The Living Pavilion

Australia. Wild plants. Indigenous knowledge. The Living Pavilion at Melbourne University 2019. The book ‘Plants – past present and future’. Plant blindness – our loss.

Recent travels [1] to see again the River Red Gums, Boxes and Ironbarks and all the other plants around the Murray River in Australia, led first to the Botanic Garden in Sydney [2] where among hundreds of species grew the grass tree Xanthorrhoea, famous for its gum but having many other uses, and the hairpin banksia Banksia spinulosa in full flower.

This Banksia, native to eastern coasts, was given its Latin name after botanist Josef Banks, who travelled with James Cook in the late 1760s, but the continent’s many Banksia’s – like many other Australian plants – had been known, named and used for tens of thousands of years before then. 

Which thoughts were present on seeing a series of books on Indigenous knowledge [3] at the Garden’s shop. And reading one named Plants – past, present and future [4] was a revelation.   

Plants by Cumpston, Fletcher and Head (2022) introduces many of the species that have sustained people in Australia, and makes the case for returning to these well-adapted forms as climate, habitat loss and soil degradation expose the limitations of some current agricultural practices. That’s for another article ….. but finding more about Plants led to the web presence and reports on Melbourne University’s Living Pavilion.

Living Pavilion 2019

The Living Pavilion [5] was an exhibition and centre of learning built in 2019 as a space, primarily occupied of plants, in which people could walk, see, touch, smell and wonder. It was part of CLIMARTE’s ‘ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE’ festival, 1-17 May 2019 [6]. Here’s an extract from page 9 of the the Living Pavilion report [5]:

“The landscape design transformed a seemingly unspectacular part of the campus into a haven of biodiversity and Indigenous stories through the installation of over 40,000 Kulin Nation plants, artworks, gathering spaces and soundscapes. It brought together Indigenous knowledge systems, community arts, performance, music, sustainable design and ecological science to showcase how transdisciplinary initiatives can sow the seeds of community vitalisation and environmental stewardship.”

The plants were the central feature of the Pavilion, assembled in a way that people could walk and sit among them, see, touch and smell them. Descriptive signage explained how Indigenous communities cultured plants in agriculture and aquaculture and derived many useful products from them [7]. A range of edible and medicinal plants, grown in an Indigenous Community Garden, taught the value of plants not only to people but to the wider ecosystem, including insects and other invertebrates.

For amphibian lovers, there was the Frog Fest including the Frog Soundscape which produced calls from a range of frog species in a re-creation of a waterway – the Bouverie Creek – which the university built over but which continues to flow beneath it. And there was more at the Frog Fest in the way of activities for children, like dressing as frogs, face painting and making frog life-stages in clay.

Art, craft, song and dance

Art and music was inseparable from the plants and their uses. Spaces were allocated to craftwork, singing, dance, art installations, demonstrations and soundscapes.

Artists and craftworkers taught the utility of native plants using traditional techniques. Stephanie Beaupark showed how fibres and dyes from native plants are used in weaving; while Katie West recreated a fishing net using materials and methods that few now know about [8].

Song and dance enlivened the festival, including performances from the Djirri Djirri Dance Group, The Orbweavers and The Merindas. You can get a feel for what it must have been like by visiting the performers’ web sites [8].

What resonates with the Living here is the belief that human society and culture are “an inherent and inseparable part of ecosystems”. The Living Pavilion’s logo, which can be seen on the web page is described: “The circle in the middle represents a meeting space. The water represents the creek that once flowed through the space and signifies journey and life. The plants represent flora and fauna and connection to Country and place.”

The Living Pavilion was the seventh in a series of events under the collective name The Living Stage developed during a PhD at Melbourne University by Tanja Beer. This bringing-together of people and culture with ecosystems and artistic performance continues through the project Ecoscenography – adventures in a new paradigm for performance making [9].

First knowledges book series

The book referred to above, Plants – Past, Present and Future by Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher and Lesley Head, is one in a series titled First Knowledges edited by Margo Neale [3].

Another in the series is on land use and management, titled Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe. Here’s an extract from the publisher’s web: (the authors) ‘demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food.’ 

