Alice Harding, 1917, The Peony, p.192

Friday 25 January 2002

I am sitting to write this in a swoon of fragrance. I am enveloped, cocooned, drenched, spellbound and transported by the scent of the Michelia champaca. Terry says sometimes visitors from Asia come through the Gardens asking urgently: 'Where is it? Where is it?' They can smell their homeland. They are directed toward the tree overhanging the path that is loaded with saffron-coloured petals. It has a smell that is complex and evocative and includes tea, temple incense, overripe fruit and jasmine.

The first thing Terry does is to pick me a handful, and they set the tone for the beginning of this collaborative project in a very auspicious way. I am delighted by the wonderful continuity they provide. This is the fragrance that followed me through the streets and parks of my happy days in Taiwan. I regularly bought these flowers out the front of a railway station, from a man with calipers replacing his arms, in bunches he had made by threading wire through the stems.

It is my first visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne today. I meet Terry in the Works Yard at 10am. The Works Yard is a delightful collection of National Trust buildings freshly painted in pale yellow and green. We are both a little early, I guess indicative of our mutual keenness. It rained solidly yesterday and there is a wonderful humidity in the air. Terry introduces me to Gardens management staff Michael McNabb and Neil Perkins, and while we discuss the logistics of the project a great gust of Kookaburra laughter bursts out of the nearby trees. We all pause, enjoying the sound.

After the formal introductions we head for the Collection in the buggy, taking along my dog, Little – it being too hot to leave her in the car. Her whiskered face sniffing the air sideways causes some amusement in people we travel by. We pause on the way past a tea plant, Camellia sinensis, situated on the edge of a border with its branches of glossy dark leaves concealing misshapen glossy green nuts.

Arriving at the Southern Chinese Collection we park adjacent to a small group of Arisaema franchetianum with their chocolate and white-striped, cobra-headed, turkey gobbler-shaped flowers and trident leaves. I am entranced. It is a good beginning. We wander along, poking our noses into this and that. A big bank of enormous Ginger Lilies with yellow flowers causes some discussion about the various qualities of yellow. The Amorphophallus yunnanensis trunks, with their erotic spotty skins, receive our rapt attention. As we potter, Terry explains to me the shapes of some of the leaves with special emphasis on distinguishing between the palmate or hand-like form, and the round or radiate form.

It is a challenge to choose which plants to take and it seems important to be fairly restrained in the selection. We agree that five or six specimens would be a good quantity. The Arisaemas (plural so not in italics) are both a must, as well as a long, strongly structured leaf related to Soloman’s Seal and a member of the lily family – Polygonatum crytonema. A beautiful fern-like leaf is included, it is something rare like Queen Anne’s Lace – Selinum wallichianum. Meanwhile, Terry draws my attention to the ferns in the collection that have great potential for use in both photograms and stencils.

I further explain the photogram process, remembering useful information about the yellow spectrum safe light that protects the paper and keeps an area white. This is used to advantage with yellow and red parts of plants, such as stamens and pollen. Also, in a photogram, only the parts of the plant that actually touch the paper ultimately produce a sharp or 'in focus' image.

We admire a strappy leaf, Curculigo, which Terry says is often used to wrap food. I remember the delicious steamed parcels of meat and rice I enjoyed so much in Taiwan – Dragon Boat parcels they were called – and how attentive I was to the tying method. I hope now that I have made a sketch of it in my journal somewhere!

We gaze into the future, squatting over an orchid yet to bloom.

Terry says 'There will be roses too!'

'Mm…' I say, 'And peonies.'

When it comes to packing the plants into the car for transport, my lack of forethought becomes painfully clear. Terry finds newspaper and water and we layer the leaves between them. The rest I carry upright in plastic bottles and crank up the air-con to the max all the way home. It is a steep learning curve and now I can see what sort of equipment will be necessary for this work. I need to assemble a collection of tall, stable, narrow-necked bottles and a container that secures them.

When I get home I remember Lotus and Ginkgo. Both, I think, will need to be included.

Friday 22 February 2002

Prior to my February visit I have the opportunity to trawl through some Chinese art books I haven’t seen before. Two images impress me strongly. They are both scrolls of the moon. One is a good attempt to represent the luminosity of the full moon in a pale sky. Light on light. The other is an empty hole in a ring of ink made with one brushstroke. It seems quite apt in this first moon of the Chinese New Year, the new lunar year of the Horse.

In the book there is also a scroll painted with ink washes showing several plants placed on the paper in a deceptively casual arrangement which, after some study, reveals itself as a very deliberate, poised composition. The individual plants are cropped top and bottom. Additionally, the text talks about the colours of the ink meaning, I infer, the tones possible from palest grey to deepest black and the way that these monochromes have the ability to ‘suggest’ colour.

These images are still fresh when I am early to our meeting. Terry arrives with a sprig of a plant with aromatic pink fruits – Zanthoxylum esquirolli in the lemon family or Rutaceae. The pinkish bumpy outer skin of a similar species, Z. bungeanum, is used in China as pepper seasoning called Hua Jiao. It smells good. She also has some prickly green chestnuts with their old flowers sticking out like pipe cleaners.

Catherine Brown, who is Development Manager at the Gardens, joins us. We discuss the parameters of the project. She asks Terry if the collection contains all of the plants that the Chinese designate for each month. A question, which I am surprised, I have not yet asked myself. Terry tells us that she thinks we have them all except the chrysanthemum; the difficulty being that these are now so hybridized it is uncertain which was the original type. Chrysanthemums are the main Chinese flower for autumn, so we may need to find a substitute for this flower. I think, with mild regret, of what a beautiful image a huge double white fluffy pompom chrysanthemum would make.

Before we leave the vicinity of the Café, Terry shows me the kitchen garden behind it, where there are wonderful bean trellises made of sturdy bamboo.

We first visit the tree bearing ‘yellow orchid’ flowers again on the way to the Southern Chinese Collection and I mention that I must find one for my garden. Delightedly Terry informs me that I can buy Michelia champaca from the 'Growing Friends’ of the Gardens that very day. It seems amazingly fast in its development and growth – from the auspicious beginning when, one month ago, I reconnected here with the sweet familiar fragrance of Taiwan. I am thrilled that this fragrance might become a part of my Gippsland garden in southern Victoria.

Once we arrive at the Collection I am really excited. I have to work against this to focus, to tune into what is happening with these plants. The seeds of Arisaema tortuosum have become cinnabar red, swollen and drooping. Seeds on the peony are similarly ripe, black glossy beads exposed in a stiffened pod. There are banks of wonderful Gingers, red spidery flowers and thick chunky yellow ones.

It is just as difficult as last time to limit our selections. Arisaema consanguineum is the most precious cutting this month. The leaf dances like an umbrella from its stem, drip tips hanging like an exotic fringe. Terry describes these acuminate appendages as being jellyfish-like; a leaf like a skirt. She tells me the underground stems of this plant are still used in Chinese medicine and known as ‘nan tian xing’ –meaning heavenly southern star. The cleaned soaked, sliced and dried tuber is used for its warming and drying properties.

We choose Begonias, Hosta leaves and a dainty fern. There are also two types of Mondo Grass. Peter Valder quotes Li, a renowned authority on Chinese garden plants, who says:

‘Mondo grass is the most commonly planted species in China. He records that it is often planted in artistically decorated pots, sometimes with rocks, to be placed on the desk of the scholar. Not only does the plant serve as a restful diversion for the eyes, but the flat leaves are useful as bookmarks. Hence it is also known as the book-tape Herb.’

It is clear from suggestions that Terry makes now that she is catching on very quickly to the photogram process. She astutely points out skeletal Michelia leaves, which are perfect.

