsoon forest that are found in fire-protected habitats. These species are generally broad leaved and deciduous; they include genera such as Gardenia, Planchonia, Ficus, Terminalia, Buchanania, Croton, Erythrophloeum, Xanthostemon, Cochleospermum, and many more, all primarily tropical in distribution. Deciduous trees and shrubs are therefore far from rare in Australia, but most of them are found remote from the major centres of population.

Conclusion Cauliflory: flowers

Judge Barron Field deplored the monotony of the unchanging greyand fruits are green eucalypt forests that ringed him round in early Sydney. He was carried on the trunk raised to a different cycle, one of annual death and renewal, which is beneath the canopy a founding myth of the western world: of Orpheus and Eurydice, of of a number of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, of a death that brings life. He was tropical tree species, missing more than an autumnal leaf-fall. He mourned a metaphor, avoiding the one that had shaped his culture. burning heat of the Yet the wheel also turns in this southern continent, if to different sun; they are often rhythms. Leaves fall, bark falls, branches fall, die, are renewed. It is the fertilised by bats or way of the world, and of our world. Jacques, the melancholic of small mammals. Shakespeare’s As You Like It, recounts the seven ages of man. He photo: Colin Totterdell begins with the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms, and concludes: ‘The last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. The American comic, Bill Cosby, has Eucalyptus miniata, compressed the seven ages into: preschooler, Pepsi generation, baby or Darwin boomer, mid-lifer, empty-nester, senior citizen and organ donor. But woollybutt the organ donor gives life, and so the wheel turns. photo: Colin Totterdell

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The droughts to which we are so continuously subject render abortive all attempts at maintaining a garden in the English style; and point out to me, that stonework, and terraces, and large shady trees, the characteristics of the Hindostanee gardens, are more suited to our climate than English lawns and flowerbeds. John Thompson, Surveyor General’s Department, New South Wales, 1839 1 T h e r e i s a n essential truth in this paragraph, that good design should respond to the demands of the immediate environment, in this case that of Sydney. The topography is steep and the soils meagre, so stonework and terraces make good sense, while the summer is hot and humid; the ‘Hindostanee’ model is not as extravagant as it might seem at first sight. The droughts are basic to any understanding of context, not just in Sydney but in most of southern Australia, especially its large cities. If we invert the climate from Sydney’s wet summer and autumn combined with dry winters and spring, the context changes to the southern arc of the continent, from Perth to Melbourne and Hobart, where the summers are dry and the winters wet. John Thompson’s comments still hold: English lawns and flowerbeds are equally inappropriate, while his ‘Hindostanee’ desiderata remain relevant to design.2 Where the summers are dry, the style might be called Mediterranean rather than Hindostanee, but the two are linked historically, with origins in Persia, moving west with the ‘Saraceni’ in Sicily, the Moors in southern Spain, and travelling east to India with the Mughal Empire. Thompson’s advice has not prevailed. It did for a time, because there was little choice, but as soon as abundant reticulated water became available, at least in the larger cities, the lawns and flowerbeds sprang up across the land. Gardening is a cultural expression as well as an environmental response. Now that water is again a scarce resource, and is likely to remain so, the wheel has turned again, and there will be a new response. While the history of water use in the garden has had its own cycles, there has been a second cycle, the attitude to indigenous plants. This has been promoted in part because of their reduced demand for water and additional nutrients, but it has also been driven – whether acknowledged or not – by an emerging nationalism, a counter-cultural reaction to the ‘English’ aspirations. This is further complicated by the purists, who argue, correctly,

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that plants from south-western Australia in a Melbourne garden are as much exotics as are roses. The purists argue for local plants only. Design principles are obscured by this debate. Thompson’s main point holds; that garden design should be in keeping with the demands of the environment. He says nothing about the choice or nationality of the plants used. Nevertheless, his Mughal design model is remote from Australia. Does this matter? At a major garden conference in Melbourne some years ago, an eminent English garden designer, John Brookes, was critical of the aping of English cultural models in the garden, and suggested that we should be developing our very own design styles. He suggested that we might do so by using Aboriginal motifs. He was quite unaware of the insensitivity of this proposal, that non-Aboriginal middle-class Australians should now appropriate Aboriginal motifs, having already appropriated their land. If his proposal was inept, there was, nonetheless, reason for his uneasiness at what he was seeing of our garden culture. Crude nationalism has no place in design, but understanding of the design context must go well beyond planning for low water use and terracing for steep slopes. It should satisfy all the horticultural demands, including knowledge of soil type, resistance to wind and exposure in general. It should then meet pure design needs and considerations, like light intensities, foliage character, textures, colours and contrasts. Design, therefore, is an inescapably hybrid craft, with a practical base and ‘pure’ design overlays. ‘Pure’ design is international, yet it must also be appropriate to its setting, which is intensely local. Both the ‘purity’ and the ‘international’ component are open to challenge: in practice, the latter usually means exhibiting the current values of the dominant world culture, in our time, those of North America and Western Europe, while the ‘purity’ is restricted primarily to the visual, neglecting meaning. The distinction between formal design and actual plant choice is further blurred in a country like Australia, where the natural environment – the bush – is still a powerful physical presence in all the capital cities other than Melbourne. In most of Australia, responding to local context must therefore recognise the force, the form and the structure of this presence. Let me repeat: this is not, at least in the first instance, an argument for planting Australian natives,

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but rather, for responding to the forms, colours and textures of a highly distinctive local environment. These qualities have been better analysed by some of our painters and photographers than by garden writers. Art historians like Bernard Smith and Daniel Thomas give a clear account of the way in which visual images of the landscape have changed, beginning with the conventions of representation that ‘Europeanised’ it, followed by the grey-greens of the Heidelberg School of painters and the ‘golden summers’ of Arthur Streeton. Next came the ‘red shift’ that came with Tom Roberts as painters sought subjects further from the coast, followed in the mid-century by the often harsh landscapes of Sydney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams and others. Hans Heysen celebrated the South Australian sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) and Albert Namatjira the ghost gum (E. papuana). Photographers like Richard Woldendorp showed us the distinctive patterns of the Australian landscape. This is not the place for an attempt at extended analysis of ‘typically Australian’ forms, patterns and colours, which in any case are diverse. Some characteristics, however, are generally agreed: the dominance of grey-green and black-green in the foliage, the asymmetry of many trees and shrubs, the fineness of foliage, its surfaces often shiny enough to glitter with pinpoints of reflected light, the colour of new growth, the delicacy of many of the flowers. Flowers light up the world, a munificent gesture of the Creator for bees and men, women, honey-dibblers and bats. Flowers in the garden, however, might be seen as a bonus rather than a goal, although in Nature it is the reverse – there is (almost) no reproduction in the angiosperms without flowers, fertilised, seeded, dispersed, germinated. In the garden, however, flowers distract attention from structure, which should take precedence. They are ephemeral, while structure endures and gives form. The first care must be to choose healthy plants, and the second is to ensure that they flourish without constant environmental manipulation, adding fertilisers, pruning, constant spraying, pouring on scarce water. The third is a due regard for form, bark, leaf texture and colour; and when the flowers come, that they be in good proportion with the mass of the plant, that they enhance it rather than dominate it, and also of course that they relate to other nearby colours, and not just of other flowers. One of the strongest design arguments for using native and preferably local plants is that their flowers relate so well to the light intensities and

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background environment, in contrast with the dinner-plate blooms of some hibiscus and hydrangea cultivars, for example. All of these are design characteristics, and for the most part, visual – although one could then go on to relate these visual qualities to ecological factors and the environmental histories that have shaped them. One could also go on to argue that the plants that best relate to these powerful contexts are the plants that are already there, and so we return by the back door, arguing that local plants are often the most satisfying purely in design terms, without invoking either the nationalistic or the horticultural arguments. So, ‘The Return of the Native’ (my initial working title) on design grounds, as well as horticultural ones?

The vocabul aries of design Those who write about literature, art and architecture have had a sophisticated critical vocabulary at their command for many years. Good architects know their materials, and the knowledge is not preliminary to, but an integral part of the design process.They know the history and traditions of different building materials, their provenance, availability and cost, durability, performance capabilities in different environments and in different social milieux. If they are also socially responsible, they know and take into account the environmental and social costs of extracting them from their point of origin as a raw material. This should equally be so of the landscape architects, but is rarely the case and, lacking such knowledge, they may be reduced to using their materials purely for visual effects. To use the phrase of Julius Fabos, one of the leading teachers of landscape planning in the United States in the last century, ‘mere’ landscape architects are condemned to the role of ‘exterior decorators’, part of the fashion industry. Good landscapes and gardens have depth and intensity of meaning. The difficulties in the discussion and analysis of design when its raw materials are living, growing, changing, seasonal are compounded by the inadequacies of the currently available vocabulary, especially as applied to the design use of Australian plants. The poverty of the current analytical vocabulary of garden writers is striking. Look at some of the words. A Japanese maple or, for that

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matter, the variegated form of Agonis flexuosa, are said ‘to make attractive feature plants’; or a bed of pansies or kangaroo paws ‘make a great show in winter’. The designer does need to recognise seasonal variation, the ephemeral, change, as a painter does not. The words and their associations are the problem, not the concepts. We do not say of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers that ‘the yellow makes a nice show’ or ‘a lovely splash of colour’. ‘Featurism’ in architecture has long been a term of disapprobation. No art critic, to my knowledge, has said that the nose is an attractive feature of Rembrandt’s self-portraits, although it does stand out a bit in most of them.The difficulty is that useful design ideas lie behind both of my sample comments.They are undone by the vulgarity of the language, but it is a struggle to find alternatives that work. There are legitimate occasions in garden design for giving emphasis to certain plants by the way they are placed, or lit, or contrasted; to isolate them in a way that draws attention to some specific qualities, and good designers do this. The Chinese and the Japanese, especially, do this. They may manipulate a plant in high degree to draw attention to (but not, please, to feature) a particular aesthetic quality, or range of meanings, which may include suggestions of great age, endurance and struggle against the environment.

Using and designing with local pl ants The case for using local plants is not the nationalism expressed in the phrase ‘wog plants go home’ which was painted on the walls at the University of Melbourne some years ago. This was in response to an avenue of plane trees we had newly planted. Most of them had been snapped off over the weekend by a zealous patriot.The discussion to date nevertheless does lead to the conclusion that local plants are often the most suitable on both horticultural and design grounds. They need no supplementary watering or fertiliser beyond the establishment phase. There is no danger of their becoming ‘garden escapes’.They provide food for the indigenous fauna, especially birds, and they relate well to the local light intensities and the ambience of the large-scale setting – but they don’t always meet all the gardener’s design needs or practical requirements.

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Some rea sons for m aking e xceptions Gardening is one of the few activities in this highly regulated world of today that allows the freedom of individual choice, the right to do what we please in our own backyard. Provided that the basic social responsibilities are met (modest water demands, avoidance of plants that are likely to leap the fence and so on) this right should not be challenged unless there are over-riding circumstances. There was a programme on Australian television for some years, Burke’s Backyard, that I enjoyed for this very reason.The presenter was not at all judgemental. He regarded his subjects as creators of personal habitat, and enjoyed their expressions of individuality without any overt aesthetic criteria. A recent book by Richard Aitken, Gardenesque: A Celebration of Australian Gardens, is similarly non-judgemental. It is worth reading if only for its robustly catholic introduction, although not only for that. There are other considerations. There is the familiar conflict between the traditional cultural background with its British origins against the pressures of a new environment. Roses and daffodils may offend the purist, but they are still a part of that cultural background.There is a perceived need for diversity rather than the limited palette of the same old plants in every garden. There is a hobby element in gardening, a pleasure in experiment and in the exercise of horticultural skills. My defence of such planting is self-interested: we have many plants in our own garden that come from Madagascar and southern Africa, mostly succulents, and mostly in pots.Their water needs are minimal, and they are unlikely to escape; although they are undemanding of resources, they would not survive if their other needs were not met (above all, perfect drainage, full sun in winter but shade in summer). I have become much more purist than I was when I acquired these plants, but I’m not yet ready to throw them out. 2 . The above is, perhaps, special pleading. Of more general application is the case for planting some deciduous trees. In most of gardening Australia (i.e. Brisbane to Perth) there is a need for summer shade and winter sun. There are some native Australian deciduous trees, including species of Eucalyptus and Corymbia 1.

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from the Northern Territory, and the white cedar (Melia azedarach australasica) from the central east coast, but none of them is indigenous to Melbourne or Adelaide, Hobart or Perth. Where we live in Fremantle, the natural vegetation is a heathland with few trees other than Callitris preissii and the tuart (Eucalyptus gomphocephala), which is at the northern extremity of its range and often of poor form. 3 . Most Australian gardens are never fully dormant, in contrast with most European and North American gardens. For example, there are many indigenous and introduced species that are commonly used in parks and gardens because of their generous flowering in winter.The wattles are a good example.The coral tree (Erythrina sykesii) is another, this time an introduction from India. It provides generous shade in summer, is winter deciduous, with a magnificent display of scarlet pea-shaped flowers. It is much loved by the honey-eaters, wattlebirds and Port Lincoln parrots, all good Australian birds but not at all concerned with the nationality of this prolific food source. It is not invasive in southwestern Australia. Once established, it needs no supplementary water or fertiliser. In short, it passes all the tests for ‘gardenCoral tree (Erythrina worthiness’ as a desirable park and garden tree in Australia, except sp.) in flower only that it is not Australian. Finally, however, even if the species photo: Colin Totterdell

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is not, the genus has several Australian representatives, such as Erythrina phlebocarpa and E. vespertilio.

