Story time
In his 2020 book, Spirit of Place; the making of a New England Garden, writer, gardener, garden designer, and garden preservationist and restorer, Bill Noble promotes gardens where plants are “the primary means of creating structure and interest, rather than architecture or garden ornament”. Setting aside for a moment paths, retaining walls, and stairs which are all fairly necessary for steep sites, his sentiment is one I whole-heartedly share.
I can accept a well-placed potting shed — the more rustic the better — a garden bench, a bird-bath, and a couple of potted plants, but as for any other permanent architecture, furnishing, ornamentation, or feature, gardens are, in my opinion, better without them. I’ve expressed elsewhere my disdain for almost anything placed around and within contemporary suburban gardens. My preference for gardens that are squarely and firmly plant-centred remains unequivocal. I suspect I’m in quite the minority of gardeners in this regard, but I don’t much give a fig (gardening quip there).
For those unconvinced that plants more than anything maketh the garden, perhaps the following two stories might help sway them. One is a tale of Microcachrys tetragona, a creeping dwarf alpine conifer commonly known as Strawberry pine on account of its tiny strawberry-red fruiting bodies. Its common name is a misnomer if ever there was one since its fruit resemble tiny raspberries in both shape and form. Given how poorly descriptive so many Australian plants’ common names are, I shouldn’t expect better. But I can’t help myself, and so shall remain frustrated with them until I croak. The other story is about a client’s garden, and more particularly, her relationships with individual plants.
According to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, the Strawberry pine’s distinctively shaped pollen has been found fossilised as far afield as New Zealand, Antarctica, South America and southern Africa. It’s even been identified among ocean-floor samples taken from the submerged Ninetyeast Ridge in the Indian Ocean. Having once had a very broad geographical range, the plant is now restricted to Tasmania’s alpine areas, and the entire genus is represented by a single species — what is otherwise known as a monotype. As curious as all that may be, I have a more personal interest in Microcachrys. In one particular specimen, that is.
Before I left Tasmania to work in northern Borneo, I grew a Strawberry pine which was part of a collection of one hundred or so potted plants native to Tasmania. My collection was once more numerous, but as I was renting during those years, I soon realised that there was a limit to how many plants I was willing to take with me each time I moved. Just as I’d done with my indoor plants when I left Melbourne for Hobart, the plants I’d grown in Hobart were given away to friends when I left there. It was so long ago now that I don’t remember who received what, let alone who received anything. That changed a little when I returned to Tasmania near the height of the pandemic while some state borders were briefly open — they closed again four days after I arrived.
After a fourteen year interregnum, and to my utter surprise, a dear friend returned my Strawberry pine in its original glazed terracotta pot. His recently deceased mother — an accomplished plantswoman and conservationist who successfully raised to flower what is unarguably Tasmania’s most difficult-to-grow and critically endangered endemic plant, King’s lomatia (Lomatia tasmanica) — had also cared for my Strawberry pine all the years I’d been absent. Its return was both a poignant and delightful gesture.
The plant had suffered much as a consequence of her house having been temporarily abandoned for a couple of weeks to avoid a particularly savage regional wildfire. And although I nurtured it back to some semblance of health, I had to part with it once again after leaving Tasmania a second time. Now in the hands of a plant-loving friend, I hope to see it once again should either of us meet again in Tasmania sometime during the next fourteen years!
None of the plants intended for my Townsville garden have such a sentimental backstory. The point is, however, that plants can play a significant role in our lives. They do everyday, in actual fact, whether one realises it or not. We build houses and furniture with materials sourced from plants — timber and compressed agricultural waste, for example. Think of any number of musical instruments, and chances are that they’re mostly made with wood or other plant material (bassoon reeds, for example). We are sustained by plant-based foods and foods that couldn’t exist without plants — bread, vegetables, beans, lentils, honey, coffee, beef, and lamb. The list is far from exhaustive.
Many of our fabrics and textiles are made from plant fibres and others that couldn’t exist without plants — denim from cotton, linen from flax, tencel from wood waste, wool, leather, silk, and bamboo-fibre. Our blood is enriched by, and we cannot survive without oxygen transpired by plants. We make dyes from indigo and woad, among so many other plant-based pigments. Bioplastics are produced from cornstarch, food waste, and algae. And medicines like aspirin from willow, codeine from poppies, and atropine from deadly nightshade, were first botanically derived before otherwise being synthesised. Many types of glues, waxes, and resins are at least partly derived from plants.
There are more nuanced ways plants affect our lives. Naturally vegetated landscape catchments where water is harvested for human consumption produce clearer water than those where vegetation has been reduced. Below soil surfaces, plant roots bind soil together and help prevent erosion. Their roots can also soak up excess water during high rainfall events, helping to mitigate flooding. Vegetation also has a cooling effect at scale through both shade and/or evapotranspiration, and absorbs carbon dioxide (especially oceanic phytoplankton). The vital importance of that last point is difficult to overstate, but I shan’t elaborate upon it.
Culturally, we have more direct relationships with plants. In Japan, gifts of an unblemished perfectly formed single rock- or honeydew melon, or a bunch of grapes, for example, are bought presented in beautiful paulownia wooden boxes from opulent stores at exorbitant prices. These are, I understand, exceptional gifts for loved ones who might be convalescing in hospital, for example, or those who’ve received a significant job promotion, or are retiring from working most of their lives for an employer who has valued their service. Bonsai are family heirlooms passed down along generations.
