Australian Literary Management - Peter Timms

I could, of course, go down the hill.
    A year or so back we constructed a path across what we laughingly refer to as the front lawn to try to make this route more enticing. The path ends in a short flight of stone steps that take you to a lower terraced area (presently just a mass of long grass, but I have plans), then down a steep slope among massive granite boulders and out across a narrow field to the front gate. It’s a walk of about half-a-kilometre in all and there’s plenty to see along the way.
    The rocks harbour a wealth of understorey plants: the Austral stork’s bills are common, with their demure, purple-veined white flowers and soft, sprawling foliage. So are the more arresting Magenta stork’s bills, whose deep-purple blooms poke up above a ground-hugging cluster of leaves like megaphones on poles. They are just two of the many varieties of native geranium. Although this is the western face of the hillside, it is so well sheltered by the rocks and trees that it stays relatively cool year-round, and can be quite boggy after rain, when the rocky crevices turn into miniature waterfalls. Maidenhair ferns and Green rock ferns love it here. There are carpets of them.
    Above hang the much less common Necklace ferns, which, of all the native vegetation, I think I treasure most. I know the exact locations of about a dozen of these gracefully pendulous ferns on our block and every so often I do the rounds to make sure they’re alright. They insinuate a thick mat of fine roots into fissures in the rocks, then wait for water to trickle in to keep them going. In summer it doesn’t, and the necklace ferns shrivel into crisp brown dust. In that seemingly dead state they remain for months, grilling on the hot rockface, until the first drops of autumn rain induce a miraculous little knuckle of green, no bigger than a pin-head, which rapidly unfurls into a long, slender tendril with a tiny clasp-like hook at the end. In no more than a week or two, they are cascading down the rockfaces again like green confetti. Fragile they may look, but the necklace ferns are practically indestructible.
    This area is also unusually rich in lichens and mosses. It takes very little moisture to turn the hard, flaky granite surfaces into miniature gardens of green, black, bright orange and white. It wasn’t until our friend, lichen specialist Kath Ralston, had shown me that the magnifying glass was as necessary a walking companion as binoculars and notebook that I really started to appreciate just how beautiful and varied lichens could be, and learned to distinguish the crusties, the leafies and the shrubbies (or the crustose, the foliose and the fruticose, as she would no doubt prefer). Just recently, Kath and I spent the best part of a day crawling around on our hands and knees with the glass, examining their multifarious little fruiting bodies.
    Beyond the rocks, where the ground flattens out towards the road, you can find, if you’re very observant, the Austral adder’s tongue, a minute, primitive fern that does bear some resemblance to the head (but not the tongue) of a snake but looks nothing at all like a fern. More readily spotted are the fleshy clusters of Austral bear’s ears — native daisies which, to judge purely by appearances, might be weeds but are in fact acceptably indigenous.

At some time in the past, not much more than ten years ago, this area was cleared of trees, so it is now the sunniest and most open part of our block. The eucalypts have begun the process of recolonisation, but as yet they are so weak and spindly you wonder how they manage to stay upright. Until they strengthen and take control, the grasses are seizing upon this window of opportunity and proliferating. I haven’t at this stage of my education got around to grasses. My plant-list, on which I tick off species as I find them, includes an almost infinite number of them, but I’ve made few inroads into that section so far.
    I look forward to the day when I can distinguish among the sedges, for instance. There’s Tall club sedge, Tall sedge, Short-stem sedge, Fen sedge, Rush sedge, Flat sedge, Drain-flat sedge, Tall flat-sedge, Flecked flat-sedge, Leafy flat-sedge, Tiny flat-sedge, Common spike-sedge, Tall spike-sedge, Thatch saw-sedge, Red-fruit saw-sedge, Nodding club-sedge, Floating club-sedge, Swamp club-sedge, Little club-sedge, Common rapier-sedge, Variable sword-sedge, Wire rapier-sedge, Sharp club-sedge, River club-sedge, Common bog-sedge and the whimsically-named and whimsical-looking Mr Curly sedge (one of Victoria’s endangered species). My plant list also includes thirteen different varieties of Wallaby grass, including kneed, slender, velvet, bristly and purplish (I like the studied imprecision of ‘purplish’). Even the wallabies must be confused. To an amateur, these are richly descriptive lists — less descriptive, certainly, yet ultimately more intelligible if you use their proper latinate names — but either way, almost impossible for a non-specialist to apply in the field.
    In any case, a good many of the grasses on this patch of ground are introduced species, as indeed are one or two of those sedges I mentioned: my plant-list is ecumenical in that respect. There are lots of Common quaking grasses, for instance, with their attractive little Japanese-lantern seedpods. Contra the bear’s ears, I always assumed they were natives, but it turns out they are, in fact, a pest. There are wild oats, sorrel, ribwort, onion grass and flatweeds. And thrusting arrogantly above them all like a prickly sentinel, the occasional Scotch thistle. This is not even to mention blackberries, which pop up all over the place and have to be constantly combatted.
    Yet, compared to many nearby farming areas, this is not an especially unhealthy patch of ground. The native plants might be outnumbered, but they are holding their own and will almost certainly prevail once the wattles and eucalypts begin to form a canopy again, robbing the weeds of light.
    One day, I’m sure, grasses will cease to be individually rather uninteresting and collectively just too big a subject to deal with and will start to exert their own fascination on me, just as the more readily likeable flowering plants have. For the time being, I get someone in every summer to spray the blackberries and thistles, I root out the other interlopers, one by one, and otherwise try to avoid this area altogether.