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The last argument, however, that at least the genus is Australian, is in my view largely specious. It is sometimes applied to other species and genera, for example, the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), which is planted in coastal locations around much of Australia. The justification of its use should not be that ‘at least it’s Australian’. A tree like this should be assessed by the same gardenworthy criteria used for the Erythrina, together with other design criteria, subject to ecological veto (invasive, water and nutrient demanding). ‘Garden-worthy’ is a familiar term in the Englishspeaking gardening fraternity (or sorority), but it is ambiguous; it can indicate that it fulfils a specific design need, or that it is attractive per se, or that it is ‘a good performer’, i.e. grows well and reliably without constant attention – or all of these things. Many Australian plants are valued for design reasons, and are widely planted far from their natural habitat. The lemon-scented gum (Corymbia citriodora), for example, is valued for its verticality, its elegant creamy trunk, the lightness of its foliage, and the perfume recorded in its popular name. These are legitimate design considerations, but ‘design-worthy’ can have yet other meanings. It is used to indicate that a plant is ‘choice’, a term much used by ‘plantsmen’ in the English gardening vocabulary. It again is two-faced. In the positive sense, ‘plantsmen’ prize and display horticultural skills, showing the knowledge to produce well-grown specimens in their gardens. Diana Snape has done this in East Hawthorn with the prostrate banksias from the south coast of Western Australia 3000 kilometres away, just as ‘alien’ as my succulents from Madagascar. A more extravagant display of horticultural skills is that of a prostrate Norfolk Island pine on the Crawley foreshore immediately to the east of the University of Western Australia. If ever a tree could be said to have emblematic value, it must be this, because it encompasses so much of our cultural history. During the Napoleonic Wars, the conifers of the Baltic were not available for ship masts, an essential strategic supply at the time. The Norfolk Island pine

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(Araucaria heterophylla) was seen as a potential replacement, and its availability may have been a significant factor in the occupation and settlement of the east coast of Australia. According to Robert Hughes, however, in a detailed account of this episode, ‘there is no hard evidence that it did so to William Pitt or his ministers’.3 What is indisputable is that the Norfolk Island pine, which has a very limited natural occurrence, soon became a popular tree for coastal planting around much of the continent, including even south-western Australia. Its popularity was due to the same qualities that suggested its suitability for masts, its striking verticality in a mostly flat continent, together with dark green foliage that reads well in the strong light intensities of most of Australia. These attractions were perhaps reinforced by memories of the tall conifers of northern Europe and all their cultural associations, including their role as Christmas trees.They are grown to this day for that use, and 2-metre tall specimens are commonly on sale in the cities every December. Given that the very essence of the attraction of this tree is its soaring verticality, its use as a prostrate form seems highly perverse. It is better seen as an extreme example of the European will to dominate the natural world, even in Crawley, even with a Norfolk Island pine. The conversion to the prostrate form requires horticultural skill, time and patience.The techniques were known and practised in the nineteenth century (vegetative reproduction using the crowns of the tree grow vertically, but cuttings taken from lateral branches grow laterally). The outcome on the Crawley foreshore is a handsome ground cover about one metre high, but with the span of a normal vertical tree, so its use, were it to be cultivated more widely, would be restricted to large gardens, since it would fill most of the courtyard of today’s small subdivisions. I find it interesting as a display of technique, but can ill-suppress the question: ‘Why bother?’What it does demonstrate with startling clarity is the European determination to dominate a new environment and make it adapt to its new masters, rather than the wiser course, which is the reverse.

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At the age of seventy, Tommy Garnett, a much admired gardening correspondent for the Age newspaper in Melbourne, gave the following description of a garden:

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A garden not made by human hands, and barely tolerated by them, alight with golden pennants and hibbertias, starred with boronia, a new species at every twist of the sandy lane – banksias and bottlebrush, correa and lasiopetalum, calytrix and clematis. One of the curving wide road verges above the steep combes on the northern edge of South Australia’s Kangaroo Island. Part of a huge, too little appreciated garden still to be explored.4

Metaphorically, this was a garden, God’s garden, but not in the sense that it was an intentional work of art by a human being. No intent, no garden. If, however, a lane such as this were deliberately contrived and planted with design criteria in mind, it would undoubtedly qualify as a garden or as ‘landscape architecture’, as does the entrance drive to ‘Cruden Farm’, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch’s home in Langwarrin, Victoria, which has a rusticity that is achieved through design. It also shows off that elegant verticality of the creamy trunk of the lemon-scented gum. Garnett’s and God’s garden on Kangaroo Island did not represent the untouched natural environment, either; the winding sandy lane

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The driveway to ‘Cruden Farm’, Langwarrin, Victoria: the home of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch photo: George Seddon

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added an open space, and the verges would have been cleared when the lane was constructed. Clearing the verges is usual, for pragmatic reasons, mainly to reduce fire danger and encroachment from trees on the road itself, but the effect is to increase available light, so that there is the opening of the road itself and then a layer of low, lightdemanding, flowering shrubs on each side, backed by trees. These three elements are common components of many designed spaces (e.g. the Hatfield garden in Sydney). It is a design prototype, and appears in many parks and gardens. The three elements are the cleared surface, in this case the road or path, the verge strip, and the background, in this case, the uncleared bush.The English perennial border and the Hatfield garden both exemplify this basic structure; in both there is a pathway or open space. The perennial border is the equivalent of the verge, and the background to it is usually a hedge or wall rather than natural bushland, but with the same effect of giving shelter.The verge is the space between road or path and the background, and this is optimal for the growth of low shrubs or perennials, sheltered from the wind, but blessed with sunshine – or in the English case, at least with light. In the natural environment, this is a colonising space. In Western Australia, for example, some of the best remaining sites for seeing generous displays of the wildflowers for which the land is celebrated are along the roads that cut through the forests of the Darling Plateau. Walk back a hundred metres into the jarrah forest, and the wildflowers are relatively sparse and with fewer species. In fact many of the verge species are pioneers, and need abundant light and freedom from tree competition to flourish.This is equally true of the shrubs in the Hatfield garden and the English perennial border, although in both these cases the ‘verge’ plants are not indigenous, but selected and placed for effective contrast in shape, colour and texture. The open space need not be a path or road. In another version of this sequence, the open space is a lawn, gravel, or even sand, as at ‘Karkalla’ in Victoria, surrounded in part or wholly by low shrubs and backed by trees, walls or fences. This model is often exemplified by the Australian backyard, and more fully, by some of our botanic gardens and many well-known English parks and gardens. Its prototype is the clearing in the forest, whether natural from fire and lightning-strike or artefact. All of these are examples of what ecologists call ‘edge phenomena’, and there are many studies showing that edges are

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The path from the side gate to the back door in the Hatfield garden in Sydney photo: Diana Snape

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A backyard – or clearing in the forest – in Melbourne photo: George Seddon

A version in Arizona, USA photo: George Seddon

‘Karkalla’ on the Mornington Peninsula,Victoria photo: Simon Griffiths

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naturally rich environments: to take one of many possible examples, they are usually exceptionally high in bird life. Some birds are restricted to forest, some to open meadow. Both are found in the edge habitat, together with additional species that are edgedependent, able to retreat to the forest for protection from hawks and other predators, and able to feed on the insects, pollen and nectar so generously available in meadow and edge plants. It is not therefore surprising that this is a favoured habitat for other species, including our own. Sea, beach and dune constitute such a sequence, for example. Behavioural studies have shown that edges are also a favoured human habitat. It is a comfort zone offering both prospect and refuge,5 usually food-rich and offering a sense of security. These responses persist, and even if their associations have lost their relevance, they help to understand the predominance of the design form. One last point; both the Hatfield garden and ‘Karkalla’ use plants that, if not strictly local, are at least distinctively and unmistakably Australian, yet the forms employed are widespread, and this is therefore a good illustration of the hybrid nature of garden design, combining elements that are regional with forms that are well-nigh universal. The range of examples given in the last few pages run the gamut of design intervention – the prostrate Norfolk Island pine flaunts the power of Homo faber, while the restraint of the ‘Cruden Farm’ driveway understates it. The next chapter looks at a different kind of human intervention, the categorising of certain plants as weeds.

Three

pioneer

designers

A few Australian plants began to be used in gardens some decades after first settlement, by the Macarthurs, for example, but conscious design based on the use of our own flora owes a great deal to three pioneers. Two of them have been well recorded. In Victoria, Edna Walling (1895–1973), and more so Ellis Stones (1895–1975), were working with stone, water and native plants in the late 1930s and 1940s. Although they were far from being the first to use Australian plants, their importance lies in their recognition that the effective use of ‘natives’ demanded a shift in design attitudes.Their achievements have been very thoroughly documented in a series of books and articles.

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Edna Walling was herself a prolific writer of journal articles, and she has four books to her credit. She has also had three books devoted to her work (Peter Watts, The Gardens of Edna Walling;Trisha Dixon and Jennie Churchill, Gardens in Time and The Vision of Edna Walling) as well as a detailed entry in The Oxford Companion to Gardens.6 Her gardens were never restricted to Australian plants, but her designs made room for them by her rejection of trim lawns, sharp edges and the Australian obsession with ‘tidiness’ in favour of the spontaneous, the sprawling, the irregular. In effect, she created a new aesthetic for Australian gardeners, although its origins were English. Ellis Stones also wrote. The first of his two books was published in 1971 and apparently sold about 50 000 copies, and between 1970 and 1975 he had a column in Australian Home Beautiful. He too was much written about, as in an outstanding book by Anne Latreille, The Natural Garden: Ellis Stones and his Work (1990). And he is generously reported in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Gardens, again by Anne Latreille. ‘Rocky’ Stones is usually described as an ‘original’, transcribing and recreating the very spirit of the Australian bush. There is undoubted truth in this; he shaped the tastes of a discerning clientele and set a trend that others have followed. The ‘naturalness’ of his compositions, however, has at times been overstated. There is nothing natural about lichenencrusted basalt boulders and a limited range of heath-land plants sitting on Silurian sandstones in the once-forested terrain of the prosperous eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Those living on the basalt plains further west could rarely afford his fees, even if they shared his tastes. His work is not nature, but art. A third pioneer was Oliver Dowell, but his design skills are not well known, although he was a close contemporary of Edna Walling and Ellis Stones, born in 1898. Gardens are ephemeral, and garden history often depends on the written record more than on the gardens. Unlike Walling and Stones, he did not write, and much of his work in Western Australia has disappeared, but in my view he had much in common with Walling’s protégé, Ellis Stones. My interpretation is that although both Stones and Dowell used indigenous plants, they employed a Japanese aesthetic, most probably derived, not directly from Japan, but indirectly from California. The influence was already established there among some of the garden elite, and quite often using Australian plants, which were widely used

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in California before they were similarly used in Australia. (A colleague tells me of his seeing our red-flowering gum, Corymbia ficifolia, labelled ‘native of southern California’ in an American garden nursery). The Californian gardens were illustrated in journals like Sunset Magazine, which at least Edna Walling knew, and she herself published regular articles in the Australian Home Beautiful. It is unlikely that a gardener’s wages stretched to the purchase of such publications but they are often to be found in the waiting rooms of doctors, dentists and the like. Through the 1930s, Edna Walling’s influence might have come to the West via the gardening articles of Edith Cole, her cousin. Edith Cole wrote several articles in 1934 and 1935 in the Western Australian Gardener after she had spent a year working in Victoria with Edna, and she also advertised her services as a garden designer in the same publication. In her articles she promoted the use of Leschenaultia in her designs. She continued to correspond regularly with Edna all her life.7 There is no evidence, The Sunken Garden at the University of however, that Dowell was aware of her work or writings. Western Australia Oliver Dowell’s best planting in the 1940s survives at the photo: George Seddon University of Western Australia in the Sunken Garden, a notable

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A cliff at Peppermint Grove, Perth, showing the landscape that was Oliver Dowell’s design model photo: George Seddon

Melaleuca elliptica in full sun at the University of Western Australia photo: George Seddon

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Suburban gardens contemporary with Dowell photo: George Seddon

composition of stone, water and trees that makes formal use of the elements of a nearby natural landscape.A specimen of Melaleuca elliptica became a focus. The twisted trunk of the small tree and its marked asymmetry (read ‘untidy’ in another vocabulary), together with the bare simplicity of its setting, show a Japanese delicacy and, in doing so, also conceptualise a view of ‘the natural’ – mediated by art. It is in marked contrast with the gardens of the suburban world around him. I was once intrigued by some accomplished window dressing in Paris. It was quite a large window, but the background was all black velvet, to show off just one diamond necklace, discreetly spotlit.That is the skill that Dowell uses. By eliminating clutter he ensures a critical focus so that we see – contemplate – the ‘essence’ of the tree’s nature.This is high art.

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Whence was it derived? Dowell was in England, France and Belgium in 1918-19 at the end of World War I, but it was not a garden tour. After his return to Western Australia he never left the state, although he travelled widely within it.We know nothing about his reading habits, but we do know that he was an acute observer of natural processes. He was also working at a time of limited water supply; practical considerations were relevant to his plantings. So perhaps was state pride: there had been very limited enthusiasm for Federation in coastal Western Australia, and it was carried by the voting strength of the goldfields – but the aesthetic response seems to dominate and to shape his compositions. Oliver Dowell He may have acquired an awareness of a Japanese garden at the end of aesthetic through master printmakers like Hokusai. Such work was World War I was a greatly admired by some of the French Impressionists at the end of transport driver in the nineteenth century and later. There is not the least likelihood France and Belgium. that Dowell saw the originals, but they were occasionally reproduced

Dowell, kneeling, works on the steps in front of Hackett Hall, University of Western Australia, c.1923.

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on wall calendars in Australia. The Western Australian flora in itself has some of the visual character that Japanese gardeners prized and recreated by pruning for asymmetry and the appearance of struggle against the elements. Dowell was using native plant material before Walling and was probably influenced by its character. If asked why he gave such prominence to a twisted and asymmetrical plant, Dowell would probably have replied that he thought it would look good. An observer might later say that ‘he had a good eye’, or ‘a sure touch’. The artist creates; the art critic may attempt to discover influences, and if they are beyond recovery, as in the present case, will seek to place the individual work in a broader context, one of which the creator might well be unaware. Another Dowell planting in the university’s Sunken Garden is that of a rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum). As the specific epithet cupressinum (cypress-like) suggests, it has weeping foliage, very fine and dark with a deep red tinge. This was also given prominence, A tree at Lake Biwa standing alone against a subdued background, and once again with a in Kyoto, Japan Japanese elegance. How Dowell acquired this graceful plant is not photo: George Seddon

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known – it is a New Zealand native, rarely planted in eastern Australia outside botanic gardens, and to the best of my knowledge, never planted before or since in Western Australia. In the 1960s it was a healthy and well-grown tree, but like Dowell, it is no more. He understood its horticultural needs, but after he left the university it died, most probably from root competition from some voracious later plantings, especially the gross Queensland umbrella tree (Schefflera actinophylla). Given the rarity and specialised needs of the rimu, it must have been a highly conscious choice on Dowell’s part, and complementary or antiphonal to the Melaleuca elliptica, one expressive of struggle, the other, grace. They are also horticulturally complementary; the Melaleuca facing north into the sun, the rimu facing south in light shade. Both of these plants look good (are aesthetically pleasing), but significant art echoes in the mind and has meaning, although the meaning will vary with the observer, and also with a single observer who ‘can see something new in it’ every time they look at it. Part of the meaning, at least for me, derives from the origin of the two plants. The Melaleuca is from south-western Australia and the rimu is a kiwi; they are both, however, peculiar to the southern hemisphere. The rimu is a true Gondwanan, a member of a family that was in existence before the break-up of the super-continent, when the land-mass that was to become Australia was near the South Pole.The

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The Japanese Studies courtyard in the Social Science Building, University of Western Australia. Drawing on the concept of yin and yang, Peter Armstrong designed the garden to express both the differences and the growing feeling of mutuality between Australia and Japan – by using local plants and materials in a Japanese composition.There is an affinity between the two, as Oliver Dowell discovered. photo: Michal Lewi

The Rimu in full shade, University of Western Australia photo: George Seddon

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Huon pine from Tasmania is the closest Australian relative. The rimu is thus a survivor from a cool, moist, shaded habitat, while the Melaleuca has a much shorter evolutionary history, one that took place in a relatively dry and harsh environment. Of course this is merely repeating what I have already said about the horticultural requirements, but it also explains them and makes, for me, a part of their meaning. Whether or not Dowell could or would have articulated his intentions in this way, there is no way of knowing. His understanding of his motives may well have been intuitive. It is the product that speaks. His Sunken Garden in its aesthetic understanding is so remote from the neat gardens of neighbouring suburban Nedlands that Dowell should be ranked along with Ellis Stones as one of the pioneers in the effective design use of Australian plants. All three – Edna Walling, Ellis Stones and Oliver Dowell – subscribed to an old Latin tag: Ars est celare artem (the essence of art is to conceal the art). Such a view is the privilege of a mature and secure society. Australia’s early years were neither, taken up with imposing and maintaining order, both on man and nature. This was to be reflected in many gardens, not a leaf out of place. There is a short Japanese poem, a haiku, in which a gardener rakes up the fallen leaves from the gravel path; the owner then walks down the path and lightly shakes a branch so that a few more leaves strew the way. This is not an Australian story or practice, but Walling, Stones and Dowell would have understood it. All three shared a love of stone in the garden. It is a love I share. Dowell used the local calcarenite and limestone caprock, and did so with the skill of a craftsman. Edna Walling used flag-stones, an ageold tradition in Europe but rare in Australia, where fissile sandstones are not so easily available, and their effective use requires specialised skills. Ellis Stones went to a great deal of trouble over his basalt boulders, both in finding and selecting the ones he wanted and then in using them. There was always much experiment in the placing, and experiment with large boulders was arduous in the extreme.Very often, a boulder chosen with such care and transported with such difficulty was, in its final resting place, barely visible, two-thirds of it under the ground.The boulders flanked his pathways, often of gravel (‘Lilydale toppings’), with weathered railway sleepers, or ties, as risers. The patently new was anathema.

