2 - The Boab
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
Summary
HORTICULTURAL AUSTRALIA can be read as a dictionary with a changing vocabulary, some words in, some out. The rate of change has been variable, the additions, over time, coming in trickles or floods. The sources of the vocabulary have also varied: the names of the plants put in the antipodean ground can be found in letters, journals, above all in nursery catalogues. The nurseries have always been the midwives, often more.
At first the vocabularies of plant names were those that the new-comers brought with them: ‘the rose’ and ‘the violet’, for example, came early and stayed, although the entry for ‘rose’ can then be expanded into a host of sub-entries ranging from ‘Cecil Brunner’ to ‘Peace’ and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a cultural history in itself. Both words were also applied to indigenous plants, an attempt to accommodate a strange environment to an old culture: Dampier's species of Diplolaena (D. grandiflora) is sometimes called the native rose, although it little resembles a rose. More conveniently, the ‘native violets’ are indeed violets, and Viola hederacea is a common garden plant.
The introduction of indigenous plants into the gardening vocabulary has had a complex history. Some came early, and from one end of the continent to the other: the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), the sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) from South Australia, the Geraldton wax (Chamelaucium uncinatum) and other ‘waxplants’ from south-western Western Australia.
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- The Old CountryAustralian Landscapes, Plants and People, pp. 43 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005