My garden began as — well, as just a garden, since it seemed almost unthinkable for a house to be without one. Of course, there are places where the bush is allowed to come right up to the walls, places that, officially at least, have no cultivated area of any sort. But what usually ends up happening is that a small patch is cleared for the car or a shed which develops into a barren yard filled with bits and pieces. Most houses in the country are plonked in the middle of their own detritus, like a baby that’s just pooed in its own bathwater. Perhaps it’s just a reflection of our underlying contempt for our natural surroundings, or, at the very least, our casual disdain.
    My two main aims when planning the garden were, in a sense, contradictory, although I didn’t realise that at the time. On the one hand, I wanted a garden artifact. Somewhere in my private fantasies I could picture it featured in a glossy magazine: ‘a glorious native garden set in tall eucalypt forest, combining all the joys of horticulture with the splendours of the Australian bush ...’ and so on: not seriously, of course, but it helped me see the garden as some other, more objective viewer might.
    On the other hand, I wanted a garden that blended into the surrounding bush so perfectly you’d hardly be able to tell where nature and artifice met: one that co-opted nature into artifact. I naively assumed I knew the difference. Principly, it was a matter of restricting myself to plants indigenous to the area, creating a garden plan that followed the natural contours of the land as faithfully as possible, and (importantly) dispensing with fences and other kinds of boundary markers.
    Armed with such relatively straightforward provisos, I set forth. However, as you might have guessed, my initial confidence quickly ebbed away as theories came up against reality. The vexed relationship between the garden and its surroundings has especially exercised my mind. It was a long time before I realised that any notion of integrating cultivated areas into bushland depended, ironically, on an artificial separation of ‘nature’ and ‘not-nature’ that, over the years, has become more and more difficult to come to grips with. So today, I am less sure than I’ve ever been about the point of my garden, except of course that it gives me pleasure, which may well be point enough. Almost by accident, it has become a miniature botanical garden of local species: a kind of reference library or inventory — my plant list come to life. Looking back now on the four or five years of its development, it seems mostly to be an accidental garden. And a garden of errors. It’s the errors, I have to say, both my own and those of others, that have taught me most.
    Considered purely as artifact, the garden is satisfying enough, if hardly spectacular. The scene is set when you emerge from the trees at the end of the drive, having wound your way up the hill from the front gate. Here we’ve made a large turning circle, leaving a group of mature messmate stringybarks in the middle. At this moment it doesn’t look quite as it should, for the drive was graded just over a week ago, exposing the raw yellow clay, and it will be a little while before it looks ‘natural’ again.
    The turning circle finds its echo in the broad curve, lower down, of the embankment behind the house, now thickly planted with White kunzia, Sticky hop bush, Spiney mat-rush, Woolly tea tree, Rough bush pea, Bitter cryptandra, Sweet bursaria, and so on. That curve, in turn, is offset by the opposing arc of the steps that take you down to the back door, and the broad sweep of the terrace in front of the house.
    So it’s all a play of forms and lines, masses and voids, broadly conforming to English landscape principles, and it cleverly incorporates some existing rock outcrops and some artfully culled groups of trees. Like all gardens, it is an imposition of order on the apparent disorderliness of nature, or, to put it in less stridently Foucauldian terms, an attempt to find patterns on which to model the natural world. A garden layout is, usually by instinct rather than intention, a matrix by means of which concepts of nature — and, of course, culture — can be rehearsed and played with.
    The overall impact of this particular garden layout is meant to be subliminal, in tune with my original aims. You’re supposed to appreciate the unity and rightness of the design without being too much aware of the artifice behind it. In that respect, I think, it works quite well. Not so long ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a friend who told me that, although the garden was nice, he thought the view of unspoiled bush northward from the kitchen window was far more satisfying. He was none-too-subtly trying to make a point, and would have been surprised at how much the unspoiled view he admired had been created by chainsaw, bobcat and even by rake and secateurs. Tactfully, I resisted the temptation to set him right.
    In any case, as time goes by, the design and layout of the garden seem progressively less important. It is the garden’s components — the plants themselves — that now demand most of my attention.
    This is odd, really, because until now I’ve never been especially attentive to plants for their own sakes. When I first decided to restrict myself to local natives, unencumbered as I was then by plant lists or field guides, I imagined that I would have, at best, only half a dozen to choose from. The evidence was there to see: I had only to walk through the forest. Apart from the gumtrees and a few acacias, there was little other than bracken. So the indigenous-only decision was ideological — it was ‘the right thing to do’ — rather than practical. I don’t know what I imagined the garden would end up looking like. Certainly I didn’t envisage an area of artfully arranged Black wattles and brackens. As usual, I suppose, I was adopting a principle and trusting to luck that circumstances would arrange themselves so as to help me work to it. (Not, I admit, a very realistic approach.)
    All the same, if called upon to justify myself, I would always cite reasons of practicality. It seemed the best defense against those inclined to sneer at my ‘environmental fundamentalism’. Indigenous plants would, I pointed out, ever so rationally, be adapted to the poor soils and the extremes of climate, surviving well without supplementary watering. They would be more resistant to disease and insect attack and, of course, they would serve the needs of native birds and animals. This is all true enough, of course, but there was a deeper motivation that was less easily defined or justified. Oddly enough, it germinated not in the bush but on a former industrial dumping ground in inner-suburban Collingwood.
    For this, in effect, was what the banks of the Yarra River around the old working-class areas of Abbotsford and Collingwood had become, despite the fact that what we now know as Studley Park and Fairfield Park were reserved as early as 1877. Robert and I have walked a succession of our dogs there over the years, and, more recently, have witnessed the revegetation of the area by Parks Victoria and a small army of enthusiastic volunteers. First, a sizeable patch is cordoned off and sprayed liberally with something we are assured is ‘non-residual and harmless to humans and animals’ (although signs warn us to stay clear and the poison is dyed a repellent shade of pink to ensure we do). When all the weeds are dead, the stubble is burnt, the soil turned over and, in no time at all, the whole area is covered in little plastic tree-guards, each embracing its fragile seedling. Despite the best efforts of dogs, cyclists, playful children, careless walkers, and rainless days, a surprising number of these plants survive to maturity.
    Yet the Saturday afternoon contests on the cricket fields are accompanied by stealthier skirmishes around the perimeters, where paspalum and couch are busily strangling the poas. Were it not for workers with backpacks constantly on weed patrol, the natives would be out for a duck. The more park that is converted to its ‘natural state’, the more there is to look after, and the further behind the weed-control efforts tend to get.
    Perhaps, with time and work and lots of money, the Yarra Bend area can be restored to some semblance of the way it was just before white settlement. Already the transformation is impressive. I’m told more than 300 indigenous plant species now grow there and, if you’re patient and very lucky, platypus, water rat and a number of bat species can be found. Nevertheless, if the parks are to be maintained in their new-found state of grace, we will have to accept the pink stains of weed poison and the roar of the mechanical mulcher as permanent features. If the Garden of Eden was (before that unfortunate incident with the apple) a place where nature and humanity lived in perfect accord, then Eden has long since departed Yarra Bend Park. This is, in effect, a museum-Eden.
    To be sure, some semblance of concordance has been achieved. On still summer afternoons the thwack of leather against willow blends seamlessly with the ringing calls of bell miners. But the serpent is not banished. It is barely being kept at bay. In short, this is not a natural environment and never will be again. It is a simulacrum that can survive only with artificial respiration, an attractive prop for family picnics, golf tournaments, fun-runs, corporate functions, free outdoor movies, orienteering and boomerang-making workshops. And, of course, a lot of dog-walking.
    This is not to decry the value of the corrodors of native bush that now penetrate almost into the heart of Melbourne. If nothing else, they heighten people’s awareness of indigenous plants. That can’t be a bad thing. Nevertheless, I’m not sure it’s enough in itself. Awareness is a start, but it’s what you do with it that counts, and how sensitively you apply that awareness in practice.