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Common practice was otherwise, and there was much support for the smooth and even red-painted path from gate to front door. Easy to find your way when you came home at night after a few beers. Handy when you nipped down in your dressy, half-awake in the morning, to pick up the milk and paper from the letter-box. Far safer than those decaying old railway sleepers to stumble over, and full of nasty splinters – there’s one in our street now, with uneven paving slabs, too. My cousin Mavis nearly broke her ankle, grazed her knees and wrecked a new pair of nylons when one of her high heels stuck in a gap between slabs. Good name that: crazy paving.

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n i n e

W e e d s

If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.

Matthew 18:9

is a place of primal innocence. In practice, it is a place of unending conflict between human aspiration and natural forces. Although the most innocuous version of the totalitarian state, the garden nonetheless is a bounded territory ruled by an arbitrary despot from whom there is no appeal. The wise gardeners adapt their practice so far as may be to natural forces, but this can never be total; if it were, there would be no garden.The very concept of a weed illustrates this to perfection. Weeds are stateless persons with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution. They are dissidents against the established order, that of an hierarchical and apparently static world, and therefore must be excluded, ruthlessly exterminated or expelled beyond the boundaries of society to the furthest corners of the earth. In this, they resemble the British settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, and inversely, the White Australia policy one hundred years later. A familiar definition of a weed is that it is a plant out of place, a splendidly ambiguous concept. Who decides the proper place and rank of a given plant, and by what criteria is it considered to be out of it? A kinder definition is that a weed is a plant whose use we have not yet found.Weed-dom is always contingent; belladonna might not be tolerated in backyards where there are children, but be cultivated in a homoeopath’s garden. Weeds come in three categories: agricultural weeds that inhibit production, or are thought to do so, environmental weeds, and weeds of the garden, the latter two being complex and thought-provoking. In being stateless, weeds invoke official wrath, at both state and federal levels in Australia, where we have a National Weeds Strategy that defines a weed as ‘a plant which has, or has the potential to have, a detrimental effect on economic, social or conservation values’. I suppose we all have the potential to become criminals in certain circumstances; ‘potential’ seems to me an awesomely inclusive term. There are also State Weed Plans. The plan for Western Australia (2001) tells us that ‘prevention, early detection and early intervention are the most cost-effective means of weed management’; that in ‘Australia’s agricultural systems, weed control costs have been estimated at 20 per cent of production costs’; and that ‘Without a substantial change in the way weed problems are tackled, the longThe garden as myth

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term impact of weeds on the economy, environment and community may approach, or even exceed, that of salinity’. Agricultural weeds are a human construct, defined pragmatically and anthropomorphically, and have been around for a long time. Poor mad King Lear was crowned with them: As mad as the vex’t sea; singing aloud; Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the weeds that grow In our sustaining corn. [IV. iv]

Here the antithesis is explicit: the corn is sustaining, and the weeds are its (and thus our) enemy. Presumably there were no weeds in Eden, but out of it, agricultural weeds have grades. Some are formally defined by agencies of state as ‘noxious’, meaning harmful (to man or man’s beasts). Environmental weeds are almost the reverse, defined antianthropomorphically. There is some overlap between agricultural weeds and environmental weeds, but most of the latter are garden plants that have leapt the garden wall. Thus human actions have become a corrupting foe to the purity of the state of nature before the Fall. The last group, garden weeds, again have some overlap with agricultural weeds, but differ greatly in values, which are individual, personal, and usually have a strong aesthetic and cultural component. What all three groups have in common is that their status as weeds comes from their being contrary to human intentions and design, although the intentions and values are diverse, and held by differing social groups. In being contrary to design, they are the other side of the coin. No design, no weeds. That is why they are discussed in proximity to my chapter on design. A ‘weed’ is the antithesis of a ‘desirable’ plant, and both belong in the domain of intentionality: without design intentions, there can be no weeds, because they are negatively defined.

Agricultural

weeds

The simplest case is that of agricultural weeds; they are weeds because they are inimical to a known land-use, usually for growing

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Prickly pear (Opuntia sp.) in Queensland photo: Colin Totterdell

Cape daisy (Arctotheca calendula) photo: Colin Totterdell

Paterson’s curse (Echium plantagineum) in South Australia photo: Colin Totterdell

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food crops or for pasture. This sounds straightforward, but weed status is both culturally and locationally defined. Water hyacinth (Eichornia crassipes) is a weed in Australia but not in southern China, where it a familiar component of the village fishpond. In traditional Guandong villages, the fishpond is the site of the village lavatory, built to project over the water, and of carp, which feed on the morsels so provided, while the carp are themselves eaten in due course. The wastes go back into the pond, and the water hyacinth is regularly harvested to use as a fertiliser on the rice fields. This stable cycle has been turning over successfully for at least a thousand years. What is for Australians a noxious and troublesome weed is for the southern Chinese a resource. The attitude to grain crops appears to have undergone an historical change-of-status in the Near East and Europe, although the historical evidence is incomplete. Wheat grows magnificently in south-central France and further to the east in similar environments, including those from which it originated in Asia Minor. Other grains such as oats and rye were once seen as weeds in the wheat fields, but as one moved north, rye became the crop, and the stray heads of wheat were seen as the weed. Another historical change in Europe,

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Sheep sorrel (Acetosella vulgaris) at Kosciuszko, New South Wales photo: Colin Totterdell

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but a recent one, is towards the plants like the field poppies (those of Flanders fields), corn-cockles, primroses, woodbine and the rest. These are celebrated in Shakespeare, but they virtually disappeared in Britain as the herbicides of industrial agriculture took their toll. I first saw all these once much-loved plants some fifty years ago in the hedgerows of the Loire Valley when I was on a walking tour, but they had already gone from Britain. Now they are back. A seed mix emulsion is sprayed onto the road verge in many areas, and some species of course reinvade the agricultural land, but are recognised as part of the rural heritage.Weeds to heritage in twenty years, but they have had a diverse cultural history. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania some time of the night… [II. i]

This is Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is also a man who grew up in rural Warwickshire. The hedgerow plants grew on banks that were there because years of passing traffic had cut the lanes below the level of the surrounding country and the soft soils of the West Country. Titania must have been a hardy Queen of the Fairies to sleep on musk roses and eglantine, both of which have vicious thorns, while the woodbine is more commonly known as bindweed, smothering all it twines around. To an ecologist, all of these plants are pioneer species, as are most weeds – the opportunist plants that generally have seeds with long viability and that spring up wherever there is disturbed ground. In areas that are ‘undisturbed’ these opportunities arise from wildfire or storm damage, and the pioneer species take their chance, later to be overshadowed and eliminated by successional stages of growth. In England, however, the land has been ‘disturbed’ by human agency for a very long time, and these hedgerow plants are arrested at the pioneer stage, never to be replaced by woodland or forest, the later stages. The irony of the story is that they were later eliminated altogether by human agency, and then restored again by the same means, as retold above.Thus the hardy Titania has her (now noisy) bed again. May she sleep well. In England, most of the oak and beech forests were felled long

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ago to grow food crops, to graze sheep, build ships and make charcoal. At the other end of the world, in Western Australia, some extreme environmentalists have argued that the indigenous vegetation that has been destroyed to grow wheat has greater potential value than the wheat. Certainly the wildflower displays in spring are a major attraction, and it is also argued that the local vegetation may have all kinds of benefits, for example in medical research, that are as yet barely explored. Government policy currently leans towards coexistence. Roadsides that were covered in a rich display of wild flowers thirty years ago now offer nothing but wild oats and the like, which have smothered the wildflowers, have lost a visual resource, and are now a fire hazard. The remedial action taken to date is to require a set-back of ten metres from the fenceline when new clearing is undertaken, and this will slow down the loss – for a time.

Envir onmental

weeds

Environmental weeds are, on the whole, a specialty of the settler societies in the Americas, southern Africa and Australia, where there are still large tracts of relatively ‘undisturbed’ forest, woodland and grassland, all subject to ‘invasive weeds’ which may disrupt the ecology. The Nature Conservancy in the United States gives some good examples in that country: Some of the worst invasive species are those that alter normal ecological processes. For example, in some deserts fire is rare. Exotic annual grasses may form a flammable carpet that can spread fire easily, and as a result the frequency of fire increases.The native plants are soon killed, and the invasive species spread even further. As a result, what was once a biologically diverse desert may become a solid infestation of just a few invasive species.

This case is well argued, and it has to be taken seriously, but the language is powerfully emotive. ‘Invasive’ is a word alive with threat, and ‘infestation’ suggests the plague and the urgent need for a pied piper to lead the invading rats to their destruction. It is also assumed that the Sonoran Desert in the south-west of the United States has already achieved its best use in being desert. It is worth noting that

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the primary threats of invasion come from either agricultural production or gardens. In south-western Western Australia, most of the weeds that have smothered the tapestry of wildflowers along the roadside verges have come from adjoining agricultural land-use or, as in western New South Wales, have replaced the original vegetation, eaten out or trampled to extinction by travelling stock. At some point choices may have to be made between a pristine environment and food.

Weeds

a s

alien

invaders

‘Weed’ is a derogatory term, but the derogation can be backed by diverse attitudes. A weedy specimen in our own species tends to be tall and slight in build, exempting high jumpers, basketball players and those who excel in most field sports, who are often tall and slight, but are no more considered weedy than rugby union men. One use of the word highlights the arbitrary nature of language, as in the question ‘Want some weed?’ This is the weed, marijuana, but its use seems to be ironic; both the name of the plant and its users signify a disassociation from the conformist middle-class society and its values at the time. It also usually represented a generation gap in the sixties, which is when the word had currency. However, ‘the weed’ had long been applied to a predecessor from Virginia – tobacco. Tobacco was used as snuff and in pipe for three hundred years in Europe before the appearance of the cigarette. Both pipe and cigarette are now facing extinction, at least in Australia, where it has been anathematised for a decade or more. Cigarettes were smoked in the twentieth century at all levels of society, from Gauloise to Craven A, so it was not a social marker (although the choice of brand may have been). Nevertheless, the word still seems to have had a selfdeprecatory ring to it, a kind of cheerful shrug admitting addiction. The cheerfulness has now abated in the face of current knowledge of the consequences. Weeds take many forms. The word was originally applied to herbaceous plants, but has been extended in more recent times to shrubs and trees. One example of a tree that is seen as an invader and also as a story of resistance to change and the new is given in the story about the introduction of the poinciana (Delonix regia) in the Kimberley. If it is seen as an invader, however, so must have been the

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first boab, not so very long ago in geological terms, had there been human beings to observe its arrival. Behind this concept of invasion is a very old world view of the fixity of Creation, timeless and unchanging. It is a pre-evolutionary world view.

The

Empire

strikes

back

Politically speaking, Australia was colonised from Britain two hundred years ago and, since then, by immigrants from many lands. Biologically speaking, however, Australia has been one of the most aggressive of colonisers. The Nature Conservancy (USA) has long lists of invasive plants around the world, and Australia figures large. In Brazil, for example, the list includes Acacia mearnsii, Casuarina equisetifolia, Eucalyptus robusta, Melia azedarach and Pittosporum undulatum. National treasures here; weeds in Brazil. In Cape Province in South Africa, 42 per cent of the worst plant invaders are from Australia, with only 3 per cent from southern Europe, 1 per cent from California, 15 per cent from Central America and 27 per cent from Central America.1 This information comes from Plant Invaders, Beautiful but Dangerous, an official publication of the Department of Nature and Environmental Conservation of the Cape Provincial Administration, Cape Town, and it is very thoroughly researched. In the short list (of the worst), there are nine species of Acacia (A. baileyana, A. cyclops, A. dealbata, A. decurrens, A. elata, A. mearnsii, A. melanoxylon, A. pycnantha and A. saligna), two eucalypts (E. gomphocephala and E. lehmannii), Myoporum insulare and Pittosporum undulatum. It is worth noting that with the exception of the two eucalypts and one acacia, these plants are not from the west, but from south-eastern Australia. There are several hakeas, and the Victorian tea-tree (Leptospermum laevigatum), which is a weed in parts of Western Australia also. This book was written in 1978; it includes a list of Australian plants that were considered potential invaders: all of them now are. The ministerial foreword remarks that ‘Plant invaders can be seen as polluters of our proud natural landscapes’ but the substance of the text is pragmatic: many of the invading plants are a fire hazard. They are a threat to the tourist industry.The renown of the Cape flora has resulted in a multimillion rand cut-flower trade. It has also been a scientific laboratory. Australian plants are widely distributed in southern Europe, California and Yunnan in China. In Portugal, for instance, several

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species of eucalyptus have taken over much empty land, especially along road verges. Driving down many roads is like driving down a grey tunnel.The adaptability of so many Australian plants in different environments is due, as all reports emphasise, to the freedom from their natural pathogens and predators at home. This gives them an advantage over the local flora, but their adaptability is also a product of their home environment, which is harsh by most standards; they survive on nutrient-poor soils, and have the ability to regenerate rapidly after fire and to withstand a variable rainfall, including frequent drought.They have been brought up tough.