We make our last stop at the Nursery to collect some Lotus leaves. The Lotus seems somehow essential to summer. The Nursery's Water Lilies grow in a glasshouse, in big cement baths. I rest my sunglasses on a huge Indian Water Lily leaf, which has the edges curled up securely, while I choose three leaves of Nelumbo nucifera. The stem of the leaf that I have chosen is hollow and divided into four chambers. Clinging to the stems are crisp, hollow cases from which some water creature has emerged. Insects often put in an appearance in Chinese album leaf paintings and I see the potential of incorporating these translucent shells into my work. However, this opportunity is lost as soon as we start off again in the buggy and they are whisked from my open palm and into the air. Decisions about what does and does not get included are made for various diverse reasons or an act of the gods. I am happy to accept this.

We return to my car. I hold the small esky I used last month to carry the yellow blooms of Michelia champaca. The perfume lingers in there. After we pack the plants and list them I show Terry what I have made from my January visit. While we confer, the Director of the Garden, Dr Philip Moors, comes upon us, excitedly leaning over the images on the bitumen. He pats my shoulder in congratulation and encouragement; says he is happy to get a glimpse.

I depart the Gardens and drive east with the sun in the west burning through the back window of the car. I wish the sun would go behind a cloud, as there are plenty in the sky. As soon as I get off the freeway I stop to check my cargo. The Lotus leaves are already fried like pappadams by the sun. Sheets of wet newspaper protect the rest as they nod along in a transportation system of water-filled stubbies lined up in a wooden magazine rack.

Friday 15 March 2002

This month the soil is dry everywhere. In the Collection, a vivid red Lycoris blooms on a leafless stem rising from the bare earth. Of this flower Terry reports, the Chinese say: 'Suddenly the soil smiled'.

The Amorphophallus stems have swollen significantly since last month. They are overtly sexy.

The red fruit of Arisaema flavum are warm when Terry dislodges them and trickles them into my hand.

Before this visit I was reading a Japanese book on tea. There is a story about Convolvulus, Morning Glory. It is included in the recent National Gallery of Victoria catalogue by Dr Mae Anna Pang:

This month we meet on Terry’s day off and we have the luxury of time to sit on the lawn and eat duck rolls with Hoisin sauce and share green tea from my thermos. The bees are busy working the Sedums (I removed the italics on Sedum because it is plural). Two swans lean up from the lake, without leaving the water, to prune the lawns. They look like hilarious glove puppets, the energetic redness of their beaks is highly theatrical.

The fragrance of Bai Lan (Michelia x alba) perfumes the whole length of the Southern Chinese Garden. While we are eating, the sky is full of flying foxes, the membrane of their veiny wings translucent under the sun. Terry observes they would make good photograms. The backlighting through their wings is beautiful. Bat is Fu in Chinese, symbol of happiness and good fortune.

This month the plant list includes Bletilla striata – orchid stems with seedpods – windflower, another black Mondo Grass with shiny black fruits, and the windmill palm Trachycarpus fortunei.

A week before my trip to the Gardens I visit the city to see the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Spring Flowers Autumn Grass. My favourite piece in the exhibition is a small Japanese book by Teisui, called The Nature Studies Album. It is palm-sized, with twenty-four ‘album leaves’ or pages. One of its charms is the recurring loops of a snake whose head finally appears amongst strawberry plants. I buy a card of this image for my studio wall.

When I return home again, I take out a bowl to pick strawberries. There has been a tiger snake in my Gippsland garden all summer. I have seen it occasionally and felt its presence daily. My encounters include witnessing it swallow four baby blackbirds in a nest, one after the other, oblivious to the strikes and blows from the yellow beak of the father blackbird courageously trying to drive it off.

Picking berries has been my uneasy occupation since early December; reaching into the leafy depths I have been well aware that it is ideal hunting ground for a snake. This time I finally find the tiger snake. It is entangled in the bird mesh covering the berries, completely unable to move but still very much alive. I recognize that it is my move in the endgame and I kill it with a clean blow of the long-handled shovel.

I disentangle it and it writhes about despite being headless. It feels like a very primal struggle in my hands. Indisputably snakes have some psychic potency; their archetypal power is resonant up close. My head is filled with these images and for a long time afterwards it feels like a big event. The synchronicity jolts me when I remember that I saw the image of the snake amongst the strawberries in the exhibition.

I am relieved to have completed the three prints for March and have no intention of going back into the darkroom for another month. But the day after printing I go for a walk and find a small hatchling snake on the road, obviously dead, but undamaged by the car tyre that had run it over. It is still limp and flexible. Given the resonance of this month, there is no question but to set out the chemicals again and print it.

I still have a creeper, Euonymus, that Terry suggested I take. It has not been used in my initial selection but now I see that it is still fresh in its stubby and would work as a stand-in for the strawberry plants in my version of Teisui’s still life. It makes a beautiful print.

When I finish printing the little snake I put it near the incense stand on my ‘ancestor shrine’ on the verandah. A few days later I am doing my routine puja, tending the shrine, and I notice that the snake's head is moving from side to side. Riveted by this impossibility, for a moment I wonder if its holy context had brought it back to life. Only on closer observation does it become apparent that a big maggot was driving this movement from inside the head. It is a sufficiently compelling conclusion to an intense and intimate encounter with this reptile.

Snakes are a symbol of regeneration and transformation. This one has travelled between two worlds, from the turn of the century in Japan to my present. In the time and space tunnel created by the work it acts as an envoy, or messenger. It seems to confirm that my environment is not only a permissible part, but actually quite an important element, in the work.

The issue of parallel time and space has been a new aspect of this project to address and for which visual solutions need to be found. The layering of the two cultures, Australian and Chinese, needs to be arranged – visually inter-woven to represent and reveal their interconnection. It seems a natural extension of the philosophy of the present inherent in the spirit of nature.

Friday 26 April 2002

The early morning finds me in Terry’s own garden marveling at the lacquer red colours of two pomegranate fruit swinging from branches. The room in which I slept in her house has a beautiful arrangement of grasses on the mantelpiece. There is an intriguing card on her pin-board that has pressed red flower stamens decorating the front. It looks like an arrangement of false red eyelashes. It is really lovely.

There are silver eye finches flitting in and out of the foliage of espaliered fig at the back of the Observatory Café where Terry and I sit for a coffee before we begin our April round.

The pendulous black figs hang temptingly low but a sign warns against picking the luscious fruit. I make a mental note to ask for a cutting of this fig variety one day.

The Gardens are a different place now that it has rained, the fragrance of the leaf mould streams along the paths in cool passage. Overhead the bats seem to have multiplied and are hanging in most of the trees up this end of the Gardens. They do look very much like strange fruit. Some of the Gardens' staff are on gurney duty to wash the bat guano off the paths; there is so much of it.

The Michelia champaca has finished flowering and instead of ‘yellow orchid’ flowers it has formed other strange fruits which resemble opaque green, Siamese-attached grapes. They hang in lumpy bunches. Michelia alba is still flowering in the Collection. The smell of it is now like a homecoming for me. It is deeply familiar and delightful, prevalent and sweet. Things have evolved in the Gardens since I was last here. At month four of this project, I am now in a position to notice how visible the passage of time and continuity of season becomes when one visits the same place regularly. I am seeing things at a good pace.

In search of roses we take the buggy up the high side of the Gardens, past the Xanthorrhoea and camellias to gather orange Tibetan rosehips. We discover malicious damage has been done to the climbing roses on metal frames. They have been cut off at the bases. It is very sad and the person in charge of the roses looks despondent when we see him at lunchtime. He tells us that three years' growth is lost.

There is a gigantic South American grass beside Richard’s office. It creates a fantastic distortion of scale; it dwarfs me and gazing up at the towering seed heads makes me feel momentarily and pleasurably like a small child again.

In the Southern Chinese Collection there is a wonderful Luculia yunnanensis with big, fat, pink buds beside Chimonanthus praecox that is budding but not yet offering its particularly wonderful fragrance known as 'Wintersweet' to the air. It is something to look forward to soon.

