anthropomorphism of my garden plants

Further to my previous post about individualising my garden plants, here are a few more.



Meet Brad. Brad, like his celebrity namesake, is about 180 cm tall. He has had a hard life, since his birth in the early sixties, but keeps on keeping on. The massive lemon-scented eucalypt above him (hidden by the leaves of his companion, Lilly) has taken the limelight ever since Brad was planted, but he doesn't mind playing second fiddle (to mix my metaphors a little).

His variegated leafy shape provides a pretty contrast to the pink as-yet-unnamed succulents that sit by his side. To him they are just children, seeing they've only been in this world for about six years.

And this, on the right of the photo, is Myrtle, born in the early sixties and destined to grow in the shadow of a massive hundred-foot cypress hedge. Fortunately for Mytle, in the early nineties the huge trees were removed and she had room to reach for the sky, straightening her trunk in an amazing way and sending out strong new branches in the space where the cypresses had dominated.
She was joined by a young cousin at that time, seen here to Myrtle's left. That's Aggie.

every living thing has the right to a name

I remember long ago reading with my primary school classes a set of United Nations books about the Rights of the Child. One that always caused a great deal of discussion was article 7, that a child has a right to a name. Children who had never suffered the indignity of being known as a number were astonished that such a right needed to be explicitly stated.

I've been thinking of that right, since I caught a snippet of an interview  by Phillip Adams on Late Night Live of Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer. Here are the program notes:

Cormac Cullinan has practised, taught and written about environmental law and policy since 1992. He says that there is a fundamentally misconceived belief that humans are separate from and superior to nature, and that the single and most important thing to consider for our survival is how to re-think our understanding of law and governance so that we can use it to govern humans in a way that will benefit the whole Earth community, and thereby ourselves.  

One thing that struck me - in the short section of the program I heard - was the idea that by turning living things into objects to be owned, we divorce ourselves from our interdependence with them. Think slavery.

This made me think about my garden. I walked around it with a gardener recently, hoping she would agree to work with me to help me maintain it. (She will.) She was quite taken with the fact that I could tell her the history of every plant in our yard. I remember the year the garrya elliptica was planted, the agonis flexuosa, the poor dwarfed variegated pittosporum struggling for life under the drip line of the tallest eucalypt for ten kilometres around. (All 1963). 

I remember the planting of every shrub, most herbs and even the blades of grass. I feel a connection with them, I sigh for them in the heat of summer drought and I vicariously drink the life-giving raindrops that fall on them in a wet season.

Now I've decided to name them, seeing we humans relate best to living creatures with an individual name. Here's a quote from a psychology article with a brief overview of this tendency, anthropomorphism: 

Anthropomorphism carries many important implications. For example, thinking of a nonhuman entity in human ways renders it worthy of moral care and consideration. 

Okay, so here's my first name:

Meet Garry.

Garry was born in Melbourne, Australia, far from his ancestral homeland in the United States. He had many good years growing up in the sixties, seventies and even eighties, but fell into bad health in the nineties and the early years of the twentieth century, as drought settled upon his adoptive family. With good rains in the first years of the second decade of the twentieth century, he has taken on a new lease of life.

the meaning of suave

After I listened to a gardening program on the radio last weekend, I told a friend  I'd figured out that the word suave must mean 'sweet'. She didn't believe me. She felt sure it means 'smooth'. I began to doubt my detective work, because I also thought it had that meaning.

I'd come up with the idea of 'sweet' because the gardening expert, in referring to mentha suaveolens, said, 'As the name suggests, it has a sweet smell'.

Now that I've looked around the Net to check up the meaning, I'm pleased to say I was correct in my guess. A website about acacia suaveolens specifically explains the Latin meaning of the word suaveolens.

And then the lyrics of an old tune popped into my head.

The sweet scented wattle sheds perfume around,
Delighting the bird and the bee,
While I lie and take rest in my fern covered nest
In the shade of the currajong tree.
High up in the air I can hear the refrain
Of a butcherbird piping his tune
For the spring in her glory has come back again
To the banks of the reedy lagoon.

I always thought the song referred to any wattle with a sweet scent, but perhaps it's specifically about acacia suaveolens, 'the sweet scented wattle'.

There's a different version of the lyrics here, with the interesting explanation that the words were probably originally composed in the nineteenth century by a young man working as a jackaroo, who would have been expected to sing for the squatter's family in the evening.

And, as a bonus for my research, I now know that the mystery plant in my garden is variegated apple mint (mentha suaveolens variegata).