Garden

weeds

Garden weeds are not at all straightforward, in that other than in the kitchen garden, they do not inhibit food production – although garden plants commonly considered as ‘desirable’ are often potential or active environmental weeds once they leap the fence. Most garden plants in common use are ‘out of place’, ‘displaced persons’ in being far from their original milieu, and their collection and distribution, much of it in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, are part of the imperial aggrandisement of Europe in those two centuries, bringing back tribute from the ends of the earth. Garden plants that are uninvited come in several categories, indicating degrees of tolerance or repugnance on the part of the gardener, which is of course highly variable.They can be described as volunteers, self sown, spontaneous, or just plain weeds.The uninvited plants in our own garden in Fremantle are bound to be idiosyncratic, determined both by location and personal preferences. It is unlikely that many gardens have an identical list. Most of the annual grasses are on everyone’s list. We don’t get many, but when we do, we pull them out well before they seed, as with thistles, docks, oxalis, plantain and the like. Our worst weeds are undoubtedly onion grass or Guildford grass (Romulea rosea: Iridaceae) and onion weed (Asphodelus fistulosus: Liliaceae), both of them almost ineradicable. Worse, the onion weed in leaf is almost indistinguishable from the attractive African star flower, Triteleia, until it flowers, which is too late for effective action because the corm has already multiplied into a mass of small cormlets, each of them able to regenerate the plant. The onion weed is unrelated to the true onion, but the leaves smell

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like onion when crushed. Winter grass (Poa annua) also needs watching but, since we never let it seed, it is not a serious problem. Pennisetum alopecuroides is regarded by most Perth gardeners as a weed that infests waste land, like nearby Buckland Hill. It is often admired in our garden, especially now that grasses are in vogue, by the same people who regard it as an invasive weed in Buckland Hill. Toadflax pops up annually with us. The species in our garden used to be known as Linaria cymbalaria, but it differs from the typical Linaria, which flowers in small spikes, whereas our variety lacks spikes, and it is now known as Cymbalaria muralis. The whole group still goes by the popular name of ‘toadflax’, however, and the small flowers all have the same shape as tiny snapdragons. Cymbalaria muralis has delicate flowers of light blue to purple, with white patches and yellow bumps in the throat. We quite like it until it smothers all in its path (another popular name in England is ‘Kenilworth ivy’, which should be a warning).This plant is native to parts of the Mediterranean and the milder parts of southern England and Ireland. It is generally regarded as an attractive part of the natural flora where it appears, and also as a garden plant for the rockery and elsewhere. It does not seem to be especially invasive in Europe.With us it is a weed. What it does demonstrate (hence the detailed account) is that the similarities between the so-called ‘Mediterranean lands’ is perhaps best demonstrated through the sharing of weeds. Most of ours in Western Australia are from South Africa and the Mediterranean, with a few from South America and California The two most improbable weeds in our garden are the much praised Mexican poppy (Romneya coulteri ) and the Queensland plum pine (Podocarpus elatus). Romneya has great white flowers of crinkled crêpe paper with a vivid orange boss, but in our garden it proved to be fiercely invasive with voracious roots that spread far and wide and then sent up new plants. Digging it up was never enough, as there always seemed to be a small piece left that would be enough to begin the invasion all over again, so I had to resort to weed killer, which I rarely use. The plum pine was also unexpected. It is rarely grown in Perth, but we planted one fifteen years ago in very poor soil, mostly limestone. It flourished, and fruited prolifically. The Podocarpaceae are conifers with an ancient pre-Gondwanan lineage. P. elatus is restricted naturally to pockets of rainforest around the New South Wales – Queensland border. It comes up all over our garden. We have left two self-seeders grow into trees, and there are

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others about a metre high sitting patiently in the shade of other trees, waiting their chance to take off if a clearing appears. They illustrate well that many ‘rainforest’ trees are not dependent on high rainfall so much as freedom from fire, a freedom we hope they may continue to enjoy. If your prize specimen, such as Romneya coulteri, can be my weed, the reverse also holds. Writing in Hortus, John Akeroyd gives some amusing English examples: Aubrieta deltoides’ fate has been to become a debased horticultural cliché, the prawn cocktail of alpine gardening.Yet here is one of the most characteristic and, to my mind, one of the most welcome of all spring-flowering plants in cultivation. From as early as February its hummocks on a south-facing wall and rocky banks [are] splashed with flowers, and it has a long flowering season. It pays its rent, survives for a long time, seeds itself discreetly – and it is neat enough.Were it rare, we would all exclaim ‘So choice!’2

He then goes into reverse. Perennial cress would be regarded by most English gardeners as undesirably invasive in the cherished lawn grasses. Not so: Soon after moving to my present garden, my disdain for green baize lawns was rewarded by a glorious patch of this elegant hairless perennial cress [sc. Cardamine pratensis].3

In

praise

of

weeds

A memorable poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’, concludes with a rhetorical question: What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left. O let them be left, wildness and wet: Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

It is unlikely that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a gardener, but in any case, his ‘weeds’ have to be read in context.The previous verse is:

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Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

These are the plants that might be expected around a ‘darksome burn, horseback brown’ and none of them would normally be considered weeds, so one might be tempted to see the word as poetic licence; but in ‘Spring’ he does it again: Nothing is so beautiful as spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush –

Hopkins is celebrating the spontaneous, free of human control. Shakespeare was too much a countryman to praise weeds, but he saw them in perspective: there are worse things in the world: The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die, But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. [Sonnet 94]

Weeds

a s

colonists

A spit of land in Lake Ontario built of rubble ‘landfill’ was intended as a part of Toronto’s outer harbour, but was never used for that purpose. Michael Hough, an English bred and educated landscape architect based in Toronto has studied its evolution over more than three decades. He calls it a ‘fascinating example of the regenerative processes of nature’.4 It was colonised by many vascular plants, some of them native but more than half of them introduced.What Hough was interested in was not provenance (where the plants came from) but succession and habitat creation. He records with pleasure the arrival of Rumex maritimus and Senecio viscosus; both are Canadian, but were recorded here for the first time in metropolitan Toronto. One is the golden dock, the other is sticky groundsel. Most gardeners regard dock and groundsel as weeds.

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Hough never uses the word. His interest is in an evolving landscape which ‘soon began to attract migrating, nesting and wintering birds … Of the mammals, raccoon, skunk, muskrat, rabbit, Norway rat, groundhog, and finally, coyotes, had been sighted’. Twenty years later, the total number of bird species had grown to 250, including significant numbers of waterbirds. In short, this urban wasteland in downtown Toronto had become ‘one of the most significant wild life habitats in the Great Lakes Region’.5 Hough and a group of the like-minded fought off plans to turn the land into a manicured urban park, formally constituted themselves as Friends of the Spit, and established the following management principles, which have now been in place for many years: • The best philosophy for the Spit is to ‘Let it be’.The least intervention scheme will be the best. • An ongoing review committee be established to review and monitor habitat and species management proposals. • Habitat and species management shall only be undertaken on the soundest of academic experimental conditions (an example are the barges floated out during the breeding season for nesting common terns that has assured their continued success). • If plantings are to occur, then native species should be used. • The Spit is always an evolving laboratory. It has evolved to its present vegetative state by natural seed and root transport. Therefore speeding up natural processes is not desirable. • Woodland clearings ‘for aesthetic reasons’ is inconsistent with a wilderness park concept.6 There is a clear assumption in these strategies that Nature knows best, and that processes of successional change will work unaided. Some plants are ‘primary colonisers’, but there are no weeds, and the provenance of the plants is not questioned. The Friends of the Spit put out the welcome mat for ‘invasive’ plants; come on in (the water’s great!). This is in contrast with the American Nature Conservancy in the Sonoran Desert, working to exclude ‘invasive’ plants and to maintain its ecological purity, as do those who work for bushland conservation in Australia. I have sympathy with the objectives of both groups. Circumstances differ. It is true that ‘weeds’ colonise disturbed

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ground, but also that they may be eliminated as a natural succession moves towards a climax vegetation. But dysclimax is now common, because much ground is now ‘disturbed’ repeatedly, and arrested at the early stages, as with, for example, the grasslands of Imperator cylindrica in parts of South-East Asia, where it is known variously as alang alang and kunai. Our own species is a supreme coloniser, and in that sense a weed species; highly invasive and adaptable, with one of the prime weed characteristics, neoteny (permanent immaturity) – that is, we physically resemble juvenile anthropoid apes more closely than mature ones, in features such as reduced body hair. Thinking about ‘weeds’ opens many windows into the cultural history of our species, reflected in the language that different groups have used to legitimise their perspectives and values – and so I conclude as I began: there were no weeds in Eden.

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e p i l o g u e

of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, Aboriginal societies, which were many and diverse, made up a multicultural complex. They had in common that they were all, perforce, adapted in their different ways to the physical realities of the territories of Australia. The words ‘Aborigines’ and ‘Australians’ are both European coinages. ‘The Aborigines’ was used for convenience to generalise the earlier groups of disparate people, making the same confusion between nationality and ecological provenance as is still made with plants. In the case of the Aborigines, the process is now in reverse, with a return to pre-invasions groupings like Nyoongah in south-western Australia, the Kaurna of the Adelaide area or Krautungalung of Gippsland. This is healthy, since the European generalisation is both imposed and inaccurate in its implication that the various groups were ‘here from the beginning’, the literal meaning of the term. ‘Australian’ in a different way is just as arbitrary, whether applied to people, plants or animals. ‘Australian’, if taken literally, means ‘of the southern hemisphere’, which includes New Zealand, most of South America, half of Africa and all of Antarctica. It is one more linguistic example of the European global domination that has characterised the last three hundred years. The corresponding term, Borealians, of the northern hemisphere, is not heard, for the obvious reason that it would include Asians as well as Europeans and a variety of North Americans. This is a further confusion of political with geographical and ecological boundaries, although in practice, plant relationships are strongest within rather than across the two hemispheres, and the Australian flora is often best discussed as a ‘southern hemisphere’ flora – although even then, we must allow some latitude to the position of the equator. B e f o r e t h e a r r i va l

Floral

wealth

photo: Colin Totterdell

What is beyond doubt is that the flora is a rich one. An awareness of the interest and beauty of the flora of the Australian continent (and an arbitrary selection of its offshore islands) is growing, as the physical extent of that flora and its genetic diversity shrink.The fight to preserve the diversity in the field and in parks and gardens is the return of the native to public esteem, but it is a gallant rearguard action against global forces, both natural and cultural.

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Tchupalla Falls in far north Queensland photo: Colin Totterdell

236

Evolution is change. Conservation, whether of significant buildings, or World Heritage cities like Quito in Ecuador, or of national parks, is about stopping the clock and maintaining a preferred status quo – as are the efforts of Jane Emberson and Robert Powell in their managed bushland garden. A geological background gives a strong awareness of the immensity of time, the massive scale of evolutionary change and the impossibility of maintaining the status quo for any considerable length of time. It is, however, seen as possible in our own human time-scale. In being a conservationist, I am thus aware of holding two incompatible value systems, like those of the opening pages of my Introduction – on kookaburras.

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Marguerite de Crevancour, writng on behalf of Michelangelo de Buonarotti, has him say that: The wish to immobilize life is the sculptor’s damnation. It is in that respect, perhaps, that all my work is contrary to nature. At every instant, the marble in which we think we have preserved a form of perishable life returns to its place in nature, through erosion, patina, and the play of light and shadow over the planes which thought they were abstract, but in fact are only the surface of a stone. In the same way, no doubt the eternal mutability of the universe astonishes its Creator.1

Natural change has been prodigiously accelerated in the last three hundred years by cultural forces. It includes a degree of mixing of both fauna and flora on a scale that constitutes a major evolutionary event, comparable with others like the emergence from the sea of the first terrestrial creatures, the appearance of the birds, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the catastrophic events of the last Ice Age. In the geological timetable, these ran their course in the blink of an eye, yet even the last Ice Age endured for more than a million years. By that timescale, the global mixing of the last three hundred years has been instantaneous, its rapidity concealed from us by our own puny time-scales. It is, in fact, unprecedented in geological history and with consequences, for better or worse, that are literally incalculable. All we know is that the biosphere survived all of these earlier events, although there was usually a changing of the guard for the dominant species of the time.The last Ice Age was an exception: our own species survived both that and the woolly mammoth, while pioneer species of plants rapidly recolonised bare landscapes as the ice melted. In non-glaciated lands like Australia, many plants re-emerged from small refugia once the All-Clear was sounded.

A spects

of

globalisation

There has been a comparable speedy reordering of the world’s plant cover in the last three hundred years, which has often created physical environments that favour weed species, against which there is now constant struggle.Weeds may well be our global future, hence

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237

the placing of the last chapter. It is not a future I care to contemplate. Weeds, however defined, are either generalists, or pioneer species, or species that are able to multiply rapidly and extend their new territory. The generalists are able to adapt to a range of diverse conditions; this is the secret of success with rats, pigeons, sparrows and many agricultural and common garden weeds. Our own species is eminent among the generalists. Species diversity, by contrast, depends on particularity, on the genetic diversity that allows a multitude of specific adaptations to local conditions. Pioneer species have a significant ecological role, as the name suggests. They move in quickly to cover bare ground and, under natural conditions, they are followed by an ecological succession to a more mature stage. In a man-modified setting, this later natural succession is stalled or arrested – as with Titania’s hedgerow. The last category is that of species that have been introduced and spread far from their place of origin, usually by human agency in the last few centuries.They are able to multiply rapidly and extend their new territory because they are free of the checks and balances with which they evolved.

Australia

a s

invader

This last group is of especial interest to Australians in that plants of Australian origin have been dramatically successful (from their own point of view) in other Mediterranean lands, where some of them are characterised as invasive weeds and they often constitute an extreme fire hazard, as in Portugal and the south of France. They succeed because they can thrive on the natural and often meagre rainfall in meagre soils.This is precisely their value in our own parks and gardens, especially in a country in which added nutrients cause problems and where water supplies are uncertain. Nevertheless, the garden columnists still, for the most part, tell us how to ‘improve’ our soils with added fertilisers so that we can grow plants that require supplementary watering and are ill-suited to our natural physical conditions.We struggle to adapt our environment to our aspirations, generated by a cultural heritage from very different environments. It is time that we learnt to adapt ourselves to our environment rather than the reverse. It is not difficult to do in

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practice, but it demands a cultural shift. There is an aesthetic bonus. Plants that look comfortably at home in our natural conditions, including our light intensities, look better than most of the aliens an imported culture has taught us to prize.

Relearning

lost

skills

Part of the cultural shift is to relearn skills acquired and lost. Australian gardens in my lifetime have changed in many ways, once given over in part to production, and now mostly to the consumerism of a consumer society. The plants used were rarely indigenous, although there were early exceptions like the Geraldton wax (Chamelaucium uncinatum). Whatever their origin, they needed little supplementary watering – and that, from a watering-can filled from the tank-stand, or a hand-held hose in the cool of the evening. Reticulation has destroyed that once obligatory frugality, but it will prove to be a brief moment in our history, since it and the garden practices it has underwritten are clearly unsustainable. ‘Fear the hose’ is a phrase I once used as an epigraph many years ago to a chapter on the design of our public parklands. My concerns then were partly aesthetic. Constant watering creates a landscape that is out of harmony with the plant forms, leaf colour, skies and soils of the natural setting – and this is still true. The extinction of our newfound reticulation systems will make for better gardens.