In some unspecified place in rural Victoria there is, according to an article in a glossy magazine I picked up in the dentist’s waiting room, an award-winning house that is ‘fully responsive to its environment’. In the artful photographs contrived for the magazine’s lifestyle and design pages, this house resembles a huge grey animal curled up in the cleft between two hills. A curved concrete wall on the west side deflects the prevailing winds, an enclosed courtyard captures the winter sun, a carefully designed pergola moderates the heat of summer, and the elegantly undulating roofline echoes the line of hills behind. Yet the architect lets slip that the long gravel drive leading to the house will ‘soon be softened with a line of poplars’. So it turns out that this house’s much-vaunted harmony with its environment has regard only to the comfort, well-being and status of its human inhabitants. The architect’s sensitivity to locality is skin-deep.
    Obviously he is either ignorant of or unconcerned about the way the environment works, as distinct from the way it looks. The problem also reflects his limited understanding of scale. Not illogically for an architect, he is thinking from the human figure outwards. That is his standard. All must be determined by the immediate needs and desires of the body. So it is immaterial whether the trees lining the drive are poplars or oaks or grey-box, since all are about tree-size and it is their scale vis-a-vis the human subject that matters. This architect’s ‘site’ is a visual construct. Like the Yarra parklands, it is a real place only insofar as it succeeds in fulfilling the immediate material demands of the people occupying it.
    We probably need to develop a more informed, more sophisticated and more nuanced sense of place than that, a subtler and less self-centred understanding of our role in the world. Perhaps this is happening, by gradual degree. Yet we still lack proper frameworks for articulating the problems, which means we tend to fall back into simplistic oppositions. We have to be on one side or the other: misty-eyed romantics or tough-minded materialists, each sniping at the other from behind well established defensive positions. All that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century talk about the Sublime and Wonder, about God’s Creation and Nature’s Cathedrals might well seem to us old fashioned and irrelevant, but at least our forebears devised patterns of thinking to frame their relationships with the natural world (which were not, as we might want to believe, always predatory). We have lost the means to carry on those conversations and we are having to invent a new language, suited to our own times and our own place. While not wishing to sound too high-flown about it, I like to think of my garden as a means by which I might learn that language, patiently, word by word.
    Having witnessed, over the years, the ongoing battle to change the odds in the Yarra parklands, it occurs to me that this little bush property of ours is in a not too dissimilar situation. Except, of course, that in this case the odds (at least for now) are in favour of the indigenous vegetation, which is holding its own against the inroads of the ferals. Nevertheless, I can’t afford to let my guard down: the environment here still needs constant maintenance. The bush has to be managed. We are still a long way from Eden. The imprint of the human animal is all over this place, and everywhere else besides. Our presence is felt in even the most remote places on the earth. For better or worse, the whole world is under our control and its fate is entirely up to us.