The Begonia that I used in February is now disintegrating and providing for the future by dropping bulbils to the moist ground around it. It is cool and damp and the sun is considerably weaker although still intense enough to cause problems in my car for the Toad Lily that dangles spotted, purple, spidery flowers from a regularly leafed stem. By the time I arrive home the flowers have scrunched into unrecognizable debris.

But remarkably the tender Luculia survives the journey and continues to do so well into the next day. I am able to use it for an image.

Papermaking is a theme that develops during this visit. Amongst the things I take with me this month are a leaf and new growth stem of the giant woolly Rice Paper Tree Tetrapanax papyrifera – endemic to China. There are several other plants in the Gardens also used in oriental paper making, with white fluffy undersides to their leaves. Called Boehmeria nivea, it is also known as Ramie, and in Taiwan as Chinese Silk Plant. Terry tells me that it is in the nettle family but luckily it lacks the stinging hairs. The Betula utilis – a young birch – has beautiful, golden brown bark and is used to wrap food in China, is a slow grower. A group of Arisaema flavum surrounding it, have almost overtaken the birch’s top-most branches. Terry has some examples of the beautiful bark in her albums from her travels in China. One day this slender birch will be a big tree.

We eat our lunch in the circular herb garden, which contains the sunshine like a bowl. We tuck thyme and basil into our sandwiches and I marvel at the cardamom plant that looks like a ginger and smells fabulous. There is also a grass with hard hollow seeds that Terry tells me is Chinese and called Coix lacryma-jobi. The seeds are threaded into grey-black necklaces and worn by different Chinese tribes.

Friday 31 May 31 2002

The day before my May visit to the Gardens I arrive in Melbourne at Terry’s place, where a delightful bunch of early Jonquils and white Freesias stands in a vase on the kitchen table. On her balcony a pot of Arisaema ringens is already flowering. I am surprised until I remember seeing them growing wild in Taiwan in the misty winter forests of Yangminshan. She has three Banksia serrata in tubes with leaves that look like they were cut out with kindergarten scissors. They are ready to join her bonsai collection when the right potting medium can be found. I really enjoy Terry’s way with plants; I learn from her all the time. In the garden below the two pomegranate fruit have now split to expose dark red, sweet seeds spilling out. They are a symbol of fertility in Chinese culture. Later when we walk my dog through the streets she points out Monstera deliciosa fruiting on a fence.

I have spent several very exciting hours that day browsing rare old books in The Herbarium Library under the guidance of Jill Thurlow. She has laid out a collection of books on a long green table for me to view. Her intuition about what will interest me is profound. The most exciting of a very good bunch is a Japanese book with a daffodil yellow cover that contains hand-printed woodcuts of botanical specimens. Terry is accurate when she describes it as ‘something for the soul'. There are other books including one on Chinese medicinal plants. One of the illustrations included is of the wonderful plant Star Anise. Many thousands of hours of human work is represented by the botanical illustrations just collected on this table.

The following day finds us embarking upon another visit to the Southern Chinese Collection. The first stop this month is to visit the pines growing on the hill near the Temple of the Winds. Along with Bamboo and Plum, the Pine is considered by the Chinese to be one of the ‘Three Friends of Winter’. We select some branches of Pinus roxburghii, a fantastic long-needled pine from the Himalayas. Terry explains how pines can be differentiated and identified by counting the number of needles. Apparently the charcoal of Pinus roxburghii is used for Chinese fireworks. . I learn that the widely cultivated but weedy Pinus radiata is a north American tree.

Further down the slope we stop to take in the perfume of Chimonanthus praecox. Terry relates that the Chinese, who value this plant highly for its fragrant, yellow, papery flowers usually borne upon bare branches, call it La Mei. The fragrance is wonderful. Later I read in Peter Valder’s book The Garden Plants of China, that Chimonanthus is sometimes used as a substitute for the winter Plum –Prunus mume.

When we reach the Collection I see that the Arisaema leaf which hovered on a long stem like a fringed skirt during summer, has now collapsed over a patch of Mondo Grass; green faded to a parchment yellow with the seed, vividly green and shaped like a corn cob, lying beside it on the moist dark soil. In another part of the Collection a different Arisaema’s seed ‘cob’ is lying similarly prone but bright red.

Terry points out Edgeworthia chrysantha ‘Red Dragon’. With its soft flexible branches it is often tied into knots. This is one of the papermaking plants – it is getting ready to flower and currently sporting preliminary green daisy-like buds. Researching this later I find a picture in Valder of an unbelievably contorted plant that has been subjected to much knotting. It reminds me of the ‘Bushman’s Bootlace’ found in the Gippsland bush and employed by the early settlers as a substitute for shoelaces.

I have recently bought a Camellia tsaii for my garden and since printing Camellia sinensis (Tea) it has begun to develop my eye for the more subtle forms of Camellia. Discussing this, Terry points out a lovely orangey/red-barked Camellia in the collection. It is still young. Apparently the red colour is velvety and can be rubbed off between the fingers. The Chinese name is ‘Houzi Mu’ meaning Monkey Tree in reference to the similar orangey- brown colour to some monkeys. Camellia oleifera is also there, with seeds from which oil is extracted and used in industry and cooking. This, I have noticed, is also an ingredient in my Aesop moisturizer.

A small wild-collected yellow Clematis tsaii, twines up a larger plant. It has long bells suspended vertically down. Terry says it is proving tricky to propagate and that this one is very precious as a consequence. The specific epithet tsaii (species name or qualifying name that comes after the genus) is in memory of Professor Tsai Xitao (1911–81). He was a Chinese botanist and in 1939 the founder and first Director of the Kunming Botanical Gardens, Yunnan, China.

As we move along, a flustered swan waddles out of our way. It retreats to the water, plunging over the edge and leaving wet, leaf-shaped footprints on the new edging of the lake. The water reflects the yellows and reds of the autumn foliaged Tupelo and Tilia. A Nankeen Night Heron roosts near the heart of a palm tree. In the quiet of this autumn day the rattle and clatter of the Tilia, or Linden, leaves falling, is clearly audible.

The science of autumn fascinates me. As I understand it, the colour in the leaves is revealed by the phenomenon of the plants reabsorbing the green chlorophyll, taking it back into themselves to reveal the yellows and red which are masked by the green in spring and summer.

As we walk into the darkness of the bamboo garden, looking for the second of the ‘Three Friends of Winter’, the temperature drops by several degrees. In the cool darkness there is a decaying Japanese-style bamboo fence beside the path, and garden beds where, amongst the various forms, grow Goddess Bamboo and Phoenix Tail Bamboo.

On the journey back towards the Works Yard we stop to view the glorious orange needles of a rare deciduous Chinese conifer Metasequoia glyptostroboides growing in the perennial border. Before 1945 these trees were known only as fossils and thought to be extinct. A stand of Metasequoia was discovered in Sichuan Province and since then they have been planted in parks, arboreta and gardens the world over.

After we have packed the car, Terry leads me on a shortcut along a wonderful soft path made of orange pine needles. Along the way she draws to my attention to a tall Taiwanese Cypress, Taiwania cryptomeriodes. It is a blue green hue and has a weeping form. It grows on the border between Yunnan province and Burma, as well as in Taiwan. She explains to me that it was much felled as the timber is valued for making coffins because as well as being straight, it is resilient and will contain a body for the three years needed before the soul departs.

At the Observatory Café we sit at a table in the back vegetable garden beside an impressive stand of tall, frilly, purple kale until the rain, that has swiftly followed the noticeable drop in temperature, drives us inside.