General store and gravel road on the Mornington Peninsula,Victoria photo: George Seddon

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239

Not long ago, gardeners exchanged fruits, vegetables, seeds and cuttings. Gardening knit neighbourhoods, a force of social cohesion in a nation of immigrants, many of them from a rural background, as many of them still are. Our large cities were a rus in urbe (the country within a town), which is why the persistence of the suburban block has been so strong in our culture.

On

being

Australian

Postcolonial Australia, today’s multicultural society, which includes the Aboriginal communities, is rich in many ways. Its adaptation to the physical realities of an old unyielding land is not one of them. Being Australian in the sense of belonging to the land has always depended on an acquired skill. It is neither a right nor a given; it has Fire; an always had to be learnt, once handed down by the tribal elders to the environmental young, and then earned by them. If there was no ‘Aboriginal nation’, constant in Australia in this at least the Aborigines were true Australians. It has always photo: George Seddon been a title to be earned, and so it remains.

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The sunburnt country – please apply sunscreen lotion SPF 30+

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241

notes

I N T RO D U C T I O N 1 2 3 4 5 6

Beilharz, The Baumann Reader, pp. 103–12. Fairbairn, Conservation of New World Parrots, p. 12. Mathew Frith, letter in Greenplaces, no. 2, February 2004, p. 18. Hopper et al., Gondwanan Heritage, p. 35. As above, p. 36. Appleton, The Experience of Landscape.

1 F I R S T E N C O U N T E RS 1

2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

For fuller detail, see Playford, Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis by Willem de Vlamingh in 1696–97, a work from which I have drawn heavily. Dublomb (ed.), Extracts from the Journal of Rose Saulces de Freycinet, pp. 5–8. Park, Nga Uruora, p. 36. Morley and Toelken, Flowering Plants in Australia, p. 76. Paul Wilson,WA Herbarium, personal communication; the account of nomenclatural procedures is all based on his work. Morley and Toelken, Flowering Plants in Australia, p. 76. Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World, pp. 312–13. Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland …1699, p. 122. British Library, Sloane MS 3236, ff. 222–222d. Nairn’s diary, quoted in Hasluck, ‘The First Year in the North-West’, p. 264.

2 THE BOAB 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8

Grey, Journal, of Two Expeditions of Discovery … 1837–1839, vol. 1, pp. 68, 69, 111–13. King, Narrative of a Survey … between the Years 1818 and 1822, vol. 1, p. 423. Cunningham, in King, Narrative of a Survey … between the Years 1818 and 1822, vol. 2, Natural History appendix, p. 521. Heward, ‘Biographical Sketch of the Late Allan Cunningham’, p. 261. Willis, ‘A Bibliography of the Australian Baobab’. See, for example, Oxford Hammond Atlas of the World, 1993, pp. 128–9, 135. Baum, ‘A Systematic Revision of Adansonia (Bombacaceae)’, p. 440. As above, p. 455.

Notes

(Introduction

–

Chapter

2)

245

9 10 11

12

As above, p. 456. Petheram and Kok, Plants of the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, p. 360. Cunningham, in King, Narrative of a Survey … between the Years 1818 and 1822, vol. 2, Natural History appendix, p. 521. See Mueller, ‘New Genera and Species’ and ‘Botanical Report on the North Australian Exploring Expedition’.

3 LEARNING 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

246

Playford (ed.), Voyage of Discovery … by Vlamingh in 1696–97, pp. 16. As above, p. 36. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Around the World … vol. I, pp. 177–8. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, p. 306. Collie, ‘An Account of an Excursion to the North of St George’s Sound’, p. 125; Baudin, The Journal of Post Captain Nicolas Baudin, vol. 3, p. 171; Peron and Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux Terres australe, vol. 2, p. 197. Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery, vol. 2, pp. 58, 60. As above, p. 61. As above, pp. 11, 12. Hallam, Fire and Hearth, p. 13. Warburton, Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia, pp. 300, 175, 200, 171, 211. As above, pp. 278, 299. As above, pp. 179–80. As above, pp. 206–7. Eyre, Reports and Letters to Governor Grey. Warburton, Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia, p. 251. Inquirer, 17 March 1841; Cameron, ‘Poison Plants in Western Australia’. Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, p. 4. As above, p. 11. Gilbert, Botanical Investigations of Eastern Seaboard Australia, p. 20; White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, p. 158; Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson, p. 72. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. I, p. 21; Gilbert, Botanical Investigations of Eastern Seaboard Australia, p. 31. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. II, p. 232. As above, vol. I, p. 29. Pitt-Morison, ‘Settlement and development’, p. 47. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. I, p. 7. White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, p. 233. Gilbert, Botanical Investigations of Eastern Seaboard Australia, p. 45. Powell and Emberson, Growing Local. Bonyhady, ‘The Bush Becomes the Garden’. As above, p. 143. Quoted in Trigger and Griffiths (eds), Disputed Territories, p. 8.

Notes

(Chapters

2–3)

4 THE CONIFERS 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

Introduction to Hopper et al., Gondwanan Heritage, pp. 2, 4. Whitmore, Tropical Rain Forests of the Far East. Hill, ‘The history of selected Australian taxa’; Hopper et al., Gondwanan Heritage. Hopper et al., Gondwanan Heritage, p. 7. CSIRO, Flora of Australia, vol. 48, p. 547. Park, Nga Uruora, p. 30. As above, p. 36. As above, pp. 15, 35. As above, pp. 15, 24. The Letters of Rachel Henning,The Bulletin, Sydney, 1952, quoted in Gilbert, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. Krauss and Hopper, ‘From Dampier to DNA’. As above. Gilbert, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

5 THE BANKSIAS 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

Alex George in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens. George, The Banksia Book, p. 10. Blunt and Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration. Smith, Bernard, European Vision and the South Pacific. Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, p. 198. Helen Hewson in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens, p. 462. Edward Duyker, in the above, p. 558. Phillip to Sydney, 15 May 1788, Historical Records of Australia, vol. I, p. 24. Richard Clough, in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens. George, The Banksia Book. Otto Stapf (1926), quoted in Blunt and Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, p. 265. Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, p. 268. Wilfrid Blunt, in Blunt and Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, p. 277. Personal communication with Alex George. See also Linden Gilbank, in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens.

6 MEDITERRANEITY 1 2

Crosby, Ecological Imperialism. Keighery, ‘The Origin and Impact of Plant Introductions to Western Australia’.

Notes

(Chapters

4–6)

247

3 4

5

Wilson, ‘Post Gold Rush Stream Regeneration’. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Sea Surface Temperatures around Australia, Browse Service. Robert Moltoni, CEO, Moltoni Corporation, 2004.

7 ON BEING DECIDUOUS 1 2

3

4

Oxford English Dictionary. Hill, ‘The history of selected Australian taxa’; Hopper et al., Gondwanan Heritage. Petheram and Kok, Plants of the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, p. 395. Lord and Willis, Trees and Shrubs for Australian Gardens, p. 25.

8 BY DESIGN 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

John Thompson, Chief Draftsman, Surveyor General’s Department, New South Wales, to J. C. Loudon, 4 May 1839, quoted in brochure for Australian Garden History Society Conference, 2004. Trisha Dixon, in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Gardens, pp. 625–6. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, pp. 60–1. Garnett and Seddon, From the Country, p. 34. Appleton, The Experience of Landscape. Trisha Dixon, in Aitken and Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Gardens, pp. 625–6. Middlemis, ‘Edith Cole’.

9 WEEDS 1 2 3 4 5 6

Stirton, Plant Invaders, Beautiful but Dangerous, p. 30. Akeroyd, ‘To Be Encouraged’, p. 16. As above, p. 17. Hough, Cities and Natural Process, p. 177. As above, pp. 177, 179. As above, p. 181.

EPILOGUE 1

248

Yourcenar (de Crevancour), That Mighty Sculptor,Time, p. 21.

Notes

(Chapters

6–Epilogue)

Bibliography

Abel, Clarke, Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China, etc., London, James Ridgway, 1819. Aitken, Richard, Gardenesque: A Celebration of Australian Gardening, Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2004. Aitken, Richard and Michael Looker (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2002. Akeroyd, John, ‘To Be Encouraged’, Hortus, no. 69, 2004, pp. 16–22. Appleton, Jay, The Experience of Landscape, New York,Wiley, 1975. Bassett, Marnie, Realms and Islands:The World Voyage of Rose de Freycinet in the Corvette Uranie 1818–1820, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1962. Baudin, N., The Journal of Post Captain Nicolas Baudin, Commander in Chief of the Corvettes Géographe and Naturaliste, translated by Christine Cornell, Adelaide, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1973 [1800–03]. Bauer, Ferdinand, Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae, London, 1813–16. Baum, David A., ‘A Systematic Revision of Adansonia (Bombacaceae)’, Annals of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, vol. 82, no. 3, 1995, pp. 440–71. Beadle, N. C.W., ‘Soil Phosphate and its Role in Molding Segments of the Australian Flora and Vegetation, with Special Reference to Xeromorphy and Sclerophylly’, Ecology, vol. 47, no. 6, 1966, pp. 992–1007. —— ‘Some Aspects of the Ecology and Physiology of Australian Xeromorphic Plants’, Australian Journal of Science, vol. 30, no. 3, 1968. Beilharz, P. (ed.), The Bauman Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2001. Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History, Melbourne, Macmillan, 1968. Blunt,Wilfrid, The Art of Botanical Illustration, 3rd edn, London, 1955. Blunt,Wilfrid and T.William Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration, Woodbridge, Suffolk UK, Antique Collectors Club Ltd, 1995. Bonyhady,Tim, ‘The Bush Becomes the Garden’, in Peter Timms (ed.), The Nature of Gardens, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1999. —— The Colonial Earth, Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2000. Bowman, D. M. J. S., ‘Observations of the Demography of the Australian Boab (Adansonia gibbosa) in the North-west of the Northern Territory, Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 45, 1997, pp. 893–904. Brock, John, Top End Native Plants: A Comprehensive Guide to the Trees and Shrubs of the Top End of the Northern Territory, Darwin, John Brock, 1988. Brooker, M. I. H. and D. A. Kleinig, Field Guide to the Eucalypts, 2 vols, Melbourne/Sydney, Inkata Press, 1988, 1990. Brunig, E. F., Der Heiderwald von Sarawak und Brunei: Eine Studies einerVegetation und Ökologie, Hamburg, 1966.

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Kraus, S. L. and S. D. Hopper, ‘From Dampier to DNA: the 300-year old mystery of the identity and proposed allopolyploid origin of Conostylus stylidioides (Haemodoraceae), Australian Journal of Botany, vol. 49, pp. 1–8. Lansbury, Coral, Arcady in Australia:The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth Century English Literature, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1970. Latreille, Anne, The Natural Garden. Ellis Stones: His Life and Work, Melbourne,Viking O’Neill, 1990. Lindley, John, A Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony: … together with an Alphabetical and Systematical Index, 1840. Lord, Ernest and J. H.Willis, Trees and Shrubs for Australian Gardens, Melbourne, Lothian, 1988. Middlemis, Carolyn,‘Edith Cole’, Australian Garden History, vol. 8, no. 2, 1996, p. 21. Mitchell, Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia: with descriptions of the recently explored region of Australia Felix, and of the present colony of New South Wales, London,T. and W. Boone, 1838. Morley, B. D. and H. R.Toelken, Flowering Plants in Australia, Adelaide, Rigby, 1983. Mueller, F., ‘New Genera and Species’, Journal of Botany [Hooker], Misc. 9, 1857, p. 14. —— ‘Botanical Report on the North Australian Exploring Expedition’, Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany), vol. 2, 1858, p. 140. Nature Conservancy, USA . Nottle,Trevor, Gardens of the Sun, Sydney, Kangaroo Press, 1996. Park, Geoff, Nga Uruora,The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape,Wellington, New Zealand,Victoria University Press, 1995. Parkinson, H. F. and C. A. Gardner, Wildflowers of Western Australia, Perth, WA Newspapers, 1959. Peron, F. A. and L. Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux Terres australe exécuté sur les corvettes le Geographe, le Naturaliste, et la goelette le Casuarina pendant les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804 …, Paris, Imprimerie Imperiale, 1805. Perry, Robert, Landscape Plants for Western Regions, Claremont, Calif., Landscape Design Publishing, 1992. Petheram, R. J. and B. Kok, Plants of the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 1983. Pitt-Morison, Margaret, ‘Settlement and Development:The Historical Context’, in Margaret Pitt-Morison and John White (eds), Western Towns and Buildings, Perth, University of Western Australia Press, 1979. Playford, Philip, Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis by Willem de Vlamingh in 1696–97, Perth,Western Australian Museum, 1998. Powell, Robert and Jane Emberson, Growing Local: Gardening with Local Plants in Perth, Perth,Western Australian Naturalists Club, 1996.