Soon after we bought this block, I took a long walk around its perimeters to establish our boundaries in my mind, as any animal might do to mark its territory. In the far north-east corner, where the forest begins to drop down the slope towards the pine plantation that occupies the valley between these hills and the Goulburn River, I discovered a stand of what I took to be some kind of tea-trees, but which I subsequently identified as White kunzia. I dug up half a dozen of the smaller seedlings and transferred them to the embankment outside the kitchen window, where they have now grown into a dense screen.
    Protecting the edges of the beds from plundering wombats and wallabies are masses of Lomandra, or Spiney mat-rush; those tough, strap-leafed plants that suburban councils like to plonk into ‘difficult’ sites such as nature-strips, carparks and traffic islands. Frankly, I think they look out of place among the well-tended rose gardens and gabled cottages of the inner suburbs — dry, sharp and spikey where softness and roundness are called for — but up here they are perfectly at home. With a bit of care and attention, my lomandra have grown bigger and stronger than they ever could have if left to their own devices.
    I’ve had success, too, with Common fringe-myrtles, which I took (with permission, of course) from a neighboring property; Black-anther flax lilies, which thrive in the poorest conditions and seem to actually resent kindness; the red-flowering ground cover, Kennedia prostrata (or running postman); Cranberry heath; and Bush parrot-peas. These last have the honour of being the first plants I’ve had to cut back, and indeed the first to need culling, since they self-seed with abandon.
    Obviously what I should have done, right from the beginning, was to collect seeds for propogation, but sheer impatience put paid to that. Our first winter here was very wet (how we long for another like it!) and I seemed to spend all my time ankle-deep in mud trying to prevent the precious topsoil from slipping away. Vegetating the slopes near the house was a matter of some urgency, and I wasn’t prepared to wait around for seeds to sprout.
    Not only was I impatient, but also intimidated. Propagating native plants from seed was, it appeared, a highly complicated affair. With the best intentions, I bought a little book on the subject, which succeeded only in confirming the awful difficulties of extracting, drying, cleaning, storing, threshing, crushing and soaking in hot water. It made me wonder how any of these plants manage to reproduce by themselves.
    Better by far to find someone else to put in all the hard work. And that we did, more or less by accident, after noticing a small ‘native nursery’ sign propped up by a farm fence nearby. Here we’ve bought many young plants grown from locally gathered seeds.
    Having established the garden to the point at which I no longer feel so much urgency about it, I’ve begun (somewhat unsystematically) to propogate seeds myself. That many fail to germinate doesn’t bother me, as once it might have, and the few that do survive invariably grow to be the plants I care most about. Seed-raising is not nearly as complicated as my little book had made it out to be.
    The Musk daisy bushes here beside the drive represent one of my not-so-successful seed-raising efforts. I gathered a jar full of seeds two years ago near the summit of Mount Hickey but only four came up. And even they are not looking very happy. I doubt they’ll ever flourish. Perhaps it matters that Mount Hickey is a couple of hundred metres higher than we are here and comprised of black metamorphosed mudstone, whereas our soils are acidic, derived from granite. While they are, generally speaking, native to the area, Musk daisy bushes are apparently more particular than I’d supposed.
    Need I worry about any of this? My mistakes, after all, are not as disastrous as those of the woman down the road who is happily cultivating wysterias, cliveas and arum lilies amongst her gumtrees. At least the trials of my Musk daisy bushes have taught me something important: that although identifying the flora may be fun, it’s only the beginning of a much more interesting and rewarding process. Learning why plants grow where they do and how they interact with birds, insects and other plants is proving to be a much richer vein to explore, involving, as it does, a dip into such rarefied (for me) fields as geology, climatology and soil chemistry.
    Our bird orchids, for example, are impossible to transplant and resist cultivation for two reasons. Firstly, they rely on the presence of a certain kind of wasp in order to pollinate. The poor male wasp is fooled into trying to copulate with the orchid flower, which unfairly releases female wasp pheromones. Secondly, like many other native orchids, they depend upon a fungus, which invades the cells of the plants and aids their intake of nutrients. Without the fungus the orchids can’t survive.
    Whichever way you look at it, this garden of mine is an unashamedly artificial thing, if for no other reason than that it takes little account of these intricate inter-relationships. Besides, nature would never contrive to have Olearias, Bursarias, Common cassinia, Mat-rush, Bush parrot pea, Hedge wattle, Hop bush, Austral indigo and dozens of other species all growing together in one small area. But then I never set out to mimic the natural environment, rather to concentrate it — both in form and content. It’s a botanical sample-bag by means of which I try to make the world intelligible (and not just this particular part of it). Of course, like almost any other human enterprise, it can be read as an exercise in power and control, but it is also, surely, an encouragement to curiosity, which implies the voluntary relinquishing of power.

On the one hand, Australian native plants are extraordinarily tough, as witness, for instance, the necklace ferns. You can cut a mature eucalypt off at ground level and within weeks little green shoots are springing straight out of the stump. There’s an ancient manna gum on our block that’s no more than a hollow grey trunk, completely devoid of branches. I had assumed it was well and truly dead. Just this year, however, a tuft of bright green leaves sprang, apparently at random, from out of its woody flank. It’s genuinely touching, this dogged determination of the much-maligned gumtree to cling onto life.
    On the other hand, our flora can be amazingly sensitive to minute local differences in climate and soil, a fact we continue to ignore as we happily cart plants from one end of the country to the other. The field guide I have to the eucalypts of south-eastern Australia lists some 300 species (of the more than 700 known to exist across the continent), many of which are endemic to areas so tiny that they don’t show up on the locality maps accompanying each entry. Eucalyptus scias, we are told, grows naturally only on the ranges east and south-east of Tenterfield in northern New South Wales. (Apparently it is so specialised that it doesn’t even have a common name.) The Pokolbin Mallee (Eucalyptus pumila) is even more choosey, restricted as it is to ‘‘portion 146, Parish of Rothbury, County of Northumberland’ — west of Pokolbin in the Hunter Valley, where it occupies a north-west facing slope of the Broken Back Range’. Any number of other eucalypts are equally specialised.
    In our thoughtless, arrogant way, we keep blundering in to carelessly disrupt these highly specific natural adaptations. For example, someone at some time in the past decided that Cootamundra wattles would make an attractive garden specimen. As the name suggests, this small tree is endemic to a small area around Cootamundra and Wagga Wagga, but it is now so well naturalised throughout the country that it is widely regarded as a weed. It is also a pest in parts of Africa, Europe, America and New Zealand.
    In his compelling but relentlessly depressing book, Feral Future, biologist Tim Low tells us that in Victoria alone more than one hundred native Australian plants are listed as bushland weeds. Among the most virulent is the Australian rainforest tree, Sweet pittosporum, which ‘gets a chance to misbehave in Australia when people grow it in gardens far from its original home but in regions with a matching climate. A native of Australia’s south-east, it has gone feral in Western Australia, South Australia and western Victoria. In some places it benefits from soil enrichment and fire control. Around Sydney and Melbourne it has crept out of gullies into dry woodlands, converting them into dark forests. Introduced blackbirds help spread its seeds.’
    Gardening, Low tells us ominously, does more damage to the Australian environment than mining does. It’s the sort of claim that’s impossible to prove, of course, but I have to admit it rings true, although I suspect agriculture causes more harm than gardening and mining put together.