An important theme in these books is that agriculture began tens of thousands of years before modern wheat, rice, maize and the other main cereals were domesticated from wild grasses. Similarly, systematic methods of land management were in place, for example to reduce the ‘killer fires’ that have caused so much destruction in recent years.

Lessons for the Atlantic zone croplands

There is much for us to learn from these books. Little is known of plants and land use in northern Britain and Ireland before to the retreat of the last ice 10,000-12,000 years ago. Modern crops have been grown here for only half that time, but before their arrival, and until recent centuries, people used wild plants for food, medicine, dyes, clothing and building.

Knowledge has been retained in written records, including accounts originating during the monastic expansion from Europe [10] and in more recent herbals [11]. 

Yet while some specialists are re-learning and extending plant knowledge today, the broader existence and utility of plants is unknown to most people [12]. It’s not just the knowledge that is fading – the plants themselves have also been made rare or extinguished. The recent Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland [13] shows loss and extinction are continuing. 

One of the main aims of the Living Field has been to show people the wealth of plant life in our region, especially the older crop species and varieties that are no longer grown and the many native plants and long-term introductions that have been used in various ways since the retreat of the ice. We will continue with that work.

The Living Field here could also learn from the Living Pavilion in Melbourne. We could bring in far more plant species and varieties for people to learn about. We could restore forgotten uses of our native and introduced species and link them to our cultures and places. And perhaps more than anything, we can feel we are not alone in the restoration of our botanical diversity – people throughout the world are doing the same.

There are organisations in the UK to help if you want to know more about plants and get involved in their conservation [14]

Sources | links

[1] The editor writes of a visit in March 2023 to Australia. 

[2] Royal Botanic Garden Sydney: https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/

[3] First Knowledges series edited by Margo Neal. For details on all books in the series: Thames and Hudson Australia web site.

[4] Cumpston Z, Fletcher, M-S, Head L. (2022) Plants – past, present and future. Thames and Hudson Australia, 212 pages. 

[5] Living Pavilion at the Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub where a substantial report on the project can be downloaded (cover shown above). Citation: Beer, T., Hernandez-Santin, C., Cumpston, Z., Khan, R., Mata, L., Parris, K., Renowden, C., Iampolski, R., Hes, D. and Vogel, B. (2019). The Living Pavilion Research Report. The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

The web link left describes how this image is made from weather data.

[6] CLIMARTE an Australian charity founded 2010 ’harnesses the creative power of the arts to inform, engage, and inspire action on the climate crisis’. Web site: https://climarte.org/  The group’s ART+CLIMATE=CHANGE 2019 Festival ‘presented 33 socially engaged exhibitions and events … across Melbourne and regional Victoria’. The Living Pavilion was one of them. Festival web site:  climarte.org/project/artclimatechange-2019 where there are links to the full programme, podcasts and other resources.  

[7] Cumpston, Z. (2020). Indigenous plant use: A booklet on the medicinal, nutritional and technological use of indigenous plants. Downloadable at Living Pavilion web page at Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub [cover shown right, see also 5]. 

[8] Performing at the Living Pavilion 2019 – some current web links : artists in residence Stephanie Beaupark and Katie West || Singing and dancing from Djirri Djirri – Wurundjeri Women’s Dance group || The Orbweavers – their song Reeds Rush links several features of the Living Pavilion || and The Merindas.

[9] Ecoscenography by Tanja Beer: blog, reading group, articles and artworks, ecological design for performance.

[10] Living Field articles on the uses of medicinal plants and the transmission of plant lore at religious sites: Medicinals through the Ages 1; Medicinal Forage – Kinloss Abbey; Labours of the Months – the Easby Murals

[11] Modern herbals and books and plant lore are listed at the end of the Living Field’s Garden/Medicinals page.

[12] Plant Blindness – a human inability to see plants, differentiate between them, understand what they do, accept them as the basis of animal and human life. More at Wikipedia including pointers to research and teaching material e.g., Wandersee, J. H., & Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness. The American Biology Teacher, 61, 82–86.

[13] The recently published Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland details the serious declines in native plants and plants introduced in the distant past, contrasting with the spread of recent introductions. See the Living Field’s notes on the latest and previous atlases at BSBI Plant Atlas 2020.