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254

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L i s t of I l l u s t r at io n s

Forest red-gum, by Colin Totterdell

ii

PREFACE Stromatolites, Shark Bay,Western Australia Fossil stromatolites, Marble Bar,Western Australia

xii xiii

I N T RO D U C T I O N Kookaburra, by David Hutchison 3 White-cheeked honeyeater (Phylidonyris nigra) 4 Honey possum (Tarsipes rostratus) feeding on Banksia grandis 4 Araucaria bidwillii 11 Magpies and seagulls, by David Hutchison 12 Cockie’s tongue (Templetonia retusa) 14 Qualup bell (Pimelea physodes) 16 Banksia coccinea 17 ‘A clearing in the forest’ at Kirstenbosch Botanic Garden, Cape Town 22 ‘Karwarra’ in the Dandenong Ranges,Victoria 23, 24

1 FIRST ENCOUNTERS Satellite image of Western Australia showing Shark Bay

29

Courtesy Clough Ltd

Satellite image of Steep Point on the Freycinet Peninsula

30

Courtesy Shark Bay Salt Joint Venture / Mitsui & Co. Ltd

Steep Point Blackwall Reach The Zuytdorp Cliffs, facing the Indian Ocean The Dampier plate William Dampier Title page of Dampier’s A New Voyage round the World Page from A Voyage to New Holland Diplolaena grandiflora, the so-called ‘native rose’ Calandrinia polyandra, one of the many ephemeral parakeelyas Sturt pea (Clianthus formosus), by Percy Stanway Tapp

31 31 31 32 32 32 33 33 35 41

Art Gallery of Western Australia

2 THE BOAB Esperance wax (Chamelaucium axillare) ‘Horizontal waterfall’, in the Kimberley

List

45 47

of

Illustrations

255

Adansonia digitata in Zimbabwe Baobabs (Adansonia grandidieri ) in Madagascar Boab (Adansonia gregorii ) in the Kimberley Boabs in Kings Park, Perth Careening Bay in the Kimberley Phillip Parker King’s Mermaid tree at Careening Bay Spiny trunk of the kapok tree (Bombax ceiba) Flower of a Brachychiton sp., sometimes confused with the boab

50 52 53 54 56 56 62 63

3 LEARNING Macrozamia riedlii, the cycad once common around Perth Colocasia esculenta (taro) from Kakadu Spinifex (Triodia) country Land clearing in Canberra

67 70 73 79

4 THE CONIFERS Deciduous southern beech (Nothofagus gunnii ) Nothofagus moorei Giant kauri (Agathis borneensis) in Borneo Giant kauri in the North Island of New Zealand King Billy pine (Athrotaxis selaginoides) Californian redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), cousin to the King Billy pine Microcachrys tetragona, of the Podocarpaceae, our largest family of conifers Huon pine (Lagarostrobos franklinii) Rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) from New Zealand, closely related to the Huon pine Totara (Podocarpus totara) in New Zealand Podocarpus lawrencei at Goonmirk Rocks Goonmirk Rocks in eastern Victoria Callitris preissii Callitris endlicheri Daintree rainforest Richea scoparia, of the Epacridaceae The Tasmanian waratah (Telopea truncata)

93 94 97 98 102 103 104 105 106 108 109 110 115 116 119 120 121

5 THE BANKSIAS Grevillea eriostachya Kunzea baxteri Telopea mongaensis, the Braidwood waratah Grevillea concinna Sweet (1827), drawn by E. P. Smith

256

List

of

Illustrations

126 127 128 130

Banksia speciosa Robert Brown (1810), the showy banksia, by Ferdinand Bauer Banksia serrata Linnaeus f. (1782), the saw banksia, by S. Parkinson Banksia dryandroides Baxter ex Sweet (1828), by Edwin Dalton Smith Banksia baxteri Robert Brown (1830)

137 139 141 142

Library of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and the State Herbarium

Walter Hood Fitch Banksia occidentalis R. Brown (1810), drawn by Louis Constans Banksia ilicifolia R. Brown (1810), the holly-leaved banksia, drawn by Edgar Dell Banksia ashbyi E. G. Baker (1934), by Celia Rosser

143 144 146 149

Courtesy Celia Rosser and Monash University

6 MEDITERRANEITY An outcrop of ‘coastal limestone’ in Fremantle Melaleuca lanceolata A ‘Mediterranean’ fountain in Fremantle Pittosporum phylliraeoides Gossypium sp. Caladenia flava, a terrestrial orchid Blandfordia nobilis, or Christmas bells Melaleuca huegelii

164 166 167 168 169 170 170 171

7 ON BEING DECIDUOUS Eucalyptus tereticornis, or the forest red-gum Epicormic growth after fire Corymbia maculata, a close relative of C. citriodora Minni-ritchi bark Eucalyptus rubida, or candlebark Eucalyptus salubris, or gimlet Corymbia bigalerita, a winter deciduous ‘eucalypt’ Corymbia bleeseri Eucalyptus miniata, or Darwin woollybutt Cauliflory: flowers and fruits carried on the tree trunk

177 178 180 181 182 183 185 186 188 189

8 BY DESIGN Flame tree (Erythrina sp.) in flower The driveway to ‘Cruden Farm’, Langwarrin,Victoria A path in the Hatfield garden, Sydney A backyard – or clearing in the forest – in Melbourne A version in Arizona, USA ‘Karkalla’ on the Mornington Peninsula,Victoria

List

of

198 201 202 204 204 204

Illustrations

257

The Sunken Garden, University of Western Australia A cliff in Perth – Oliver Dowell’s design model Melaleuca elliptica, University of Western Australia Suburban gardens contemporary with Dowell Dowell at the end of World War I Dowell working at the University of Western Australia A tree at Lake Biwa in Kyoto, Japan The rimu, University of Western Australia Japanese Studies courtyard, University of Western Australia

207 208 208 209 210 210 211 212 213

9 WEEDS Prickly pear (Opuntia sp.) Cape daisy (Arctotheca calendula) Paterson’s curse (Echium plantagineum) Sheep sorrel (Acetosella vulgaris)

220 220 220 221

EPILOGUE Coastal dune heath,Western Australia Tchupalla Falls, far-north Queensland General store and gravel road, Mornington Peninsula,Victoria Fire; an environmental constant in Australia The sunburnt country

258

List

of

Illustrations

235 236 239 240 241

inde x

Note: Bold page numbers refer to illustrations. Abel, Clarke 152–3 Abelia chinensis 152–3 Aboriginal land management 68–70 Aboriginal languages, learnt by Grey 77 Aboriginal people 234, 240 Dampier’s description of 40 Grey’s close relation with 69–71, 77 management of yam grounds 69–71 station manager’s description of 41 use of boab trees 47 use of cycad nuts 66 use of fire as management tool 68 Warburton’s experiences of 76–8 Aboriginal plant names 38 Acacia xvii, 34, 129 as invasive species 225 Acacia acuminata 66 Acacia baileyana 129, 225 Acacia cyclops 225 Acacia dealbata 225 Acacia decurrens 81, 225 Acacia elata 225 Acacia mearnsii 225 Acacia melanoxylon 129, 225 Acacia pycnantha 225 Acacia rostellifera 38 Acacia saligna 38, 225 Acetosella vulgaris 221 acidic soils 131 Actinostrobus 114, 115 Actinostrobus acuminatus 115 Actinostrobus arenarius 115 Actinostrobus pyramidalis 115 Adansonia 48, 50, 60 Adansonia digitata 50–1, 50,

51–2, 57 Adansonia grandidieri 51, 52, 54, 57 Adansonia gregorii 11, 46, 52–3, 53, 55 vagaries of taxonomy 55–7 Adansonia madagascariensis 51 Adansonia perrieri 51, 58 Adansonia stanburyana 55 Adansonia suarezensis 51, 57 Adansonia za 51 Adelaide Botanical Gardens 52 admiral butterfly 84 Adontopetalum proliferum 111 Aepyornis 57 aesthetics in garden design 195–6, 213, 214 Africa, baobabs 50, 51–2, 57 African star flower 226 Afrocarpus 109 Agathis 97 Agathis atropurpurea 97 Agathis australis 11 Agathis borneensis 97 Agathis microstachys 97 Agathis robusta 11, 97 Agonis flexuosa xvi, 197 agricultural weeds 218, 219–23 Aitken, Richard 197 Aizoaceae 36 Akeroyd, John 228 akudjura bush 87 alang alang 231 alkaline soils 18, 19–20, 130 Alogyne 33 alpine pepper 111 Angophora xvii, 132, 187 Anigozanthus manglesii 21 Antarctic flora 92, 93 Apium australe 82 Apium tenuifolium 82 Araucaria 11, 15, 97, 145

Araucaria bidwillii 11, 97, 118 Araucaria cunninghamii 11, 97 Araucaria heterophylla 11, 18, 44, 97, 118, 199 planting at Farm Cove 122–3 Araucariaceae 91, 92, 97–102 Arbutus andrachne 182 Arbutus menziesii 182 Archaeolemur 57 Arctotheca calendula 157, 220 Arizona backyard 204 Armstrong, Peter 213 Artemisia abrotanum 38 artists, portrayal of Australian landscapes 194 Arum lily 157 Asphodelus fistulosus 226 associations 117–22 asymmetrical plants 209, 211 Atherosperma moschatum 111 Athrotaxis 102, 103 Athrotaxis cupressoides 102 Athrotaxis selaginoides 92, 102, 102 Atriplex 39 Atriplex chamaecladum 39 Aubrieta deltoides 228 Australian as arbitrary term 234 being Australian 240–1 Australian animals and plants, as icons 6 Australian backyard 203, 204 Australian continent xiv–xv, 10 Australian fauna, decorative uses 150, 151 Australian flora Antarctic elements in 92–3 as southern hemisphere flora 234 autochthonous elements 93 botanical illustration 135–50

Index

259

Australian flora (continued ) decorative uses 150–1 evolution xiv, 91–7 floral wealth 234–7 Hooker’s elements in 92–3 Indomalesian elements 93 practical uses of 66–71, 79–83, 115 use as building and roofing materials 81–2, 115 use as food supplements and remedies 82 use as stock food 78 use as timber 80–1, 107 Australian Home Beautiful 206, 2078 Australian landscapes, portrayal by painters 194 Australian outback 10–11 Australian plants adaptability 18–19 defining 9–12, 44–5 foliage colour and structure 20–1, 189, 195 growing more in gardens 9 limited natural distribution 15–17 pleasure of growing 18–19 propagation for use in diverse habitats 15, 17 soil and design constraints 19–21 vulnerability in natural environment 17–18 author’s garden 13, 18, 19–20, 34, 112, 129–30, 157, 165–6, 175, 227–8 weeds in 226, 227 autochthonous elements, in Australian flora 93 Avena spp. 156 backyards 204 balga 38 Balme, Basil 122 Banks, Sir Joseph 136, 138, 140, 152–3 organises plant collecting 152 plant collecting 133, 134

260

Index

Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia 144 Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia 150 Banksia Banksia 159 Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia 151 Banksia Banksia Banksia Banksia

xvii ashbyi 132, 149, 150 attentuata 151 audax 150 baueri 132 baxteri 4, 132, 142, 143, benthamiana 132 blechnifolia 148 brownii 132 burdetti 132 caleyi 132 candolleana 132 canei 132 chamaephyton 148 coccinea 15, 17, 18, 130 cunninghamii 132 dentata 133, 138 dryandroides 141, 141 elderiana 132, 150 ericifolia 138 gardneri 132, 148 goodii 132, 148 grandis 4, 145 hookeriana 132 ilicifolia 146, 150 integrifolia 138 lemanniana 132 lindleyana 132, 150 lullfitzii 132 marginata 131, 132, 133, meisneri 132 menziesii 132, 147, 150, oblongifolia 132 occidentalis 144, 145 ornata 150 petiolaris 148 prionotes 129, 143 repens 148 robur 132, 133, 147 rosseri 132, 150 serrata 133, 138, 139, solandri 132, 138 speciosa 130–1, 137 spinulosa 138, 140 victoriae 143

banksias 18, 19, 128–31 collecting and illustrating 135–50 decorative uses 150–1 disease susceptibility 134–5 distribution 148–50 east-coast 132–5 iconic status 129 interest to collectors, taxonomists and botanical artists 131–2 naming of 131–2, 134 near-desert species 149–50 prostrate 148–9, 199 use in the garden 129 Baobab 51 baobabs 50–4, 50, 52, 53 adaptability 51, 52–4 Africa 50, 51–2, 57 Australia 51, 53–4, 53, 54, 55–7 long distance dispersal 58 Madagascar 51, 52, 57–8, 62 pollination and dispersal 57–8 see also boabs basalt boulders, use of 214 Basedow, H. 40 bat-winged erythrina 185 bats 57 Baudin, Nicolas 59 Bauer, Ferdinand 131, 133, 134, 135–7 background 136 Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae 136–7 quality of illustration 135, 136 Bauer, Franz 136 Baumann, Zygmunt 5 Baxter,William 134, 140–1, 143 Beadle, N. C.W. 96 Beaufortia 34 Beaufortia sprengeliodes 33 beeches 222 being Australian 240–1 Betula pendula 182 bindweed 222 birches 10

birds 4, 12, 198 Melbourne 3–5 Sydney 3, 5 use of edge habitat 205 WA 2–3, 5, 6, 157 black sally 182 blackberry 156 blackboy 38 blackbutts 38, 176 Blackwall Reach,WA 31 blackwood wattle 129 blady grass 82 Blakella 186–7 Blancoa canescens 33 Blandfordia nobilis 170 Blechnum 122 bloodroots 118 bloodwoods 179, 185, 187 Blunt,Wilfred 136 boabs 11, 46, 52–4, 61, 225 and vagaries of taxonomy 55–7 as succulents 51 Australia 51, 53–4, 53, 54, 55–7, 56 early descriptions 46–8 pollination and dispersal 57, 58 relatives of 48–51 suitability for Australian gardens 61, 62, 63 boat-building 81 Bombacaceae 55, 62 Bombax ceiba 62, 185 Bonyhady,Tim 79, 80, 84 Boboli Gardens, Florence 166 Borneo rainforest species, soil deficiency effects 95–6 Boronia 33 botanic gardens Gondwanan flora 121–2 see also specific names, eg. Kings Park Botanic Gardens botanical artists 131, 133–4, 135–50 see also specific artists, eg. Bauer, Ferdinand botanical illustration 135–50

Botanical Magazine 143 botanical names xvi–xvii instability xvii, 38–9 boxes 176 Brachychiton acerifolia 184–5 Brachychiton sp. 63 Braidwood waratah 128 Brock, John 45 Brookes, John 193 Brown, Robert 136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 153 Brunig, Eberhardt 95–6 Buchan, Alexander 138 Buchanania 189 building and roofing materials 81–2, 115 Bunya Mountains 118 bunya pine 97 Burke and Wills, die of starvation 71–2 Burke’s Back Yard 197 Bursaria 132 bush gardens 9, 83–4, 169, 236 bush tomato kasundi 86–7 cabbage-tree palm 81 Caesalpiniaceae 86 Caladenia flava 170 Calandrinia xvii, 36, 38, 39, 117 Calandrinia polyandra 35, 37 calcarenite 164, 214 Californian gardens 206–7 Californian redwood 103, 103, 162 Callicoma serratifolia 81 Callitris 92, 102, 114, 122 as garden plant 115–16 use for building materials 115 Callitris columellaris 115 Callitris endlicheri 116 Callitris intratropica 115 Callitris macleayana 116 Callitris preissii 19, 115, 115, 116, 166–7, 198 Callitris rhomboidea 81 Callitroidea 114 Calocephalus brownii xvii Calophylla ficifolia 15 Canberra, land clearing 79

Canberra Botanic Gardens 121, 135 candlebark 182 cape daisy 220 Cape Inscription,WA 28, 29 Cape lilac 184 Cape Town 159, 160, 162 Cape tulip 157 capeweed 157 Capparis 46, 48, 55 Capparis gibbosa 48, 55 Cardamine pratensis 228 Careening Bay,WA 56 Carophyllaceae 36, 37 Castle Crag, Sydney 84–5 Casuarina 81, 115, 122 Casuarina equisetifolia 225 Casuarina (schooner) 81 cauliflory 189 Cavanilles, Antonio 132–3, 135 celery-top pine 11, 105, 107 Chamelaucium axillare 45 Chamelaucium uncinatum 18, 44, 239 Chelsea Flower Show 134 Chenopodiaceae 39 Chorilaena 33 Christmas bells 170 Churchill, Jeannie 206 Clianthus formosus 41 climate change, impact on flora 8 cloud forests 112 coast banksia 138 coastal dune heath,WA 235 Cochleospermum 189 cockie’s tongue 13, 14, 19, 38, 84 coelacanth 99 cold ocean currents 162 Cole, Edith 207 Collie, A. 68–9 Colocasia esculenta 70 colonisation by weeds 229–31 common names of plants 37–8 conifers 92, 97, 99, 175 see also Araucariaceae; Cupressaceae; Podocarpaceae; Taxodiaceae