Already the dark clouds are reneguing on their promise, as I knew they would, passing rapidly away to the north. I hope someone somewhere gets a splash of rain from them. The sun comes out, just as it is about to sink into the distant hills. It takes some of the chill off the air, if only briefly, and a delicious little shot of warmth courses all the way down my spine. But the light of the horizontal rays is so dazzling I’m driven down to the shade at the top of the embankment behind the house. The path here ends in some half-finished stone steps that will eventually wind up among an outcrop of mossy boulders (another project temporarily abandoned in midstream). Here I’ve planted a dozen Sweet bursarias. They are yet to struggle above the plastic tree-guards that have helped them through this punishing drought but, when they mature, they will be, as the field guide says, ‘attractive medium-sized bushes with spiny branches and many sprays of sweet-smelling creamy-white flowers’. This is an ideal spot for them: well-drained with plenty of sun. The bursarias, however, are another of my errors.
    For although sweet bursaria are not uncommon in the forests and along roadsides hereabouts, these particular ones were purchased from a native nursery in Melbourne. What I didn’t realise was that a sweet bursaria from Melbourne might not be exactly the same as one from here, although they are all the same species and look pretty much alike. There are, within native species, an infinite number of local variations — or provenances. By introducing Melbourne-bred bursarias into my garden, I might well be muddying the bursaria gene pool. I don’t really know what harm that does, but then nobody does, apparently, except of course that it is one more small step in making an extraordinarily diverse environment that much more uniform.
    ‘In the early days’, according to a local history I consulted in the library, ‘the (Tallarook) plateau had more high timber on it and much less of the scrub and fern of later years’. This is maddeningly unspecific, but it set me wondering just how many of the plants I now think of as indigenous owe their presence here to human intervention? How much of the natural environment is, in truth, natural?
    These ranges were used for summer grazing from at least the middle of the nineteenth century and have been an important source of timber for more than a hundred years. In fact, our block was itself part of a timber-milling property until as recently as 1970 and I have photographs of it taken in the sixties in which hardly a tree can be seen. The gradually darkening forest all around me is satisfyingly wild-looking, but most of it is only about thirty years old, which is why there are so few very large trees and so much ‘scrub’, as the local history calls it.
    So, in trying to wed my garden to the natural environment, am I in fact just joining together two more or less artificial environments? George Seddon, in another context, has answered the question and, in doing so, posed a lot more. ‘If by ‘natural’’, he writes, ‘you mean that this is a ‘pristine’ environment untouched by man, then you are clearly wrong. Building a house and a driveway alone will affect drainage patterns and water run-off. Soil compaction will follow the increase in foot traffic. Any soil disturbance brings weed invasion with it. But the environment was not ‘pristine’ even before your arrival. Most of the mammal fauna will have gone. There will be introduced birds and insects. As inconspicuous an event as the introduction of the European honey bee has changed pollination patterns in the Australian flora. Even the air quality has changed, globally. There are no ‘natural’ environments, if that is taken to mean ‘not man-modified’.’
    John Cotton, grandfather of the Australian wildflower painter Ellis Rowan, had a 30,000 acre property on the Goulburn just below here in the 1840s, ‘consisting’, as he put it in a letter home to England, ‘of hilly wooded ranges and well-watered flats’. The whole area, he says, ‘appears to be one continued forest, even to the tops of the ranges’, and he makes careful note of many native trees and shrubs that are still in evidence today. He even cultivates some of them in his garden, along with the vegetables and English ornamentals. Banksias, he says, are common. Today, however, they are few. In fact, I’ve never seen one growing naturally in the Ranges, probably because they need fire to reproduce and fire patterns have been disrupted. Cotton also mentions the ‘very numerous’ satin bower birds, a ‘pretty little flying mouse’, kangaroo rats, pelicans, black swans, brolgas, platypus, bandicoots and ‘flying squirrels’. He has heard of ‘lyre-tailed pheasants’ in the vicinity, although he has not seen them himself.
    He might just as well be writing about a different place altogether. And, of course, it’s settler-farmers like Cotton who have contributed to the demise of most of these birds and animals. On the other hand, by 1846 he is complaining about increasing numbers of white cockatoos at his wheat crops, apparently without realising that the wheat crops themselves are encouraging the proliferation of these pesky birds. Cotton says, too, that kangaroos are ‘not plentiful’ and, astonishingly, he has never seen a wallaby. Extensive land clearing and dam-building since then has encouraged these animals to the extent that, walking through the bush these days, you’d expect to encounter at least a couple.
    So a good deal has changed in just under 200 years, to the benefit of some plants and animals and the detriment of others. Overall, however, it’s quite apparent that this is now a much less varied environment than it was then, with far fewer surprises and delights, even if we do have more ‘scrub’.
    Yet it was hardly ‘pristine’ even before the arrival of Cotton and his neighbours. Aboriginal people routinely burned the vegetation along the river valley (although whether they also burnt the forests up here in the ranges is uncertain) and Cotton himself noticed when he first arrived that ‘trees are rather thinly scattered over the flat’. The hordes of native flowers he recorded and painted with such obvious delight were probably the products of those periodic burnings. ‘Throughout the bush and forest’, he writes, ‘... the ravages of fire are observable, and hundreds, nay thousands, of trees are hollow and charred by the flames’. Many of those fires were set by the pastoralists, but Cotton was also seeing the results of centuries of burning-off. The symbiotic relationship with fire that eucalypts, wattles and banksias have developed is the result of thousands of years of human burning practices.
    ‘But don’t be fooled,’ warn Sue Feary and Gregg Borschmann. ‘That burning wasn’t ... a soft and fuzzy ‘caring for country’ in the way that some modern Europeans romanticise it. The main game was exploiting and maintaining various resources within an ecosystem. Over time, this produced an intimate and practical knowledge of country which also fortuitously helped to maintain biodiversity. No doubt management was tied up with an ever present spiritual component. But it is somewhat daft to think that Aboriginal people were manipulating the land simply to conserve it for altruistic reasons.’
    Indeed, as Tim Flannery has argued in his provocative book, The Future Eaters, Aborigines wrought immense changes to the Australian environment, such that ‘I now see virtually all the continent’s ecosystems as being in some sense man-made’.
    Our ideas about nature always reveal more about us than they do about the non-human world. In Western cultures they tend to be a retelling, in some form or another, of the story of the Fall. Humankind, the Bible tells us, existed originally in a state of perfect harmony with other living creatures. There was no conflict, nor any change. We were an integral part of God’s package. Only after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden does nature come into existence as something separate and distinct. It’s a separation we have never quite come to terms with and we spend a lot of emotional energy these days trying to reconnect with our supposed origins.
    It’s hardly surprising, then, that discomforted urbanites these days choose to believe that Aborigines lived in a state of grace before Europeans came along. Like indigenous peoples everywhere, they are presumed to have had morally superior lives, in perfect harmony with nature’s rhythms, just like Adam and Eve. It’s not difficult to see whose interests are best served by such a fantasy. For one thing, it sustains the market for Aboriginal art, which is valued precisely because it expresses all those qualities that in a non-Aboriginal artwork would be widely regarded with contempt: cultural cohesiveness, religious orthodoxy, the upholding of traditions and social heirarchies, and the subjection of individuality to strict communal laws. Isn’t there a worrying and potentially racist contradiction in our placing great value on these qualities in tribal art while at the same time deriding them in our own? Are we demanding of Aboriginal peoples that they act out for us our own Rousseau-esque daydreams?