In Papua New Guinea, as elsewhere, parts of many plants are a valued and integral part of traditional cultural attire. In the highland province of Enga, the dark egg-yolk yellow stems of a dendrobium orchid are cut into short lengths, dried, and threaded to make necklaces. Across the country, seeds and nuts of varying shapes, sizes, and colours are similarly used. Leaves and bark are also utilised. An online image-search for ‘Dukduk’ and ‘Baining masks’ will show costumes that are traditionally made entirely from plants.
A plant’s sexual reproductive organs, its flowers, have many symbolic meanings that vary between cultures and across the ages: from expressions of love and betrothal (roses on Valentine’s Day, for example), to sympathy for personal loss and grief (lilies at funerals, but also wreaths of leaves and/or flowers). Back in Japan, white moth orchids are frequently gifted to newly-opened restaurant and store owners to wish them success with their business. In parts of the Pacific, a judiciously placed flower behind one ear or another indicates one’s relationship status. Strip away any meanings we might confer upon them, and flowers are simply admired for their beauty and brought indoors to adorn interiors, and also to infuse them with pleasing and often stimulating fragrances. One can also adorn one’s head with a daisy-chain, or neck with a lei.
Pressed and distilled plant oils are variously used as perfumes, disinfectants, wood sealers, massage oils, and in cooking. No one would be drinking their craft beer and artisanal gins, not to mention every other alcoholic beverage, cordial, and juice without plants of some kind or another. And almost everyone it seems has heard of the psychological benefits of nature therapy, horticultural therapy, frilutsliv (Norwegian nature communing), and of course, shinrinyoku (Japanese forest bathing).
Although many of us take our relationships with plants for granted, others form much deeper attachments. One of my Adelaide-based clients — who became a dear friend — has their garden filled with reeds, flowering shrubs and trees, and little else other than some strategically placed birdbaths, a rainwater tank, and her painting studio. It’s a haven for a wide variety of native bird species. In those respects it’s very much my type of garden. Many of her plants were originally sourced from cuttings or divisions of other plants grown by her friends and loved ones, some of whom are deceased. With so many remembrances present throughout her garden, I used to think that it verged on the cemeterial, if not the morbid. How wrong I was. The way her face lit up whenever Marjory (a pseudonym to protect her privacy), mentioned the names of the people whose gardens her plants had come from made me wonder whether her plants were less memorial and more living proxies for the deceased. While I undertook a long-term reworking of her garden, she ensured that I keep in situ each plant she’d inherited and nurtured, or carefully transplant them only when absolutely necessary.
The relationship she has with her garden is very intimate, and not only because of her relationships with particular plants. She inspects her garden daily and, noticing the slightest of changes, delights in the positive, and immediately sets to remedying anything untoward. I like to think that the relationships she has with her inherited plants are a way of still caring about the people she loved and probably still loves despite their passing. Perhaps it’s a way of prolonging one’s love for someone who has died? Whatever it is, it’s a very life-centred expression of both love and loss.
We all eventually have to cope as best we can and in our own way with the grief that follows the death of those with whom we have formed an emotional attachment. Sometimes the shadow cast by grief can be light and dappled; the grief is real, but bearable, manageable, and temporary. Other times the shadow is cast deeply, and our grief is profound, crippling, even life-changing. Since my mother’s passing I’m now far more sensitive than I used to be when considering life’s great inevitability and its many vicissitudes. Whereas previously, for example, I tended to rationalise severe or grave illness experienced by dearly loved friends, family, companions, or pets, that has irrevocably changed. Just recently, my emotions were shaken when I caught a wallaby under my wheels while driving along a quiet country road. Previously I’d have cursed and dismissed it for being stupid, but any wild animal hit by a car isn’t stupid, of course. Their species has simply yet to evolve to cope with the increasing presence of very fast and dangerous machines.
I know some people will scoff, but I do feel my life becoming more ‘vegetarian’. I don’t necessarily mean in the dietary sense, though that is something I strive towards but fail miserably with. I mean that my outlook, my attention, and my very being is increasingly entwined with the life of plants. My love of plants, of gardening, has been a part of my identity for as long as I care to remember, but now even more so. Gardening has become a source of income. In other countries and cultures, being employed as a gardener is considered a respected career for people with considerable knowledge and skills.
When I recently divulged to a Japanese acquaintance that I am a gardener, they responded by telling me quite sincerely how noble a profession it is. And after being introduced to almost anyone in Papua New Guinea (but particularly highlanders), their face beams when I tell them that I’m a gardener. They are, however, immediately surprised to learn my hourly rate! In Australia, by contrast, gardening as employment is largely looked upon as unskilled work with little or no need for specialist knowledge.
It’s little wonder that I feel the way I do about gardening at this stage of life, considering how close I am to planting out my own garden. I’m also reading more books than ever about garden history and design, particular designers, and plant care and maintenance — especially pruning, shaping, and topiary, which, according to my clients, I’m apparently quite good at. I continue watching some TV gardening programmes, though skip through sections that would otherwise bore me (i.e. those that aren’t practically orientated). And for the last nine months I’ve been writing about plants and gardens. I’ve even started watching movies with clear gardening themes. There are worse things to be obsessed with…
As noted elsewhere, my suburban block is presently dominated by well managed weeds with the pretence of lawn, and which will be entirely replaced with larger, more substantial, and diverse garden plants. It is intended to be a much ‘livelier’ place, which won’t be difficult to achieve since plants deliver life in spades. Not only have they value in themselves, but whole communities of insects, spiders, centipedes, snails and slugs, birds, bats, frogs, lizards, snakes, fish, mammals, fungi, worms, viruses, and bacteria (have I left anything out?), form and thrive around plants. As do — occasionally — humans. With that in mind, I’m just about to head to the annual Bluewater Gardening Fair and Flower Show.
To be continued…