Index

261

Conostylis 34 Conostylis stylidioides 33 conservation Castle Crag, Sydney 84–5 colonial era 79–80 of biological diversity 15 Constans, Louis 144, 145 continents xiv–xv, 10 Cook, Captain James 138 Coopers Creek, Qld 118, 119 Cootamundra wattle 129 coral trees 12, 19, 157, 198, 199 cork oak 10 corn-cockles 222 Correa 33 Corymbia xvii, 176 deciduous bark 179, 183 deciduous leaves 187–9, 197 Corymbia bigalerita 185–6, 185 Corymbia bleeseri 186 Corymbia calophylla 3, 187 Corymbia citriodora 174, 180, 199 Corymbia ficifolia 3, 187, 207 Corymbia maculata 180 Corymbia torelliana 183 Cotoneaster horizontalis 107 crepe myrtle 182 Croton 189 Crowea 33 ‘Cruden Farm’, Langwarrin, Victoria 201 Cunningham, Allan 41, 48, 55 Cupressaceae 92, 114–16 distribution 114–15 Cupressoideae 114 Cupressus 122 Curtis,William 143 Curtis,Winifred, Endemic Flora of Tasmania 148 Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 143, 147 Cyathea 122 Cyathea cooperi 122 cycad nuts 67–8, 69 cycads 122, 169 Cymbalaria muralis 227 Dacrycarpus dacrydioides 38, 113 Dacrydium 107

262

Index

Dacrydium cupressinum 106, 211 daffodils 21 Daintree rainforest 118 Dampier,William 28, 29, 30, 34–5 and his reputation 40–1 description of Aboriginal people 41 impact of his collecting 36–7 plant collecting 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41 plant descriptions 35 A Voyage to New Holland 32, 33 Dampier plate 32 Dampiera 34 Darwin, Charles 132 Darwin stringybark 187 Darwin woollybutt 187, 188 Darwinia collina 15 Darwinia leiostyla 15 Darwinia macrostegia 15 Dasysurus 78 dawn redwood 99, 103, 104 day length 160 de Buonarotti, Michelangelo 237 de Freycinet, Louis 28, 59 de Freycinet, Rose 34, 36 de Vlamingh,Willem 28, 66 deciduous, etymology 174, 175 deciduous bark 174, 176–83 deciduous branches 174, 176 deciduous characteristics, in animals 174, 175 deciduous leaves 174, 175, 176, 184–9 deciduous trees 174, 175–6, 184, 189 for summer shade and winter sun 197–8, 199 location in Australia 184, 185 Dell, Edgar 145–7 Delonix regia 86, 224 design see garden design design-worthy plants 199 Dianthus barbatus 38 dieback 18 Dietes spp. 157

Dilwynites 92, 99, 102 Diploglottis australis 86 Diploglottis cunninghamii 86 Diplolaena 34 Diplolaena angustifolia 78 Diplolaena grandiflora 33, 34, 44 Dirk Hartog Island 28, 29 Discovery (ship) 145, 147 Diselma 114 Diselma archeri 114–15 Dixon,Trisha 206 DNA studies,Wollemi pine 101 Dodonea spp. 82 Dowell, Oliver 206, 207–14, 210 awareness of Japanese gardens 209, 210–11 background 210 design models 207–9 plantings at University of Western Australia 207–9, 211–13, 214 Drimys 111 Drimys lanceolata 111 Drimys winteri 111 Drimys xerophila 111 drought 192 Drummond, James 143 Dryandra xvii dune systems,WA 28 Dutch explorers 28, 29 Dutch possessions 60 Duyfken (ship) 28 early settlers, food shortages 68 east-coast banksias 132–5 distribution 133 early collecting 132–3 Echium plantagineum 220 ecological destruction 17–18, 114 ecological integrity 5 edge phenomena 203–5 Eendracht (ship) 28 Eichornia crassipes 221 elephant bird 57 elfin forests 112 Emberson, Jane 83, 84, 85, 236 emu-bushes 21

Endeavour (ship) 138, 139 English perennial border 203 English style gardens 192, 193 environmental conservation 15 environmental weeds 218, 219, 223–4 Epacridaceae 121 ephemerals 36, 37 epicormic growth, eucalypts 178 epiphany 2 Eremophila 21 Eriostemon 33 Erythrina 185, 198 Erythrina phlebocarpa 199 Erythrina sp. 198 Erythrina sykesii 12, 19, 157, 199 Erythrina vespertilio 185, 199 Erythrophloeum 189 Erythrophloeum chlorostachys 185 Esperance wax 45 essential oils 82–3 eucalypts 189 adaptive to change 96 classification on bark characteristics 176–9 deciduous bark 176–83 deciduous leaves 185–9, 197 epicormic growth 178 evolutionary history 93–6, 176 invasive species 225 sclerophyllous characteristics 96 Eucalyptus xvii, 176 Eucalyptus caesia 181 Eucalyptus caesia subsp. magna 181 Eucalyptus camaldulensis xvi Eucalyptus cladocalyx 44, 179–80, 194 Eucalyptus confertiflora 186 Eucalyptus diversicolor 179 Eucalyptus dives xvi Eucalyptus elata xvi Eucalyptus ewartiana 181 Eucalyptus georgei 179 Eucalyptus gomphocephala 198, 225 Eucalyptus grandiflora 186 Eucalyptus grandis 183 Eucalyptus gummifera 82

eucalyptus leaves, scent 128, 129 Eucalyptus lehmanii 225 Eucalyptus marginata xvi, 80 Eucalyptus miniata 187–9, 188 Eucalyptus minni-ritchi 181 eucalyptus oil 82 Eucalyptus papuana 186, 194 Eucalyptus patens 38 Eucalyptus pileata 179 Eucalyptus piperita xvi Eucalyptus regnans 179 Eucalyptus resinifera 82 Eucalyptus robusta 225 Eucalyptus rubida 182 Eucalyptus salmonophloia 183 Eucalyptus salubris 183 Eucalyptus sheathianea 179 Eucalyptus stellulata 182–3 Eucalyptus subgen. Blakella 186–7 Eucalyptus subgen. Eudesmia 187 Eucalyptus subgen. Symphomyrtus 186 Eucalyptus tereticornis 177 Eucalyptus tetradonta 187, 189 Eucalyptus todtiana 151 Eucalyptus viminalis 179 Eudesmia 187 Eugenia 95 European plants 10 evergreen oaks 175 evergreen trees 174, 175, 184 evolution 236, 237 Australian flora xiv, 91–7 eucalypts 93–6, 176 evolutionary time 118 experimenting with plants 18–19 explorers failure to learn about food sources from Aboriginal contact 71–2 Grey expedition, learns from Aboriginal people 69–71 plant collecting 30, 32–5, 41, 132–3, 134 Warburton expedition, failure to learn 72–8 Fabaceae 93 Fabos, Julius 195

Fairbairn, Patrick 6–8 ‘feature’ plants 196 Ficus 189 Field, Judge Barron 189 field poppies 222 Fielding-Druce Herbarium, Oxford 30 figs 11 fire and eucalypt regeneration 179 as environmental constant in Australia 240 use by Aboriginal people 68–9 firewood banksia 147 Fitch,Walter Hood 142–4, 143 flag-stones, use of 214 flavouring materials 82 Flinders, Matthew 59, 133, 134, 136 Flindersia spp. 182 floral wealth 234–7 flowering gums 181 foliage colour and structure 20, 189, 195 food sources 82 central Australia 71–2 see also cycad nuts food supplements and remedies 82, 111 foreign invaders 7, 8 forest red-gum 177 fossil pollen 92 fossil seed-ferns 90, 91 fossil stromatolites, Marble Bar, WA xiii Fraser, Charles 147 Freesia x leichtinii 157 Fremantle coastal limestone 164 comparison with Salentina, Italy 164, 165 fountain 167 heathland vegetation 198 new subdivision, to reflect a Mediterranean lifestyle 163, 165 sister cities 165

Index

263

Fremantle garden (author’s) plants grown 19–20, 34, 112, 129–30, 157, 165–6, 175, 227–8 soils 13, 18, 19, 130 weeds 226, 227 French explorers 28 French possessions 59 French Riviera 159 Freycinet Peninsula,WA 28, 29 garden design 166–71, 192–215 aesthetics in 195–6, 213, 214 and water use 192, 238, 239 awareness of droughts in 192–3 awareness of foliage, form and flowers 194 basic design forms 200–5 constraints 20–1 design elements 203 lessons and models from local flora 21–5 pioneer designers 205–15 ‘purity’ of design 193 reasons for making exceptions to using local plants 197–9 responding to local context 193–4 use of ‘Australian’ genera 199 use of ‘design-worthy’ plants 199 use of native and local plants 194–5, 196, 238–9 vocabularies 195–6 garden designers, pioneer 205–15 garden escapes 13, 17, 156, 157, 219 garden weeds 218, 219, 226–8 garden-worthy plants 199 gardeners, constraints and responsibilities when choosing plants 60–3 Gardenia 189 gardening as form of social cohesion 240

264

Index

Castle Crag, Sydney 84–5 hobby element 197 in the suburbs 83–5 local and alien 85–6 need for cultural shift 238–9 gardening impulse 5 gardening vocabulary, entry of indigenous plants into 44–6 gardens 201 design model 21–3 metaphorical description 201 native, in the suburbs 82–3 naturalistic 23–5 Perth 83–4, 208 Sydney 84–5, 202, 205 see also author’s garden; bush gardens; Mediterranean gardens Gardner, C. A. 145 Garnett,Tommy 200–1 Gastrolobium 78 Geery, Kath 23, 25 Geleznowia 33 general store and gravel road, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria 239 genetic diversity 13, 15 genetic relationships xvii genetic studies,Wollemi pine 101 geological time 118 geology, Australia xi, xiii George, Alex 39, 132 The Banksias 148 Geraldton wax 18, 44, 239 ghost gum 186, 194 giant hogweed 7 Gibbs, May 134, 151–2 Banksia Men 133, 151 Snugglepot and Cuddlepie 3, 151 Ginkgo biloba 100–1 globalisation 236–7 Glossopteris 90, 91 golden dock 229 golden wattle 129 golden wreath wattle 38 Gompholobium calycinum 78 Gondwana 90–1

Gondwanan flora xiv, 12, 46, 58, 90, 91–7, 109–13, 118, 213–14, 227 different from European floras 117 in botanic gardens 121–2 significant sites deserving preservation 118 Gondwanan heritage 91–2 Gondwanan rocks 90 Goonmirk Rocks, eastern Victoria 109–12, 110 age of forests 112 Gondwanan flora 109–11 site preservation 118 subalpine environment 110, 111 Gossypium 33 Gossypium sp. 169 gouty-stemmed trees 46–8 relatives 48–51 see also boabs grain crops 221–2 grasstrees 38, 82, 118, 169 Green Museum sites 118 Grevillea bipinnatifida 129 Grevillea concinna 129, 130 Grevillea dryandroides 129 Grevillea eriostachya 126 Grevillea excelsior 129 Grevillea lanigera 129 Grevillea leucopteris 129 Grevillea olivacea 129 Grevillea robusta 18, 129 Grevillea thelmanniana 129 grevilleas, use in the garden 129–30 Grey, George describes gouty-stemmed trees 46–7 describes Kimberley landscape 46 describes managed yam grounds 69–71 learns Aboriginal languages 77 learns about foodstuffs from Nyoongah people 69 Griffin,Walter Burley 84, 85

Guildford grass 157, 226 gungurru 181 gymnosperms,Tasmania 11 Haemodoraceae 118 Haenke,Thadeo 131, 132 hair-pin banksia 138 Halocarpus 109 halophytes 51 Halosarcia 51 Hamelin, Baron Emanuel 28 Hancock,W. K. 79 Hartog, Dirk 28 Hatfield garden, Sydney 202, 205 heath-leaved banksia 138 hedgerow plants 222 Hemodoraceae 33 Henning, Rachel 117 Heysen, Hans 194 hierarchy, in naming of plants 37 Himalayan balsam 7 Hindostanee gardens 192 honey possums 4 honeyeaters 4, 6, 12 Hooker, Sir William 117 Botany of the Antarctic Voyage 143 identification of elements in the Australian flora 92–3 hoop pine 97 Hopkins, Gerard Manly 228–9 Hough, Michael 229–30 Hughes, Robert 200 human evolution xiv–xv Huon pine 11, 105, 107, 118, 214 Illawarra flame tree 184–5 Imperator cylindrica 82, 231 imperial appropriation 36–40 indigenous, terminology 25 indigenous names of plants 38 indigenous plants introduction into garden vocabulary 44–6 use of 12–14 see also local plants; native plants

Indomalesian elements in Australian flora 93 introduced pathogens 6, 17–18 introduced plants 7, 156–7, 199, 238 invasive plants 7, 8–9, 13, 223–4, 225, 230 from Australia 225–6, 238 Investigator (ship) 134, 136 Irises (Van Gogh) 150 Irish strawberry tree 182 ironbarks 179

King George Sound,WA 68 Kings Park Botanic Gardens, Perth 21, 36, 134, 135 boabs 52, 53–4 Mediterranean theme gardens 163 Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens, Cape Town 22 kookaburras 2–3, 5, 6, 12 Krautungalung people 234 kunai 231 Kunzea baxteri 127

jacaranda 176 Jacaranda mimosaefolia 176 Japanese gardens 209, 210–11, 2123 Japanese knotweed 7 Japanese maple 195 jarrah xvi, 80–1 Jones,Wyn 98 Juncus maritimus 82 Jurien Bay,WA 159, 160

Labillardière, Jacques 133, 135, 141 lad’s love 38 Lagarostrobos 105, 107 Lagarostrobos franklinii 11, 105, 107 Lagerstromia indica 182 Lake Biwa, Kyoto, Japan 211 land clearing 156 and plant vulnerability 17, 114 for agriculture 222–3 landscape architects 195 landscape architecture 201 landscape design 195–6 landscapes, Australia xi, 194 Latreille, Anne 206 Laurasia 90 Leeuwin Current 161–2 legumes 78 lemon-scented gum 174, 180, 199, 201 lemurs 57 Leptomeria acida 82 Leptospermum laevigatum 225 Leschenaultia 207 Leschenaultia formosa 18, 151 Leucodendron serratifolium 138 Leucophyta brownii xvii, 21 Leucopogon maccraei 110 Lewis, J.W. 73, 74, 75 lily relatives, in Australia 118 limestone 13, 19, 28, 30, 31, 164, 214, 227 Linaria cymbalaria 227 Linnaeus 38, 51, 132, 134, 135, 138

kahikatea 112–14 kangaroo grass 11 Kangaroo Island garden 201 kangaroo paws 21, 33, 118, 196 kangaroos 57 kapok tree 62, 185 ‘Karkalla’, Mornington Peninsula,Victoria 203, 204, 205 Karrakatta Cemetery chapel, Perth 150 ‘Karwarra’, Dandenong Ranges, Victora 24, 25 kauri 11, 91, 97, 97, 98, 118 Kaurna people 234 Keighery, Greg 39 Kenilworth ivy 227 kerangas 96 Kew Magazine 143 Kimberley gorge 47 Kimberley Republic hypothesis 59–60 King, Captain Philip Parker 41, 48, 55, 56 King Billy pine 92, 102, 102, 118