In his environmental history of the Holocene (the period from the end of the last ice age — about 11,500 years ago — to the present), Neil Roberts points out that palaeo-indian hunters were instrumental in the catastrophic extinction of most of America’s large mammal species about 11,000 years ago. Extensive land-clearing by prehistoric farmers stripped much of western Britain and Ireland of its forest cover during the mid-Holocene and resulted in the formation of blanket peat bogs. ‘The extinction of the moa and other flightless birds in New Zealand and the deforestation of Easter Island’, says Roberts, ‘were both directly consequential upon the arrival of the Polynesian peoples 1000 years ago.’
    So we humans have been wreaking environmental havoc ever since we first learned to use sharp and blunt instruments. But nor was the world ‘pristine’ even before we appeared on the scene (which, it’s worth remembering, was less than 200,000 years ago, which is not really a long time at all).
    ‘The million years or so prior to the Holocene’, writes Roberts, ‘was a period of extraordinary environmental variability and stress upon ecosystems and organisms. Those species capable of adapting to a fluctuating environment were able to benefit.’ The human species, of course, being one. Our extraordinarily rapid evolution was helped along no end by drastic environmental changes during the Pleistocene period, which, at the same time, drove a large number of other, less adaptable, species to extinction or, at the very least, forced them to move thousands of kilometres to more conducive climate zones, with all the traumatic upheavals that entailed.
    Where does this leave the much-vaunted ‘balance of nature’ that we learnt about at school — that static, harmonious world full of sweetness and light where every living thing knew its place and fitted in? It’s yet another Garden of Eden. The wider the historical view you take, the more nature’s harmony begins to look like bedlam.
    The idea that modern, post-industrial societies are unique in upsetting what one prominent environmentalist calls ‘the sacred balance’, and his suggestion that a dose of ‘ancient tribal wisdom’ will get us out of our mess, rests uncomfortably on a hazy belief that there is, or was, some original state of nature from which we can measure how far we have strayed. As anthropologist Geoffrey Bateson has pointed out, ‘It would not be wise (even if possible) to return to the innocence of the Australian aborigines, the Eskimo and the Bushmen. Such a return would involve loss of the wisdom which prompted the return and would only start the whole process over.’

We live precariously in the latter part of one of a series of relatively short warm intervals that have punctuated the typically glacial climate of the last few million years. This particular little window of opportunity has, apparently, another 25,000 years or so to run before the next ice age descends.
    Sooner or later, then, we will all go the way of the dinosaurs. For most of us, however, that possibility seems so remote and unreal that, in a curious way, we use it to justify our complacency. We’re all doomed eventually anyway, so let’s just pillage the earth while we can. If you’re treading on thin ice, you might as well dance. Environmental crises have occured in the past that make what we’re doing look minor, so why should we worry? It’s a particularly crude kind of cynicism.
    What the environmental history of the past 100,000 years should tell us, on the contrary, is that it takes remarkably little disturbance to cause major ecological changes and that we humans are not, in fact, well adapted for change. It might also remind us, paradoxically, that we usually think in terms of very short timespans, forgetting that 200 years, or 1000 years, are but the blinking of an eye, and therefore failing to appreciate just how rapid and drastic have been the changes we ourselves have wrought. And, as Neil Roberts reminds us, we are wrong to think of human and natural causes as being separate. Most of the major upheavals of the past 10,000 years have been caused by human interference and natural factors coinciding, or of human depredation weakening an ecosystem to the point that it cannot recover from some natural disaster.
    What all this ‘big’ history might also tell us is that global catastrophes are made up of many small, interconnected local catastrophes. This simple fact is, it would appear, still to be grasped by governments. As far as I’m aware, no national government has ever put environmental protection at the top of its list of priorities, and here in Australia it is more likely to be near the bottom.
    Humans, in Tim Flannery’s evocative phrase, are ‘an exterminator species’, capable of eliminating all other species and reducing diverse environments to monocultures. Although there are plenty of other exterminator species, our unique ability with technologies has made us unusually successful (if that’s the right word). While other exterminator species can dominate the environments that suit them, we can alter environments to suit ourselves and be dominant almost everywhere (for a short time at least).