Thursday 28 and Friday 29 June 2002

My visits to the Gardens are expanding over two days to enable me to spend time studying in the Herbarium before going to the Collection with Terry and selecting the plant material to take back to my studio. It is freezing in Melbourne this time. An icy wind wakes me in the night when I spend the first of three in the city at my mother's place. In the morning I walk the dog and notice that several tall Pinus roxburghii are growing in the nearby park and cemetery. Their long needles offer no resistance to the wind. There is also a Magnolia already in bloom against a sheltered wall. This evidence of spring takes me by complete surprise

It is cold and wet on the day nominated for the Herbarium visit. The streets are full of plane leaves, paper bag brown, which do not break down easily but get blown by the north-westerly into big deep drifts collected in gutters and curbing. In full flower, a red Abutilon glows near the entrance to the Herbarium.

Upstairs, Jill Thurlow has prepared for my visit by draping the long table with a dark green cloth and putting out fifteen volumes of the daffodil yellow-covered Japanese woodcut books, tied in bundles of five with a simple white cloth ribbon. These books are wondrous treasures, black lines printed onto handmade paper carefully and simply arranged to make botanically accurate images.

This month I begin randomly with Dandelions and Thistles, amongst which surprisingly are Ginsengs. The former two belong to the same family and have in common both a seed with a downy parachute and a heavily indented leaf. I am touched to notice a single black human hair embedded into the fibres of one of the handmade paper pages.

I move on to legumes where there are exquisite paintings of various Peas: black, green, grey, orange and maroon. Then there are the Brassicas including Daikon, Wasabi and Midzuna. Other books document the Mints and Thymes, Nepalese Geraniums, Lycoris and Nerrines. It is similar to my experience in Taiwan where, because one does not read the language, the emphasis shifts to decipherment of visual clues.

I spend hours traversing through further volumes that feature Asparagus in the same context as Aloes and Bromeliads. I recognize Nasturtium. There are Sedums with Silene. Water Lily and Poppies seem to have things in common. I make a note to look up Trilliums later; they have a flower that seems to grow out of the centre of the leaf in a curious way.

There are other books Jill has laid out. Ttwo small books, one Japanese and one German contain wafer thin slivers of timber. From each tree there is a piece of end grain and a piece of straight grain, each piece no more than 1" x 2 ".

The end grain pieces sometimes resemble landscapes with clouds and setting suns, as the growth rings radiate out like pond ripples or fractals. Amongst these examples are Ginkgo biloba, Cinnamon, Camphor, Firmiana (the scholars' tree, called Wutong in China), Birch and Oak. My time passes quickly while I am deeply absorbed in this material. Before I know it I must leave and venture out into a real storm.

I make my way into the city. I have an appointment with a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. I have decided, given this work I have undertaken with Chinese plants, that I should consult one. The wind is icy and the rain makes the black road a reflective surface for all the city lights.

I make my way up to the second floor and find myself in rooms that smell deliciously medicinal and strange. Assistants sort strange bundles of herbs on woven tea trays. The practitioner's enthusiasm for our project is warmly expressed and he brings out medicinal woodcut books to show me, offering them for copying should they be required. He takes my pulse and sends me off with a brown paper sack that smells like the dispensary.

Later that night at Terry’s home she brings inside the pot of Arisaema ringens. It has grown fast since last month and is twice as tall as the eight-inch pot. There are three green-striped, weird-lipped helmet-shaped flowers, with white spadix and chocolate-coloured ears and lips. I have brought Persimmons from my tree, and eggs and lemons. Terry gives me the gift of a marvellous red-covered journal.

The following day the weather is outrageously bad. It hails as we leave the house and drive to the Gardens, but we are lucky when we walk through the Collection together as the worst of it holds off long enough for us to make our selections. We collect grasses with fluffy heads in the Perennial Border where the deciduous Cypress has lost every orange feathery leaf. In the Collection itself the fragrance of Michelia alba is faint but still present.

The Mahonias are in flower with yellow antlers reaching out from their tops, crowning like glowing antenna in the grey day. There is a surprising amount of colour in the Collection given the bleakness of the season. The purple fruits of Callicarpa decorate bare branches. An Aralia cachemerica, resembling Tree Dahlia, has collapsed in an orange and pink decline, bent but glorious in its passing. Nandinas haves red berries. The Magnolias are budding up and Daphne is already showing pink tips at the end of the glossy green leaves.

The Peonies' bare stems sprout the beginnings of the new season's growth. They are like pink foetal hands, with green webbing, folded in, embryonic-like, upon themselves. They lean out of a rich mixture of leaf litter. The night heron roosts in the palm that is reflected in the water of the lake. A speckled breasted Old World thrush perches near us momentarily before flying through to a distant vantage point. The orange splots of bird-digested Pittosporum seed is much in evidence on the ground.

There is a plant with leaves like Hydrangea speckled with yellow, that my grandmother always called the gold dust plant, Aucuba japonica. I remember it being regular background foliage in her floral arrangements. An Aspidistra has a similar gold fleck at ground level.

This month, we choose a pleated leaf, Curculigo, used to wrap sticky rice, and a length of the rare yellow-flowered Clematis tsaii, which now has a long-bearded seed as wispy and transparent as a sage's beard.

Some of the bats have gone for winter and there is a new quiet in the Gardens. Apparently, there is now a problem with rats in a big clumping bamboo. A few new bamboo shoots resembling huge asparagus spears, have been chewed away at the point.

Driving home the fragrance of Sweet Box, Sarcococca ruscifolia, fills the car.

This month I have been convalescing from a flu virus that is slow to pass through me. My energy is low and I feel delicate, wan. However I am cheered by Terry whistling and singing in the kitchen the night before our formal visit to the Gardens. We are to give a presentation to the Gardens' staff, of the project at the mid-point. I sleep fitfully with this imminent event in the forefront of my mind. The next morning it is crisp and clear, completely unlike the previous month's tempest.

We give two talks and finally make our way to the Café for a breather. The dog is happy to be out of the car and pulls on her lead in the direction of some trail of smells around the beds of the vegetable garden. It is such an inspiration, this potager at the back of the Observatory Café. Various coloured Chards grow in rows displaying red, yellow, white and green stems, backed by tall purple curly Kale. Another beautiful bamboo trellis made by David Wong, has appeared; the pieces still green, assembled with such care and attention to detail.

When we finally reach the Southern Chinese Collection there is an amazing peace and quiet. I notice small dainty Camellias are flowering in their demure and shyly downcast fashion. I express my loss of faith to Terry that the buds on my Camellia tsaii will ever open but she points out that the ones here are still waiting too.

The Windflowers have been cleared out from between the bigger plants and there is an open spacious air to the beds. It is very much as though things have turned inward, the earth is sleeping. The wild collected Clematis tsaii or ‘Xiao Mutong’, twines up bare branches with seed heads fine as suspended thistledown.

Terry uses her stick to scrape the leaves back to bare earth where the Begonia will rise again in time. The Edgeworthia has a couple of flowers, pompoms with a bright yellow flush.

When we reach the far point of the Collection, Magnolia denudata stands alone with outstretched branches presenting blooms like upright white candles. It is an arresting sight, of extraordinary grace and presence. What’s more, its existence comes as a complete surprise. I have not noticed it before, nor do I know of it as a significant plant. Yet I can tell immediately that will become significant and I will discover it needs a prominent place amongst the collection I am making.

The dog suddenly pokes her nose among the roots of a tree and a rat leaps out. The very rat, Terry surmises, that is eating all the new growth off this Phytolacca tree. The dog strains at the lead, inhaling deeply the strong ratty smell, whining to be let hunt.

Oblivious to this fuss stands a tall Camellia relative -Gordonia yunnanensis, aloof on the far edge of the Collection, with white flowers and big clusters of yellow stamens in their centre. Terry deems the flowers like poached eggs and picks off a seedpod to show me the fine, finger-like form it takes.