Index

265

literature 150 Livistona australis 81 local plants design lessons and models 21–5 reasons for exceptions to use 197–9 reasons for use 12–13, 194–5, 196 use of 12–14 see also native plants Lomatia 110 Los Angeles 159, 160 ‘love ’em or lose ’em’ proposition 15–18 Lovell, John 7 Macrozamia riedlii 67–8, 67 Madagascar 59 baobab pollination and dispersal 57 baobab species 51–2, 58, 60, 62 floral similarities to Australia 50 geographical similarities to Australia 48–50 Magnoliales 111 Mahony, Marion 84–5 Malvaceae 33, 34 manna gum 179 Maori plant names 38 marihuana 224 marri 3, 187 Marseilles 159 Marsilea 72 Mauritius 59, 133, 136 ‘Mediterranean’, terminology 158 Mediterranean climatic zones 158–9 day length 159–60 geology 160–1 influence of ocean currents 161–2 latitudes 158, 159, 160, 161 localities 159 soil nutrient status 162, 163 temperature and rainfall data 161

266

Index

Mediterranean gardens 192 and their physical context 158–63 design 166–71 style of garden 159 mediterraneity 157–8 Melaleuca 213, 214 Melaleuca acerosa 19 Melaleuca elliptica 208, 213 Melaleuca lanceolata 19, 166, 176 Melbourne gum 17 Melia azedarach 184, 225 Melia azedarach australasica 184, 198 Mermaid (ship) 41, 55, 56 Metasequoia 105 Metasequoia glyptostroboides 99, 103 Mexican poppy 227 Microcachrys 105 Microcachrys tetragona 11, 104, 105–7 Micromyrtus 20 Microstrobus 105, 107 Microstrobus fitzgeraldii 107 Microstrobus niphophilus 107 Millbrook Nature Reserve,WA 4 minni-ritchis 176, 180 bark 181 Minorca 159, 160 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 68 Molloy, Georgiana 84–5 Moraea flaccida 157 motifs 150 mountain ash 179 mountain bells 15 mountain pepper 111 mountain plum pine 109 Mueller, Ferdinand 55, 107, 131–2, 135 “My Country” 241 Myoporum insulare 225 Myrtaceae 33 evolutionary history 93–5 Myrtus communis 95 Namatjira, Albert 194 naming of plants see plant names

National Weeds Strategy 218 nation’s animals and plants, as works of art 6–8 native, terminology 25 native cat 78 native currant 82 native dusty miller 19, 84 native gardens, in the suburbs 82–3 native hops 82 native plants becoming invasive in new settings 13 introductions to horticulture 46 reasons for making exceptions to use 197–9 sale through plant nurseries 45 use of 194–5, 196 see also local plants native rose 33, 34, 44, 78 native violets 44 native wells 75–6 natural boundaries 10 Naturaliste (ship) 28 naturalistic gardens 23–5 Née, Luis 132 New Holland honeyeater 12 New Zealand flora 105, 107, 108, 112–14, 212, 213 naming of 38 Noble, David 98 Nolan, Sydney 194 Norfolk Island 118 Norfolk Island pine 11, 15, 18, 44, 91, 97, 104, 200 coastal planting 199, 200 plan for use as ship masts 199–200 prostrate form 199, 200 North, Marianne 145 Nothofagus 93, 95, 107, 122, 184 Nothofagus cunninghamii 184 Nothofagus gunnii 93, 184 Nothofagus moorei 94, 184 noxious weeds 219, 221 nursery trade 15, 45, 63, 100

Nyoongah people 38, 68, 69, 234 oaks 10, 175, 222 oats 221 ocean currents, influence on climate 161–2 olives 61, 165–6 onion grass 226 onion weed 226–7 open spaces in gardens 203 Opuntia sp. 220 Owenia verrucosa 185 Oxford Companion to Gardens 206 Oxylobium 78 painters, portrayal of Australian landscapes 194 Pangea 90 pansies 196 paperbarks 38, 182 Parakeelya xvii, 39 parakeelya 35, 39, 40, 117 Parietaria debilis 84 Park, Geoff 38, 113–14 Parkinson, H. F. 145 Parkinson, Sydney 138–40 ‘parsley’ 82 Paterson’s curse 220 pathways 203, 214–15 Peakall, Rod 101 pellitory 84 Pennisetum alopecuroides 227 pepper tree 62 Peppermint Grove, Perth, garden 208 peppermints xvi, 176 perennial border 203 perennial cress 228 persistent bark 179 Persoonia 110 Persoonia elliptica 38 Perth gardens 83–4, 208 influence of Leeuwin Current on climate 161–2 latitude 159, 160, 161 temperature and rainfall 161

Phaner furcifer 57 Phillip, Governor Arthur 140 Phylidonyris nigra 4 Phyllocladaceae 105 Phyllocladus aspleniifolius 11, 105 Phytophthora cinnamomi 6, 18 Pimelea physodes 15, 16 Pimenta dioica 95 Pimenta racemosa 95 pine grevillea 129 Pinus pinea 167 pioneer garden designers 205–15 pioneer species 222, 238 Pittosporum bicolor 110 Pittosporum phylliraeoides 168, 169 Pittosporum undulatum 13, 225 Planchonia 189 plant affinities 10 and national boundaries 10–12 plant collectors 30, 32–5, 41, 66, 131, 132–3, 137, 138, 140, 142, 147 plant invaders see invasive plants plant names 35–6, 37–40 change of names xvii, 38–9 hierarchy 37 use of popular names 37–8, 40, 79 validity of scientific names 37 vocabularies 44 plum pine 112 plume grevillea 129 Poa annua 227 Podocarpaceae 11, 100, 104–14, 227 Podocarpus 19, 20, 104, 110, 122 distribution 107–9 proposed genera split 108–9 Podocarpus amarus 108 Podocarpus dacrydioides 38, 113 Podocarpus dispermus 108 Podocarpus drouynianus 11, 107, 108, 109 Podocarpus elatus 18, 100, 108, 112, 122, 227–8 Podocarpus falcata 109

Podocarpus grayi 108 Podocarpus imbricatus 113 Podocarpus ladei 108 Podocarpus lawrencei 108, 109, 110, 118 use by gardeners 112 Podocarpus spinulosus 108 Podocarpus totara 108 poinciana 85, 86, 224 poisonous plants 78–9 pollen comparison 92, 99, 101–2 popular names of plants 37–8, 40, 79 Port Jackson plant collecting 140 use of local timbers 80 Portulaca grandiflora 35 Portulacaceae 36, 39 distribution 36 Powell, Robert 83, 84, 85, 236 Preston, Margaret 150 pretty grevillea 129 prickly pear 156, 220 primary colonisers 230 primrose 222 Prostanthera lasianthos 110 prostrate banksias 148, 199 prostrate Norfolk Island pine 199, 200 Proteaceae 91, 93, 109, 110 at risk of dieback 18 diversity 126–8 see also banksias; grevilleas Prunopitys ladei 108 Qualup bell 15, 16 Queensland plum pine 100, 227 Queensland umbrella tree 213 Quercus agrifolia 19, 175 Quercus ilex 19, 175 Quercus suber 10, 19, 175 quokka 67 red-flowering gum 3, 15, 17, 187, 207 red swamp banksia 134, 145 Réunion 59 rhododendrons, place for 20–1

Index

267

Richea scoparia 120 rimu 106, 211, 212, 213, 214 Riviera 159 Roberts,Tom 194 Roebuck (ship) 30 Roman pine 167 Romneya coulteri 227, 228 Romulea rosea 157, 226 rose gum 183 roses, plant names 44 Rosser, Celia 131, 133, 148–50 illustrations in The Banksias 148 quality of illustrations 148 Rottnest cypress 116 Rottnest tea-tree 166, 167 Rowan, Marian Ellis 147 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 35, 36, 100 Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne 25, 104, 121–2, 135, 183, 185 Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney 100, 122–3 Rumex maritimus 229 Rumicastrum xvii, 39, 117 Rumicastrum chamaecladum 39 rushes 81–2 Rutaceae 33 rye 221 Salentina, Italy comparison with Fremantle 164, 165 geology 164 multicultural identity 163–4 salmon gum 183 salt marsh plants 51 saltbush 39 Sapindaceae 86 Sarcocornia 51 sassafras 111, 112 saw banksia 138, 139 Schefflera actinophylla 213 Schinus molle 62 scientific collecting 66 seed collecting 13–14, 140 Wollemi pine 99–100 seed-ferns 90, 91

268

Index

Senecio viscosus 229 Sequoia 104 Sequoia sempervirens 103, 103, 162 Sequoiadendron 104 Sequoiadendron giganteum 103 Setonyx brachyurus 67 shade trees 197–8, 199 Shakespeare,William 229 Shark Bay,WA xii, 29, 30, 36 she-oaks 81, 82 she-pine 112 sheep sorrel 221 Sibthorp, John 136 Sida calyxhymenia 33, 34 silky oak 18, 129 silver banksia 132, 133 silver birch 182 Smilax glyciphylla 82 Smith, Edwin Dalton 141–3 Smith, James Edward 140 Snape, Diana 199 snottygobble 38 Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (Gibbs) 3, 151 Society for Growing Australian Plants movement 44 soil constraints (to plant growth) 19–20 soils acidic 131 alkaline 18, 19–20, 130 author’s garden 13, 18, 19, 130 nutrient status 96, 162, 163 Solander, Daniel 133, 134, 135, 138–40 southern beech 93, 107, 184 Sparaxis bulbifera 157 species diversity 238 spice plants 95 ‘spinac’ 82 spinifex 73 Spyridium globulosum 15, 19, 84 State Weed Plans 218 Stearn,William 136 Steep Point,WA 28, 29, 30, 30, 31 sticky groundsel 229

Stirling, E. C. 40 Stirling Range,WA 39, 130, 171 stock feed 79 Stones, Ellis 205, 206, 214 Stones, Margaret 148 Streeton, Arthur 194 stringybarks 176, 179 stromatolites Marble Bar,WA xiii Shark Bay,WA xii Sturt pea 41 suburban gardens 209 successional change,Toronto 229–30 succulents 51, 197 sugar gum 44, 179–80, 194 summer scented wattle 38 Sundacarpus amara 109 Sunflowers (Van Gogh) 150, 197 swamp cypress 104 Swan River Colony 68, 78 Swan River mahogany 80 Swane River Republik hypothesis 60 Sweet, Robert, Flora australasica 141 sweet tea plant 82 sweet William 38 Sydney, climate 193 Symphomyrtus 186 Syzygium aromaticum 95 Tamala limestone 28, 30, 31 tamarinds 86 Tamarindus indicus 86 taro 70 Tarsipes rostratus 4 Tasmania, site preservation 118 Tasmanian pencil pine 102 Tasmannia 110, 111 plant structure 111 Tasmannia lanceolata 110, 111 Tasmannia xerophila 110, 111 Taxodiaceae 92, 102–4 distribution 103–4 Taxodium distichum 104 taxonomic details, importance of 131

taxonomists 131–2 Tchupalla Falls, far north Queensland 236 Te Matua Ngahere (kauri) 98 tea-tree oil 82 Telopea 110 Telopea monagaensis 128 Telopea truncata 121 Templetonia retusa 13, 14, 15, 19, 38, 84 Terminalia 189 Terminalia spp. 185 Tetragona expansa 82 thatching materials 81–2 Themeda 11 Thompson, John 192, 193 Threlkeldia diffusa 84 timber 80–1, 107 toadflax 227 tobacco 224 Toronto Spit, successional change 229–30 totara 108 tree-ferns 122 Trigger, David 85 Triodia 73 Tristania 95 Triteleia 226 tropical banksia 138 tuart 198 Tucker, Albert 194 University of Western Australia 2–3, 5, 104, 210, 212 Gondwanan flora 122 Japanese Studies courtyard 213 Sunken Garden 207–9, 207, 208, 211–13, 214 Uranie (ship) 28 Valparaiso, Chile 159 Van Gogh,Vincent 150, 197 Vancouver, Captain George 69, 145, 147 Vanessa itea 84 Venice 159, 160 verge strip 203, 223 Victorian tea-tree 225

Viola hederaceae 44 vulnerability of plants, in their natural environment 17–18 wallabies 57 wallaby saltbush 84 Wallace, Alfred Russel 132 Wallace’s Line 10 Walling, Edna 205, 206, 207, 214 waratah 121 Warburton, Peter Egerton assessment of ‘bad country’ 73–4 crosses western half of the interior of the continent 72–8 exploration party members 73, 75 finds native wells 75–6 mindless assumption of superiority 77 relations with Aboriginal people 76–8 reliance on ‘untutored native’, Charley 77–8 suffering from the journey 74, 75 warm ocean currents 161–2 water hyacinth 221 water-wise plants 87 Watsonia spp. 57 wattling 81 Watts, Peter 206 weed status 221–2 weeds 156–7, 218–31, 237–8 agricultural 218, 219–23 as colonists 229–31 definition 218, 219 environmental 218, 219, 223–4 garden 218, 219, 226–8 gardener’s friends and enemies 228 in praise of 228–9 invasive nature 223–4, 225–6, 230 terminology 224–5 see also garden escapes

weedy specimens 224 Wellingtonia 103 Wentworth, D’Arcy 82, 122 Western Australia satellite images 28, 29, 30 State Weed Plan 218–19 Western Australian ecosystems 8 Western Australian Gardener 207 wheat 221, 222 white cedar 198 White, John 82, 140 white-cheeked honeyeater 4 white pine 113 ‘wild celery’ 82 wildflowers along roadsides 223, 224 smothered by weeds 224 WA 204 Wildflowers of Western Australia 145–6 wildlife xenophobia 7–8 Williams, Fred 23, 194 Willis, Jim 48 willows 156 Wilson, Paul 39 winter grass 227 Winteraceae 109, 110–11 distribution 111 Winter’s bark 110–11 Wishing Tree, Farm Cove 122–3 Woldendorp, Richard 194 Wollemi pine 46, 63, 91, 97–102 adaptability 100, 101 commercial propagation 15, 100 discovery 98–9 DNA studies 101 natural occurrence 99, 101 pollen comparison 92, 99, 101–2 seed collecting 99–100 seed germination 100 site preservation 118 Wollemia 91, 97

Index

269

Wollemia nobilis 46, 92, 98, 99, 100, 102 woodbine 222 Woodford, James, The Wollemi Pine 99, 100, 101–2 woolly orange banksia 141–2, 142

270

Index

woollybarks 176 Xanthorrhoea hastilis 82 Xanthorrhoea preissei 38, 159 Xanthorrhoea spp. 168 Xanthorrhoeaceae 118 Xanthostemon 189

yam grounds 69–71 Yanchep National Park 3 Zamia palm 67, 69 Zantedeschia aethiopica 157 Zuytdorp (ship) 30 Zuytdorp Cliffs,WA 30, 31