[14] Want to get involved with plants? In the UK, find out more through the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland and Plantlife – both organisations promote plants through learning, training, meetings and visits, and welcome plant enthusiasts from absolute beginners to experts.  

Paterson’s Curse

We’d taken a stem back from the field to examine it. It looked close to Viper’s bugloss Echium vulgare, similar flowers and habit (images below), another species of Echium probably. It was growing profusely among what first looked like a field of oat, in Victoria, Australia. Then our  host, Mrs McPherson, who knew the plant well said ‘Paterson’s Curse‘ and it turned out to be one of the most noxious weeds.

Viper’s bugloss near the pond at the Institute’s Balruddery Farm, where it grows as a winter annual, germinating one year, overwintering and flowering the next.

The borage family, to which Viper’s Bugloss belongs, is hardly a weedy problem in the UK. In his book on arable weeds in Britain, written well before the intensification of agriculture after the 1950s, HC Long [1] lists viper’s bugloss, corn gromwell Lithospermum arvense, bugloss Anchusa arvensis and field forget-me-not Myosotis arvensis among the borage family weeds of the 1920s, but none were harmful. Today, only field forget-me-not is common in the arable seedbank [2] but is still not among the top ten troublesome cornfield weeds.

But in Australia …..

In pasture and arable

Paterson’s Curse Echium plantagineum  remains a major invasive species and noxious weed of arable land in southern Australia, notably Victoria and New South Wales. It was not always there. It is from Mediterranean Europe and north Africa, but sometimes cultivated elsewhere as a garden plant for its blue flowers, for which it was taken to Australia.  Then it spread uncontrollably [3].

Here it is in the photographs below, growing in what is most likely a field of ryegrass, along with probably oats that self-seeded after a previous crop. Paterson’s Curse is the blue-purple haze, growing in irregular lines and patches.

The plant is taken very seriously in south Australia as a weed of pasture and arable land. It competes for light, water and nutrient with crops and pasture plants, but is also a poison to some farm animals.  It is a ‘declared plant’ listed in the Biosecurity and Agriculture Management Act 2007, and it is an offence to spread or transport it. Full descriptions are given, by national and state agriculture departments [3], including various means of biological control using invertebrates (e.g. insects).

It’s not all bad, however. Another of its common names, Salvation Jane, hints that it can assist in times of hardship, forming a constituent of pasture or hay that some stock animals can feed on, especially in dry seasons.

In flooded river red gum forest

The plant was also seen growing under the trees in a River Red Gum forest by the Murray River [4]. It was profuse, lining dirt tracks, but also spreading out underneath the shrub layer. There were other weeds with it, notably some of the composite, legume and nightshade families.

Paterson’s Curse lining tracks through river red gum and (lower) a flowering branch and two other understorey plants.

Away from the tracks and under the denser canopies, it was less common, but still the occasional plant was flowering and seeding.

Two years earlier, in the same month, there was no Paterson’s Curse to be seen here. Which raises questions as to how it became so abundant in 2017. Was it in the seedbank but did not germinate two years ago? If the seed was newly arrived in the area, how did it get there in such numbers?

There were extensive floods recently, and it may be that the seed was brought down the river or else the floodwater covered nearby agricultural fields and picked up seed as it receded, depositing seeds in the forest near the river. There are many potential means by which the plants could have spread.

Paterson’s Curse is a classic and costly example of a plant species that is barely an inconvenience in its native home, but finds spectacular opportunity in new territory. A bit like the rabbit and the fox. It’s no wonder Australia is cautious about its biological quarantine.

Do we have weeds as bad as this?

Britain certainly had its share of damaging weeds. Long [1] refers to the Corn Production Acts of the 1920s in which injurious weeds were named, and instructions given that they should be controlled, and if they were not, the landowner could be fined. He cites the counties of Surrey, Kent and Lancashire as having ‘shown very great energy in the matter’ of enforcing the Acts and bringing prosecutions.

The named weeds were ragwort, spear  thistle, creeping thistle, curled dock and broad-leaved dock.  Thirty years later the same weeds were still causing trouble and were named in the 1950s weed acts.