We cut across a lawn for the Prunus mume. One tree that is already nearly finished has hot pink double flowers so we seek out a white double that is in a cooler place and will flower later. The fragrance, when we find it, is such a surprise. It is mysterious, complex and quite different to the fluffy powdery nose of the plum blossoms in my previous experience. This one is beautiful and subtle; its humility is exquisite. It is a symbol of promise, transformation and triumph over adversity. And it represents, for my project’s purposes, the point of focus for the acute attention paid by Chinese culture to nature.

There is a sharp and profound pleasure to be had from Prunus mume. It is a jewel in the richness and reward delivered by proximity to nature. Part of this power comes because it appears during winter, at the time of shut down. It signals the first stirrings of life again. This annual appearance has gladdened hearts for centuries.

I am exhausted by the time I get home. I have a post-public speaking adrenal slump further induced by the flu. But there is such consolation in the beauty of the Magnolias and the Plum. They fill my house with wondrous perfumes that transport me through the night.

I spend the evening with these companions at my table while I research the Magnolia, discovering its other names, variously called: ‘Beauty Under Moonlight’, ‘Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness’, ‘Jade Orchid’ and ‘Winter Yulan’. It is said to model purity, sweetness and beauty. To me it seems to generate a cool and faintly greenish glow; the petals are the colour of luminous paint in daylight.

Its perfume overtakes the Prunus mume in stages, and over time it has deeper notes and a resonance of both the summer Michelia champaca (Yellow Orchid) and Michelia alba. The Yellow Orchid and the Jade Orchid are positioned like opposites: bookends of the seasons. Locked together in the symmetry of their genus, the Michelia is a warm and golden summer emblem, by contrast with this fragrant jade Magnolia that belongs in pale and cold winter moonlight. It seems fitting and important that the later provides the marker for the winter apex.

In the darkroom the next day, the goblet-shaped Magnolia flowers open as I work, the timing fine and precise.

My idea for an image evolves from various sources: the name 'Beauty Under Moonlight'; a memory of the recent high moon; and a confirmation (provided by a remark made at the presentation) that my works emit an eerie light. The images, more than anything else, are about light.

I seek to incorporate the qualities of winter: humility, retraction, stillness, and inwardness in the pictures I make. I want them to seem very cool and to exist in night air rather than daylight. The resulting images are stylized in the decorative tradition of plate patterns and embroidery. The moon I make is almost clichéd, or at the very least, kind of sentimental and romantic.

When I move on it is to make my second image and work with the Prunus mume. This Mei hua, as it is known in China, throws its petals about like confetti, a cloud of them covering every surface.

Over the next few days I remain engaged with the Magnolias as they continue to open. A lilac powder is sprinkled at the heart of each bloom. The stems are purplish brown and burnished like the highest quality purple clay used for making teapots. I am entranced by the slow theatre of this unfolding and understand something more of the unmediated joy in contemplation experienced and continuously expressed in the poetry and painting of Chinese civilization.

As I am expecting them to wilt and fade, I am surprised when I read in Valder that the flowers have this advantage of not dropping their petals immediately. The following day they are still divine. I cannot get past the power of these flowers and decide to make another version of the Magnolia, now fully open.

Later, on the verandah, when I light a stick of incense for my ancestor shrine to conclude my work and thank the darkroom gods for being with me, I notice that the first flower of Camellia tsaii has finally opened! I feel very happy again.

Friday 30 August, 2002
RECORD OF PRECIOUS THINGS

The morning air in the Gardens is moist and fresh when I arrive to park in the Works Yard before my meeting with Terry and Roslyn Semler (Visitor Programs Officer). There is pine pollen everywhere. It has gathered like yellow powder at the edges of puddles, in crevices of paths. With each gust of wind I can see it rise against the darkness of the needles, filling the air with clouds of fertile dust.

I show Roslyn and Terry my blue Yulan Magnolia print and the Prunus mume from the previous month's work in my darkroom. Terry comments that she recalls a quote from an unknown source about Prunus mume: ‘Among all flowers, plum blossom is more intimately associated with Chinese art, literature and the everyday life of common people of China.’ It is often called the flowering plum, as in the translation of its Chinese name Mei Hua, but actually it is more closely related to apricot.

Walking back towards the yard after the meeting, Terry sends me into a bed beside the path to kneel and smell Osmanthus delavayi that hides fragrant white flowers under prickly dark green leaves. There are several bushes beneath a huge old Coral Tree. This South American Erythrina crista-galli has had all recent growth amputated and now wields stumps to the air. It is a Victorian approach to plant maintenance, Terry explains, a legacy of earlier gardening styles. Practices that include the intensive techniques of coppicing and pollarding are just as much a part of the inheritance of the Royal Botanic Gardens collection as the plants themselves. The diversity visible in the Gardens is not only in the variety of plants but also in the layers of philosophical relationships toward them and the history of ideas about of how to arrange, organize and tend these specimens.

Our first stop is the Magnolia Bed where there are long branches of Corylopsis, or Winter Hazel, to collect. Pendulous long gold tassels are attached at intervals along elegantly zigzagging twigs. Thesecontrast beautifully with the intense pink on the outside of the flowers on the Sargents Magnolia, the biggest tree in the bed. It has produced masses of plump, crumpled, pink-petalled blooms on otherwise completely bare branches.

Down the hill is the Pearl Bush, Exochorda racemosa from east China, which has upright branches loaded with pearly white balls of buds, tiered up the stems and bursting to open.

I have been thinking about Narcissus as a possibility for this month. My research has included many paintings of a particular type of jonquil - Narcissus tazetta that has been cultivated intensely by one village in Fujian province in Southern China. This Narcissus is forced, or made to bloom, early for the New Year markets throughout the whole of China. They appear for sale as bulbs arranged in a bonsai-style pot of gravel and are invested with much symbolism.

Additionally, the villagers carve into the bulbs causing the emerging shoots and flowers to deform and assume weird shapes that can (at a stretch) be imagined to make the auspicious forms of beasts like dragons and lions. The more strange and suggestive the more coveted and the higher the price commanded. Terry tells me that they have not been included in the Garden’s Collection, as their origins are undetermined. It is thought that the bulbs are not native but brought to China from Persia or the Middle East. This theory seems supported by the fact that their location is restricted to this one coastal village. Trade and propagation of this Narcissus forms the entire and only business of the town.

When we reach the Southern Chinese Collection the first thing I notice is the pelt of a Ring-tailed Possum drying on the mulch. Apparently foxes and owls both live in the Gardens, and hunt at night.
The Edgeworthia is finally coming into flower and there are several clusters of buds at various stages of development. This dainty bush has a soft pliable structure and branches that are easily twisted into decorative knots. Terry tells me it is related to Daphne and that she has a picture of an old plant in the Kunming Botanical Gardens in China that supported masses of these twined knots.
Iris japonica has commenced its long flowering period and there are many white, yellow and mauve tri-petalled flowers swaying above the spears of foliage. We both recognize the visual potential and gather some pieces for me to work with.

When I pack the back of the car it is a riot of pastels: lemony yellows, mauves and pink.

The precious treasure of August is indisputably the Peony. We select a Paeonia suffruticosa x delavayi cultivar There is one bloom for me to take. I read that the Chinese character for peony translates as 'Male Red'. This is the perfect pair to the Magnolia, symbolizing the feminine, which I have toned blue to signal moonlight. This harmonious occurrence fits beautifully with the Chinese principle that symmetry creates balance. The Peony is supposedly the most Yang of flowers. The King, Hua Wang, whose beauty is valued because it is available to all, is particularly appreciated by the poor and the humble.

This Peony, Moutan, is powder pink, sailing in on the first wings of spring. Peonies are spring and spring is so sexy – how did Valder put it? '…..associated with voluptuous women, robust sensuality, opulence and aristocratic splendor. In contrast, depictions of pine, bamboo, plum, and chrysanthemum suggested simplicity and seclusion.' The Peony is associated with brightness and masculinity, which I find faintly amusing for so fluffy and flamenco a flower. Brightness – the Sun is on the rise again. Winter has passed and the increase in light has begun again.