When I lift one of the bricks from the stack here by the path (they will eventually form the foundations of my steps), a clutch of shiny black beetles scurries away in fright. Under the next brick are several enormous orange centipedes, a black spider hurrying to protect her egg-sac, a swarm of ants rushing around in pointless circles, and some native cockroaches that flatten themselves out and play dead. This stack of bricks, which has been here only a year or two, is already a veritable apartment block. Every brick shelters an astonishing array of residents. Presumably they occasionally attack and eat one another, but on the whole they co-exist quite peaceably. Together they make up a rich interdependent set of creature societies. There is hardly a square centimetre of this forest that isn’t swarming with life.
By contrast, if I were to lift a brick from the stack in our city garden, I’d be lucky to encounter a single slug. There’s no life there at all. Wherever humans are dominant, they are remarkably successful at eliminating everything else. Whole supermarket aisles are dedicated to the extermination of all non-human things — insect sprays, rat and mouse baits, cockroach poisons, flea bombs, bird repellents, and germ-killers of every kind — a cornucopia of potions for ensuring that we are never required to share our lives, except perhaps with our domestic pets. We have lost the capacity for co-existence. No wonder, then, that our ideas about nature have become so sentimentalised and abstracted.
Such orgies of elimination continue, on a small individual scale as well as globally, as if we were not even aware of the consequences. As Tim Flannery tells us, ‘a long period (I suspect more than a million years in most cases) is needed for new species with long generation times (such as the larger mammals) to evolve. Even if plants and fish can evolve faster to exploit specialised environmental niches, it surely would take many tens of millions of years for the diversity of the Great Barrier Reef and the Western Australian heathlands to develop.’ In response to a prediction, published in the journal Nature, that as many as half the world’s species might vanish over the next 50 to 100 years, environmental scientist James Kirchner points out that humanity itself will be extinct before anything resembling any of the vanishing species is ever again seen on earth. A million years might be just a moment to Mother Nature, but it’s a long time for us.

After scanning, with admirable thoroughness, the history of Western literature and philosophy since ancient times, classical historian Arthur O Lovejoy managed to identify 66 different meanings of the word ‘nature’. They range from ‘the universe in its entirety; ‘everything’’, for which he cites certain passages in Plato and Aristotle, to the more finely-tuned idea of ‘natural good’, which is ‘any action to which men’s impulses or instincts prompt them; ethical naturalism as moral antinomianism’, for which Aristophanes, Plato (again), Montaigne and Diderot are called into account. Interestingly, only one of the 66 (Lovejoy puts it at number 32) aproximates the definition that most of us today would come up with if asked: ‘... the out-of-doors, the world of sights and sounds conceived as an object of aesthetic appreciation or a source of religious emotion’.
    In fact, most meanings of the word Lovejoy pinpoints have to do with what we today would call ‘human nature’. We still use many phrases that call upon the word ‘nature’ to explain human behaviour. ‘It’s in her nature’, we say, for example, when someone’s actions seem odd but characteristic. We admire those who ‘behave naturally’ in social situations. In fact, one of Lovejoy’s meanings (taken from Hippocrates) is the precise opposite of the one we are most familiar with today: nature is, by this account, ‘generic human nature (ie. the physical nature of man), with express or implied contrast with the specific characters of other animals’.
    No wonder then that Raymond Williams says ‘any full history of the uses of (the word) nature would be a history of a large part of human thought’.
    Yet basically what all these multifarious meanings of the word have in common is their reference to somethingoriginal. ‘Nature’, ‘natural’, ‘native’, ‘innate’ and, interestingly, ‘nation’, all derive from the Latin ‘nasci’: to be born. So Lovejoy’s first and most succinct definition of ‘nature’ is ‘Genesis — birth’, which he says is ‘etymologically primary’.
    Hence ‘Mother Nature’: she who gives birth to the world. Folk wisdom and religious belief throughout the ages have emphasised this meaning of ‘nature’ as the gods, the force that gave birth to and directs the world and its inhabitants. From this, it is a short step to nature conceived in the modern sense as the physical features of the earth itself, as distinct from the man-made.
    Or perhaps not such a short step at all, since, astonishingly, this meaning of the word dates in English from as recently as the mid seventeenth century.
    The innate characteristics of a person, animal or thing — or, indeed, of a society or culture — are those which were there at birth. When Greek philosophers talked about nature they were usually referring to the first principles, or the valid norm, against which any anomalies might be judged. In social terms, nature suggested the condition in which human societies existed at their genesis, the implication being that the primeval state must have been the normal, or natural, one. So it follows that nature is the enemy of culture, art and learning, whose effect is to lead us away from these fundamental characteristics into ever more diversity. Lovejoy concludes from this that, for ancient Greek thinkers, ‘the really universal elements in human nature are to be seen in their simplicity and purity only in savages or in primeval mankind’. It’s an ideal that Rousseau was to revive in the eighteenth century and one which, as we’ve seen, still guides much of our thinking today.
    In a nutshell, here is the origin of our linking of nature with morality and our continuing insistence that tribal peoples traditionally lived morally superior lives close to nature (that is, to our common original state). Perhaps one reason this myth has special currency today is that, like the ancient Greeks, we tend to look for guidance to the past rather than to the future (in their case, to the Homeric legends, in ours to a vague time of innocence before the European Enlightenment brought upon us all that nasty scientific rationalism).
    Fundamentally, then, for most of us nature represents some kind of original state: a state of grace. It is what civilised societies have become remote from. If only we could get ‘back’ to nature, things would be a whole lot better than they are. The world is divided neatly into the natural and the man-made. We rather like binary oppositions of this sort. The makers of breakfast cereals and laxatives make good use of them. Even sugar, we are assured, is ‘a natural part of life’. But popular concepts of nature these days (singular, and sometimes even with a capital N) are usually founded on the notion that we humans are outside it because, in some way that is detrimental to us, we have moved beyond it.

