Stop The War
The Age
Saturday March 3, 2007
Thinking of swapping exotics for natives? It doesn't have to be one or the other, says Dirk den Hartog.
WOG PLANTS GO Home! said a graffiti noted by environmentalist George Seddon on a wall at Melbourne University some years ago, near a newly planted avenue of plane trees. It was a late sign of the zealous horticultural nationalism that had peaked in the 1970s, born of purists like Betty Maloney who advised gardeners to grub out all established imports. A more pluralistic consensus has emerged in recent decades, matching our broader multiculturalism, with pro-indigenous experts tempering ardour with common sense. "Replant . . with natives while still finding a treasured place for the peony received from Mum last Christmas," says Peter Timms in Australia's Quarter Acre. Now, however, drought and global warming have revived the view that the indigenous is absolutely preferable. Relative water needs are rightly prominent: I'm beginning to picture hydrangeas in the cartoon image of the fat, bloated capitalist one used to see in Trotskyist magazines. Yet the facts here don't seem quite so simple. As quoted in The Age, for instance, exotics such as roses, rosemary, lavender and geraniums can mix it, water-wise, with hardy natives. Many gardeners know this.Practical concerns, though, are all too easily overlaid by unexamined assumptions about national identity. In The Age earlier this year, Suzy Freeman-Greene contrasted the suburban backyard of her childhood, dominated by her Anglophile father's love of roses and hydrangeas ("Dad . . . put Omo on his hydrangeas to turn them a deep Wedgwood blue"), with the "bleached grasses" that relate her own present Australian landscape yard.The assumption in these examples is that resistance to a wholesale shift to indigenous planting is a nostalgic clinging to our colonial past, a "cultural cringe". It's the Dorothea Mackellar position: sunburnt country versus green and shaded lanes. It typifies the kind of "new middle-class" nationalism that grew in tandem from the mid-20th century onwards, with the rise of the bush garden movement. Literature of the time reveals the connection. In George Johnston's novel My Brother Jack, the fictional narrator, David Meredith, an aspiring writer, is forever unable to forgive himself for not being like his true blue Aussie brother - a damaging self-doubt that narrator and author clearly share. Meredith's own assertion of Aussie-ness is to stage a kind of "gum rebellion" against 1950s suburban conformity by planting a sugar-gum, "a real bloody tree", in the garden, to disrupt the sterile tidiness of the "spindly little sticks . . . stuck in at intervals along the footpaths". Neighbours' complaints soon force its replacement by a mock-orange tree.A successor to Johnston's David is Don Henderson, the half-ockerish host in David Williamson's play Don's Party, whose sensitive side is revealed in a sheepishly self-mocking reference to his "new-found passion for native plants" - he's planted mahogany gums. This touch of horticultural nationalism is in keeping with the world-view of that "new middle class" that Don, his mates and their wives exemplify. No one openly slags roses in Don's Party, nor are the words Australian and English explicitly mentioned. But class politics are aggressively played out in the rhetoric of national identities, through the bullying by Don and his friends of Simon, a Liberal-voting party guest whom they quickly slot into the comic stereotype of the effete Anglophile, calling him "old chap"and "old cock". But what if we stop thinking of Australian-ness as maturing in strict opposition to colonial origins, and see it as an evolution from origins that still coexists with them? That is how we grow up psychologically as individuals: we never fully outgrow our parents, but can only hope, through reflection and effort, to carry on more of their good than their bad qualities. Why, as historian John Hirst has asked, shouldn't this also apply to nations? What's good and bad on this level is contentious, as reactions to John Howard's idea of our "British heritage" proved last year. But if "heritage" is to mean anything, it must involve some sense of a living relationship with origins. We should value our 19th-century urban architecture, for instance, not just for intrinsic aesthetics or as period style, but as our connection with the great European cities it derives from. "A sense of place" is important, of course, and we certainly need to acknowledge that Australia is the place we live in. Yet as George Seddon has argued, a "sense of place" involves cultural as well as physical location, and sensitivity to our geographical environment shouldn't exclude our cultural identity as a diasporic outgrowth of the Western tradition.The history of garden design in Victoria offers wonderful examples of such accommodation. We know of the founding director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, Baron von Mueller, with his passionate interest in the indigenous, being replaced by the English-oriented William Guilfoyle. Guilfoyle wasn't so much nostalgic for English gardens as inspired to adapt their most suitable qualities, especially those of the 18th-century "natural" landscaping style, to Australia, as with his South Seas palms and canna lilies.The results can be seen in the Gardens on a hot day, in all the people happily picnicking, reading and dozing in the thick shade of oaks and elms, with the spaces of shadeless lawn between them agreeably smaller than the vast exposed lawns of many English gardens. Contrast this with how deserted the indigenously planted Birrarung Marr is in such weather. Edna Walling's gardens, similarly, adapt English design principles, such as merging the garden seamlessly into surrounding countryside.So while sheer green lawns and beds of annuals may have had their day in a globally warming world, let's remain multicultural and admit that keeping our favourite exotic plants going with grey water is just as respectably Australian as letting hardy natives look after themselves. Let's not see "Death to Hydrangeas!" or "Roses Out!" written on our walls. Horticultural racism is only fractionally as sinister as the human kind, but it could badly detract from the joy in our surroundings that can help us face difficult times ahead.
© 2007 The Age