Later, when making a print in the darkroom, the peony will not be rushed. It demands due deference and ceremony. It takes up the whole day and dominates the darkroom. In the finished print it shines like the sun pushing against the darkness, but working with it is difficult. Away from the sun in the darkroom the petals determinedly close in slow motion, with an action that has all the finality of a scallop shell clamping shut.

Afterwards though, I find confirmation in my choice of arrangement of the flower amongst its leaves when I read, 'Although the Moutan is beautiful it all depends on the support of the green foliage.' The Peony, cultivated across the continent, was packed for transit in bamboo cages filled with cabbage leaves to prevent damage. I can’t help thinking that there is an interesting political parallel in the idea that the King requires support from the humble cabbage.

As part of the extensive Peony cultivation , apparently professional grafters were employed, but only paid for their work the following season when the proof of the success of their efforts could be seen.

Painters, embroiders and decorators of porcelain all used the Peony flower extensively. It has deeply infiltrated all aspects of the arts in China. There are examples of it everywhere.

 

It is spring and it seems like most of the fences in the streets of Melbourne are garlanded in Jasmine. The sweet smell is on every breeze. In Gippsland it is Pittosporum undulatum, or native Daphne, that scents the air.

Terry has a new Japanese Arisaema on her kitchen table when I arrive. Arisaema sikkokianum is reminiscent of a carved Buddhist throne; a single brown pointed petal (spathe) with white veins, joining a collar which encircles a thick white pestle-shaped spadix. The whole flower has a remarkable resemblance to a religious icon, framed by a three-part leaf.

In her lounge room is a potted species Hippeastrum with a tall fat stem and green and red striped petals. Perfect flowers unmarred by snail holes the way mine always are.

In July Terry introduced me to red Chinese dates -the fruits of Ziziphus jujuba. This month she produces a bag of them for me. They are wonderful fruits that Valder tells are 'among the fruits and nuts scattered on the wedding bed.' A beautiful ritual of abundance.

When I arrive an hour early at the Gardens the following day it is overcast and cool. The sun is behind a thin veil of cloud. I glimpse a flurry of bats over the treetops. I have time for coffee at the café before our meeting. I sit in the potager garden behind the café. Everywhere there are holes in the dirt scratched by foraging and breeding blackbirds. They are active this morning, males with bright orange beaks spring like wind-up toys from perch to perch.

A ancient Wisteria twines up a tall old pine with scaly bark near the Herbarium, throwing a thick stem-like rope over the high branches and sending a cascade of mauve blue flowers falling back down toward the earth like a fountain. This beautiful climber has been used extensively in Chinese gardens. On hearing of a romantic place near Beijing called Black Dragon Pool, Peter Valder recounts Wisteria growing over 'a stout framework, so extended so as to cover part of the pool … and when the flowers were in bloom … one might swim below this trellis as lavender blossoms dropped onto the green water.'

Nearby the Wisteria-draped Pine, I notice an orange Abutilon, alight with a crowd of flowers. This Abutilon is thoroughly deserving of its common name, Chinese Lantern.

I browse the Growing Friends Nursery, choosing Cardamom, Sea Holly, and Tagetes, a yellow marigold, for my vegetable garden. Hopefully it will deter cabbage butterfly from my brassicas!

In the Works Yard an Angelica is in flower and has a horizontal haze of tiny umbelliferous blooms.

I meet Terry and we set off in the buggy. Our route takes us past a huge old fallen Fig, a casualty of the third vicious storm that has punished the Gardens over the past month. There is extensive damage – huge limbs torn off the tree and tender plants below now fully exposed to harsh sunlight without warning. The branches of Eucalyptus and Pine that have fallen into the lake will sensibly be left where they have fallen, to provide habitat for birds and fish.

The Mondo Grass, which edges the path in the Southern Chinese Collection, is stressed and dry. A Willy Wagtail, clearly nesting somewhere close, makes persistent, valiant and aggressive dives at the dog's head, attempting to drive her off. She can’t go anywhere on her lead so must put up with it.

Prickly Mahonia leaves wreath both ripe purplish and unripe jade green seed; all with a soft powdery blush that makes them seem translucent. An ungainly Magnolia figo, the Port Wine Magnolia, has many buds of small purple flowers that smell of some strange confectionery. There are a couple of clumps of Orchids newly risen from the soil; vivid pink flowers are readying themselves for a big display. Behind them the Ginger Lilies have long cobs decorated along their lengths with sticky red seeds. The tender new growth on Camellia tsaii is a delicate apricot colour.

We climb back in the buggy and drive across the Gardens to another section where, tucked into the back of the Viburnum Bed, is an unusual citrus similar to a cumquat but not one. It is budding up and covered in white unopened flowers between the dark green leaves. It creates an ideal dark backdrop for the Viburnums that are covered in lacy white flowers, their form -like doilies presented horizontally along the branch between attractive bright green leaves. The Chinese name for Viburnum macrocephalum planted close by, commonly known here as Snowball Tree, is Hsiu Ch’iu, which means ‘embroidered ball’.

The Chinese have stories about a mysterious and beautiful tree called the Jade Flower Tree that grew in the grounds of the Temple of the Earth at the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze River. In the twelfth century only one specimen of this large tree, which bore fragrant flowers in great profusion, was known. All trace then seemingly disappeared. Its fame is legendary. It was highly esteemed by the people and regarded as something rare and precious. A pavilion was built beside the tree with the inscription ‘Without Peer'. Li states that 'the exact identity of this elusive flower may forever remain a mystery'. However, Peter Valder reports that it is now accepted in China that Viburnum macrocephalum f. keteleeri fits the descriptions most closely. Evidence of the widespread acceptance was clear to him when he bought a brand of thermos called Jade Flower which carried a picture of the Viburnum.

Winding back along the paths we come upon a pool where a pink Tamarisk in full flower leans low over the water as if narcissistically admiring its own gorgeous reflection.

Beside the Oak Lawn is a big cloud or sea of vibrant colour, reds and pinks merging into each other. Apparently this massive clump of old Azaleas that have lost all individuation of form is the hiding place of some of the Gardens’ foxes and the perfect place for such a lair. Children, too, are apparently fond of crawling in and exploring inside this territory where no adult may follow.

The sun comes out and I remark to Terry that I have given up waiting for the cool day when transportation of the plants is not as difficult. It is clear at this point that there is not going to be the cold grey day to enable me to enjoy my journey homewards. We are already past the months where this was even likely. Regardless of the season, every single month just before my departure, and for the duration of my trip, it has cleared and become sunny.

Terry advises that a good way to revive wilting plants is to recut the stems and completely immerse them in a bucket of cold water for a few hours. I have reason to put this to the test later that day. I can vouch for its effectiveness as I manage to rehydrate a branch of the Viburnum that seemed to have drunk all the water at the top of its bottle before I arrived home and looked quite the worse for wear.

Friday 18 October 2002

From the start, this day is engulfed by a huge wind. A Coral Tree in the rainforest border is brutally shaken, causing its flowers to flop heavily out of the sky and fall onto the bitumen path around our feet, like curled orange prawns. The air feels chaotic. It is hard to think and speak above the noise as we walk through the roaring of leaves down the hill to the Southern Chinese Collection.

There is some protection from the direct blast here but the sound is still phenomenal. Clouds of dust from The Tan on the other side are intermittently sieved through the wrought iron fence into our hair and eyes.

I have reached the point in this project where I feel able to claim that the Magnolia/Michelia family, Magnoliaceae, is at the top of my list of favourite plants. Michelia figo provides further reinforcement of their exquisite contribution to the world where one or other seems to be in flower at any given moment throughout the year. There is a M. figo at either end of the Collection creating delicious bookend smells of bubble gum.