So the shelter a rabbit makes by digging an elaborate system of tunnels through the earth is natural, while the shelter Robert and I have made by stacking mudbricks in a square and topping it off with a corrugated-iron roof is man-made. Of course, most people would choose a more clear-cut example than that: a glass and steel office tower in the city fills the bill very nicely. Nothing could be less natural than that.
    But where, exactly, do we draw the distinction? Is our house in Fitzroy, made of fired bricks, less natural than this one here in the ranges, made of unfired mudbricks (the cooked or the raw)? The rabbit is an introduced pest. Does that mean its home is less natural than that of a wombat? Are wombats, then, to be considered more legitimately native than, say, dingos, which are thought to have been introduced into Australia some 4,000 years ago (along with their parasites, which have been infecting kangaroos and wallabies ever since)? Is it simply a matter of time-scales: the longer a plant or animal has been here the more natural it is presumed to be? Actually, there might be something in this. Certain introduced plants are now commonly listed as ‘naturalised’, meaning that we’ve got so used to them being here that we are prepared to grant them honorary native status.
    I’m inclined to think that any attempt to pin down the concept of ‘nature’ will inevitably be fruitless. When I pick up a copy of the journal Nature, for example, I expect to find in it learned articles about quantum physics and molecular biology that are far too specialised for me to be able to comprehend. On the other hand, my expectations of a magazine called, for argument’s sake, The Wonders of Australian Nature would obviously be quite different. It’s not just a matter of degree of difficulty, but an entirely different conception of what the word refers to.
    I like that flexibility. I prefer my nature indeterminate. The word ‘nature’ is like a whole set of differently-shaped templates that we choose from according to our needs and which we hold up to the material world in order to give it some shape or other. Each template reveals the things that concern us at a particular time while concealing those that don’t. Some templates are wilderness-shaped. They give a view of nature as only the part of the world that might be thought of as untouched by human hands. Others, a little more generous, will also include pastoral land and other landscapes altered by human activity (what Cicero called ‘second nature’). Such a template might even make allowance for a little mud-brick house in the bush. Another might embrace the bush (even if it’s regrowth) but not the house or its native garden. Then, of course, there are templates so all-encompassing that they find room for the macro environments of planets, solar systems and the rest of the universe, and the micro environments of electrons, neutrons and atoms. There is even one that seeks to include human beings within its view of nature (although that, of course, raises the question of who’s holding up the template).
    In our day-to-day lives, we use these differing templates all the time, depending on the situation, and are quite capable of switching effortlessly from one to another. Trouble starts once we mistake the template, which is supposed to be giving us patterns by which to interpret reality, for reality itself. Yet, despite this readiness to adapt to circumstances, most of us, deep down, stubbornly harbour a fixed idea about nature that is part of our inheritance and which we rarely hold up to serious scrutiny.
    At the beginning of each of her courses, Anne Whiston Spirn, a lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, asks her students to write a short essay defining nature. At the end of the course, she repeats the exercise to see what they have learnt. Almost invariably she finds that, although their final essays are more articulate and reflective than those they wrote the first time, the students’ ideas have hardly changed. From this she concludes ‘that ideas of nature are deeply held beliefs, closely tied to religious values, even for those people who do not consider themselves ‘religious’. By the age of twenty-five, most students’ ideas of nature seem set or at least not modified greatly by a single course on the subject ... While largely North American, approximately one-third have been from other parts of the world, including Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia. Of the North Americans, most grew up in the suburbs or in rural areas; a higher proportion of foreign students are from cities.’
    Modernisation and technology have led us jaded urbanites increasingly to the belief that nature is ‘out there’, away from the centre and remote from the realities of daily life. Nature is something we visit at weekends to top up our spiritual reserves and clear our congested lungs. It is confined to specially designated sites such as state forests and national parks (marked on roadmaps as crisply defined squares of green) where it can be kept safely distinct from everything that isn’t nature. It’s nice to know, isn’t it, that there is some nature around if and when we want it. And when we get to it, what we don’t want is any sign that non-natural things have been messing around with it. We especially resent the presence of other people. We insist that our little ghettos of nature at least give the impression of being pristine.
    Which means, of course, that we don’t want them ever to change. Contra our hectic, pressured lives in the dynamic city, we expect the natural world to provide a bit of much-needed stasis, a sense of permanence and predictability, by which we can measure our progress. Of course, the natural world does change, ceaselessly, but most of us are not inclined to hang around long enough, nor to observe closely enough, for that to become apparent.
    One of my favorite boasts to friends about this place used to be that, although it’s only about an hour from the city, you’d hardly know another human being existed once you were here. Perfect really: paradise conveniently located. It’s utter self-delusion, of course, and these days I’m inclined to be much more accommodating towards signs of human presence. I no longer resent the buzz of light aircraft overhead, or the distant dull rumbling of trains rising from the valley, or the whine of trail bikes heading for the tracks in the state forest. Even the occasional logging truck, crawling in first gear down the steep hill with a load of freshly-cut trees, no longer fills me with indignation. With concern, perhaps, but no anger, no sense of frustration. My nature templates are more accomodating these days. In time, I trust, I will completely lose interest in trying to recapture Eden.

Peter Timms

Making Gardens

Chapter One — First Walk — Origins

S O U R C E S