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A Growing Collection
The joy of garden plants
The local native plant nursery released its new stock list on 1 July. I’ll visit the nursery but won’t buy any plants, I told myself. I visited the nursery three times and bought plants on every trip.
I live in the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland, a narrow band of rainforest on the north-eastern coast of Australia. Declared a World Heritage Area in 1988, the Wet Tropics is home to a huge diversity of plants, many of which have ancient origins. Among them are clubmosses, cycads, and ‘primitive’ flowering plants such as the vine Austrobaileya (Austrobaileya scandens, Austrobaileyaceae) and the ‘green dinosaur’ Idiot Fruit or Ribbonwood (Idiospermum australiense, Calycanthaceae). There are wonders here — on mountain peaks, in remote river valleys, and high in the canopy of giant trees. Many of them I will never see in the wild, but some have been brought into cultivation. I found them at my local nursery.
A confession: I am a collector.
I used to collect snail shells, wandering along the beach looking for stranded treasures from the sea floor, or scratching through leaf litter in forests. Over the years, I assembled a Wunderkammer, a…