As Terry and I progress along the path it is evident that quite a lot of clearing up has gone on here recently, after the last fierce storm. We poke along together, interested in everything.

We find a yellow peony blooming, like a performer making a dramatic entrance. I am entranced, having never before seen a yellow one, having only read about their extreme desirability. We crouch to give it a thorough examination. It has a mysterious fragrance. There is a tomato red blush at the base of each buttercup yellow petal and a white Persian shaped turret in the centre, with three green stigmas curving out of the top. Surrounding this plant are other earlier flowering peony plants, with seed heads borne like three-pronged court jester hats.

On the lower lakeside of a bed we discover another theatrical arrangement of Arisaema flavum. Standing formally together is a row of stems of descending height. The tallest sports a golden green hood, striped with maroon lines through which a yellowish light is glowing.

While walking back up the hill we pass the Perennial Border where I am amused by the way the giant annual Echium with single flower stems., mass like triffids over the fence of the old Director’s residence. The wind animates them and they look like they are advancing, with a plan to overwhelm the fence and march across the lawns.

When we return with the car I spy a cluster of ghostly white flowers in a patch of deep shade close to the edge of the Collection, which I point out to Terry. She is thrilled when she realizes that it is a precious, wild-collected Rhododendron species, unequivocally demonstrating its approval of her choice of its position by flowering. It is the sort of rare, hoped-for triumph that is both significant and sustaining for a plant collector. We reverently kneel to drink in the sweet perfume.

Nearby in the shade is a low growing plant called Acorus gramineus, with strange fruits and flowers pointing, along with one leaf, at right angles to the stem. It is a most unusual form. Terry tells me that this strappy, sweet-smelling herb commonly called Sweetflag, was used for ceremonial strewing across a dwelling floor. She gathers a bunch of the fan-shaped plants for my later consideration in the darkroom.

On the radio there is a report that the wind is gusting to 100 km/h and that today is the first time in recorded history that an October day has been declared a day of total fire ban.

Terry had asked me whether I put the cuttings into separate vases when I got home, but I don’t; I carry the whole rack of bottles into the coolest darkest room in the house and leave them there undisturbed until the morning when the work begins. It is only after I have made the prints that I choose the appropriate vessels and arrange the individual plants to enjoy during the following week.

Often I spend the evening following my collection journey, researching the plants that I have acquired that day, pouring over texts that may provide me with clues as to how to construct the images. I am looking for symbols and poetic connections, meanings and stories that explain names. This evening I am well rewarded for my search with the following information about Acorus. The root of both Acorus gramineus and A. calamus contain volatile oils. They are used in Chinese medicine as an anti-rheumatic and for the treatment of traumatic injuries.

This seems particularly provident in the context of the week in which the Bali bombings have occurred.

The next morning I print the orchid first, with an incense ting (a three-legged bronze vessel) and a thick streamer of smoke rising from it. It makes a contemplative image that seems to configure as an antidote or charm to counteract how tragic the world seems to have suddenly become.

I follow this with Hosta leaves that I have prepared by pressing overnight to maximize the visibility of the ribs in the leaf structure. I read later in Valder that it is known as 'jade hairpin’ and am delighted by such a perfect name, invoking all the ceremony of women’s dress in the Chinese Imperial courts. I used a bronze Buddha to make a white silhouette that I will later print into.

The following day I print the Acorus with some teacups, my idea being that a strewing herb was probably used in places where food and drink were served. The teacups create some sort of inexplicable magic. The pattern on the ceramics has somehow reflected off each shiny surface and printed onto the paper. This is totally unexpected and fortunate. 

Without intention, my darkroom session becomes quite circumspect; the quality of the images is quiet and inward as opposed to floral and exuberant. Despite that it is mid-spring, this approach seems to befit the times in which we live, especially the past fortnight. 

I am aware that my unconscious absorbs the outer world and processes it through creative work. My responsiveness to the world is possible because of the process of making this artwork. It depends upon immediacy. All the elements are collected at one point in time and then configured for one exposure or moment. The images cannot manifest or become without this convergence of elements in space and time at one particular moment. The process is consistent with the Zen notion of Beginner’s Mind. There are also similarities to the art of calligraphy, which engages both the mind and the body in the same place through gesture.

Through this work I am involved with the construction of a visual botanical language using the forms of the actual plants. I am making calligraphy with leaves.

Thursday 21 and Friday 22 November 2002

My visit to the Gardens this month comprises two days. Terry and I are to give a joint presentation to the Friends of the Botanic Gardens. I arrive in the city on the eve of our talk to meet with her and confer on the sequencing of our respective slides. I have brought crimson sweet peas from my garden, their fragrance has filled my car with sweetness for the past two hours, now it seeps out and merges into the evening seaside air. They are well received.

The next day, Terry’s talk transports us to a place where blue lakes feed numerous waterfalls, where fragrant Luculia trees in full bloom overhang the path, and clumps of Arisaema tortuosum tower like some weird forest over humans. It is wonderful to hear her talk about her journeys and to see slides of the places she has been to collect the plants that have subsequently become ‘The Collection’. I gain a new appreciation of the physical and emotional investment at stake when a watering system fails or a tree crashes across the garden in a storm. Plants that have been gathered as seed in a remote and inaccessible place, passed quarantine, grown on, identified and finally planted out as small fragile plants, can represent years of work for a horticulturalist like Terry. Without passion and commitment this work might never succeed.

My part of the talk focuses upon the cultural differences between Oriental and European art traditions which address the relationship of human to nature. There are adjustments required of the viewer by the respective works; the viewer’s attitude to art and nature is directed and shaped by the form that the works take.

Asian scrolls have always been ‘interactive’. The scroll format asks the viewer to actively participate, inviting you on a journey. The need to roll the scroll along in order to see the work requires the viewer to be physically engaged in the communication of ideas. This occurs over time in a similar, but more active, manner to the way film or theatre unfolds.

This contrasts with the static detachment fostered by European work, which locates to the viewer in front of a frame like a window. A boundary between the audience and the place is established. Interaction is limited rather than encouraged. The Asian model represents more closely my own experience of nature.

I explain that my research has been about trying to devise new ‘hybrid’ visual models, which express the feeling of involvement I enjoy in relation to nature and landscape. I want to integrate the Eastern and Western influences and devise a cross-cultural visual language that will speak more accurately about my experience of being present in the natural world. My talk is followed by questions and morning tea. The dog waits patiently and unobtrusively under the table for us to finish.

Friday is a perfect plant-collecting day. We arrive early, and the dew is still on the grass. The weather is in complete contrast to last month’s tempest. It is a sweet and tender early summer’s day compared to the brutal spring wind we fought with last time. Blessed relief.

We walk down to ‘China’ the long way, approaching from the direction of the Wisteria Pavilion. On the way our attention is drawn by a row of tight budded, late flowering Camellias.

It is so dry already. Water restrictions are in force across the state. The collection needs mulching. Our approach from this direction brings us in under the bower of Kolkwitzia amabilis, covered in fluffy seed; two plants either side join hands across the path.

This month the collection is full of points and spears moving upwards to the light. The buds of Iris sanguinea are formed like paintbrushes with a tassel on each end. The Amorphophallus has sent its flower out into the world: the brown withered vulval spathe has collapsed around the stubby spadix – these archetypically male and female parts joined and exposed – and are four feet above the ground. The spotty brown stems are still fleshy trunks, keeping the action aloft.

These particular plants herald the imminent completion of the full cycle of the year in my association with this garden. I remember when the project was only an assembly of words upon a page and I was new to the Collection, exploring it tentatively, discovering the rising stems of Amorphophallus startled by their dramatic entry into the display, much more exotic and sensual than I had imagined any plant could be.

Against the dark wall of Pittosporum leaves along the fence line, the almost transparent white flowers of Rhododendron fragrantissimum hover like an apparition in a ghostly insubstantial way. Nearby the ground is colonized by Aspidistra lurida with gold flecks like dappled lights playing across its dark green leaves.