That was before chemical pesticides were routinely used and today the only one of them still spreading out of control is ragwort [5]. But interestingly, ragwort is spreading not in managed agricultural land but along main roads, motorways and roundabouts, and also into rough pasture and along some minor roads leading into wild land. The 1950s weed act still applies, so complaints can still be made about landowners encouraging ragwort to persist and spread  [5].

Today, in Britain, and ragwort excepted, most botanical invasions are outside tilled agriculture and by perennial plants such as rhododendron and himalayan balsam (but that’s another story).

Sources, links

[1] Long, HC. 1929. Weeds of arable land. London: HMSO. Ed: Long wrote his book on arable weeds well before chemical control became the norm after the 1960s in the UK. His account is an essential guide to weeds and their management, mostly by cultivation and choice of crop, in the period before intensification of arable land between 1950 and 1990.

[2] The seeds dropped by plants and buried in the soil form what is called a seedbank. Depending on the species, the seeds can survive for many years and then germinate when they are brought to the surface and conditions are right for them. The seedbank is important for survival is vegetation that suffers periodic destruction – such as burnt grassland or forest and land disturbed for agriculture. If no opportunities arise for germination, the seeds eventually die and the plant can be locally extinct. Most of the borage plant family in Britain can form a seedbank, but conditions in tilled fields have not been favourable to them and with few exceptions, they are rare in farmland.

[3] History, invasiveness, effects as a weed and poison, control and some stunning photographs of Paterson’s Curse’s ability to spread and cover, are available at the following web links: Agriculture Victoria; New South Wales NSW WeedWiseGovt of Austalia Dept Primary Industries and Regional Developmen.

[4] Barmah National Park protects a river red gum forest Eucalyptus camaldulensis by the Murray River in Victoria, Australia. Information at Parks Victoria.

[5] More on Ragwort Senecio jacobaea at The lone ragwort: late bee-haven.

Contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk

[article in progress  ….

Among tree ferns and mountain ash – the William Ricketts Sanctuary

William Ricketts began in 1934 to create his Sanctuary in a hilly region of the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, Australia. He fused  fired-clay images, mainly of Aboriginal people, with the lie of slope and rock on a hillside vegetated with trees and tree-ferns.  He believed that people could live together and with nature, and that destruction and exploitation were not inevitable.

lf_noim_rcktts1_gs_750

 

The images are now shaded by layers of vegetation. The upper canopy is mostly the leaf and branch of australian mountain ash,  Eucalyptus regnans,  tall and straight, said to be the tallest of the Angiosperms (non-conifers), and so very different from our own mountain ash or rowan.  Below them are a few medium sized trees and then the tree ferns, luxuriant above the paths and sculptures. (A part of a tree fern is included in each of the sets of images on this page.)

At the base are herbs, ferns and mosses, growing close to and in some instances on the sculptures. This proximity gives the site an organic feel, the images becoming part of the scene, aided by the artist taking casts of the rocks so that he could match the base of the clay precisely with its intended location.

lf_noim_rcktts2_gs_750

 

The clay images come alive in their setting. Many are part covered in a green algal film that must change with the seasons. Water droplets lie on them. Rivulets of water flow over them. Insects and fallen leaves rest on them and they change as the gums and tree ferns filter the light. There are  touches of William Blake in the way figures swirl and flow into each other.

Ricketts was born in 1898, a little more than a century after the main phase of European colonisation began. He spent many years living with Aboriginal Australians, learning their approach to life and how they managed vegetation and land. He also created works for natural locations farther north, in central Australia.

lf_noim_rcktts3_gs_750

 

He died in 1993, aged 94. He lives through the Sanctuary, his various other works and a few writings, but most of all through the memories of people who have seen his works in their intended setting.

The Sanctuary is managed by Parks Victoria. As with all other images on the Living Field site, images of William Ricketts’ works here are displayed ‘not for profit’ (taken October 2015).

Sources

Parks Victoria State Government web page on the William Ricketts Sanctuary (with access to a downloadable PDF guide)

Brady P. 1995. Whitefella Dreaming: the authorised biography of William Ricketts. Published by Preferred Image.

The Wikipedia entry gives further references.

Tree fern overhead at the William Ricketts Sanctuary (Squire)
Tree fern overhead at the William Ricketts Sanctuary (Squire)