The Phytolacca is in flower and covered in dainty decorative creamy blooms hanging down like a lantern and looking very oriental even though it is actually a plant that pre-dates the locating of the Southern Chinese Collection here. Too old and graceful to brook relocation, this South American tree has been accommodated, providing support for a climbing grape and buttressed roots of orangey bark, shapely and reminiscent of the root structure of some Asian figs.

We walk back to the Works Yard to collect the buggy to transport the cuttings. Returning with it we pass the Magnolia Bed and Terry notices Magnolia delavayi. This plant, which Terry introduced to the Gardens, is on the brink of full flower. A bulky tree with a mass of leathery green leaves, it is covered in dark purplish brown buds and some open flowers that have an apricot tint and a rich fruity fragrance.

We circumnavigate it several times trying to find suitably shaped branches with bud, flowers and pointed fruits. In the same bed resides a Ginkgo biloba tree, an ancient coniferous thing with primitive fan-shaped leaves like some magnified maidenhair fern. Beside it, inhabiting the furthest edge of the bed, is a small twisted-looking tree with fragrant, two-winged pink, purple and white flowers and simple leaves shaped like two partly-merged circles – a two dimensional version of a fertilized human egg on the brink of splitting into two. Terry tells me that Bauhinia variegata is sacred to Buddhists and is the floral emblem of Hong Kong.

Loaded with plant material, the buggy carries us back up the hill. Passing Long Island we marvel at the luxuriant growth of the mixed indigenous planting. The vigor, unrivalled elsewhere in the Gardens, clearly demonstrates recent adaptation to the climate. It is fast becoming a replica of the pre-settlement riverbank. It is very beautiful in its tangled chaotic leap into existence.

As an afterthought we enter the Nursery greenhouse, which smells of moss and moulds. Sunlight filters through whitewashed glass creating an aquatic feeling. Outside sounds are muffled by tiers of leaves of every shape and form, and amongst these, falls of flowers tumble down. There are plants that look like orchid trees, potted with all the rich profusion of the tropics. Amongst this riot, Terry parts some leaves to show me several strangely shrivelled black flowers attached to a low growing leaf. The flowers are fringed tubes made of black webbing that clearly suggest its common name ‘batwing flower’. This, too, has been wild-collected and its happy existence in this environment is a great accomplishment for the Gardens.

From the outside, the muted screeching of the flying foxes seeps into the quiet air of this strange enclosed world.

My last visit. The End of the Year. It is marked by the mass flowering of Arisaema franchetianum in pots on Terry’s verandah balcony. This architectural feature seems the perfect venue for a puppet show, an Edwardian red brick cube with a waist-high brick railing. It is inhabited in a very animated sense by these big plants with enormous three part leaves. They have chunky, robust flesh-coloured stems, each wrapped in a transparent sheath of pink tissue and extending into hooded chocolate and white-striped flowers, poised like cobras, ready to strike. I have strong intuition that a secret pantomime is planned for when we leave.

One flowering pot of this plant has been brought inside and placed upon the glass table. Dripping leaves float above us, each of the drip tips on the tri-parted leaf holds a droplet suspended. There are small pools of water under each point, like lenses or magnifying glass on the table surface. Terry thinks this is part of the way the plant manages water. I, too, have read that the potted bulbs of this plant family will adjust their own depth over time. They are so actively alive, these weird vessels from the forest.

Later that night in Terry’s study, my bed sheet is chocolate and white-striped, echoing the aroids performing somewhere down the passage, not far away.

The forecast is for a heat wave. I am anxious about how this will create difficulty for the project. But early the following morning the day is filled with soft pearly light. Mists waft gently about, drops of water move lightly in the air. It is humid like China. In the Gardens, the bats winging through the thick air are jagged black shapes.

We pick up and examine the Coral Tree flowers. They are crimson red and shaped like Persian slippers.

Terry leads me to a green lawn where astonishing mauve-blue Jacaranda flowers are scattered evenly over the grass. They reflect up a skewed sky blue from beneath our feet. It is almost disorientating. Sitting on the seat inside the space created by the canopy we are transported. I feel like giggling it is so beautiful and light, like some version of heaven.

Terry has been a most fantastic guide, always thoughtful, possessing a high degree of awareness and responsiveness to this environment. Each visit she has led me a different way to the Collection, pointing out the extended Southern Chinese Collection throughout the Gardens, as well as including other things of interest and amazement. It has been a privilege to be given the benefit of such expert and inspired mentorship. I have learnt much; I have been educated. Yet there is so much more to learn.

We wend our way along a new path through the recently completed Camellia Bed. Planted amongst them is a Terry Smyth . wild-collected Chinese maple that is yet to be fully identified. This Acer with red stems joining vibrant green leaves and red winged seed has been planted here to shade the Camellias. Down an old stone path we find a tree fern unfurling a whole new set of fronds, and there are strange Impatiens, weirdly tropical, with small flowers resembling toucans’ beaks in both shape and colour.

Emerging onto another lawn we have a view to where a huge old white-trunked Eucalyptus grows. It has been roped off since it started dropping limbs. In one of the holes, where a branch has long ago dropped, two baby Sulphur-crested Cockatoos roost. They are curious and alert. Adult birds watch from a higher perch. This family of birds and their relatives have been breeding in that same hole for as long as Terry can remember.

We reach the Collection and enter through what I think of now as ‘The Entrance to a Forest’. The bamboo and overhanging trees darken the light to a greenish hue and form a tunnel like a passage. Translucent spears of Acorus fringe one side the path, hairy ‘Tigers’ Ears’ with pink undersides, line the other. Where the sunlight falls again on the path there are big upturned leaves that Terry has placed as sunshades for tender plants. Here, too, is a simple seat and the trunk of Michelia alba – my favourite ‘White Orchid’. The tree allows us one fragrant flower – dangling within reach. One is quite enough to transport me to two places simultaneously. It takes me back to both Taipei and also now, to the beginnings of this project twelve months’ ago.

It is then that I realize just how much strong new growth is taking place. The heat is calling everything and all the Collection is unfurling and reaching out. It has changed and developed a lot over the year. Amoprhophallus has inclined itself like a challis, a cone of new leaf balanced on a dark stem with silver blotches. The leaf gently lets itself unfurl. In the shade there are hidden places, where leaves are beaded with pearls of moisture at their edges. It is so humid, fecund.

Arisaemas are showing themselves everywhere. Close by is a colony of yellow-hooded flowers of A. flavum, originally brought from Tibet for Terry by the plant collector Bob Cherry.

A. candidissimum is strangely sweet, like a tea party with a sociable set of pink and white-striped cups. A. yunnanensis seems more bird than flower, like a rooster in full crow, head thrown back, tongue extended.

Light, filtered by the sweep of poppy leaves, is golden. Yet the leaf front is steely grey, with a powdery whitish bloom. When we collected these leaves as prospects last February, the sap inside was a corrosive orange, and it seems likely that this substance moving in the veins tints the light through the leaves. I recognize, and am impressed by, Terry’s intentionality in this planting. I see that she knew what the quality of this light would be like. This is design coming into being.

Summer is harvest time. There are Camellias that dangle hard, round, shiny green fruits, weighing down the branches. The Chimonanthus has fruits that are coarse like green sandpaper. Lillium formosanum trumpet the promise of the festive season with a cluster of white-throated flowers, dusky pink on the outside, with candy pink stripes along the petal ridges. Others are plain white. All are fragrant. Banks of bright yellow Daylilies are in full swing. Blackbirds sing from places hidden in the bushes. The smell of Christmas barbeques along the riverbank fills the air.

I say to Terry that I can’t believe we have done this twelve times. But we both know that an ending is also a new beginning. We have a long hug.