Bulletin

Issue: March 2005

Research in Action

Acacia v Agapanthus - Reshaping Australian gardens

from right, Drs Holmes, Martin and Mirmohamadi: understanding the cultural resistance to native planting at a time when 36 per cent of domestic water consumption is used on gardens.

Have a breather from mowing the lawn, stop pruning that rose or tidying that agapanthus – and reflect for a few seconds on this question: why are Australian gardeners hooked on exotic plants at the expense of natives?

And what will convince us that many natives can not only be visually as pleasing as exotics, but are also environmentally much more sensible?

Two La Trobe University researchers are conducting a three-year study to fi nd out the cause of our obsession with introduced plants. With the answer to that, they then hope to change our horticultural fixation with exotics so that we incline more and more to natives.

Dr Katie Holmes, a senior lecturer in History, and Dr Sue Martin, senior lecturer in English, have received a $149,000 ARC Discovery Grant over three years to investigate Australian cultural attitudes towards native gardens. They hope to make us think abut our gardens and to contribute to changing our botanical preferences.

It is estimated that 36 per cent of Melbourne’s domestic water consumption is used on gardens. Drs Holmes and Martin say that the imperative to reduce this level of urban and suburban Australian water use is clear and planting natives in the garden is frequently advocated as a way of doing so.

The Department of Primary Industries estimates that native gardens use one third of the water supply required by a traditional garden. Planting indigenous flora is also promoted as a means of protecting Australia’s biodiversity.

Assisted by independent researcher, La Trobe PhD graduate Dr Kylie Mirmohamadi, Drs Martin and Holmes aim to discover how attitudes to native gardens have reflected, and been reflected in, ideas about Australian identity, our sense of place, and a sustainable future for our environment.

They will investigate the ways in which ‘native gardening’ and ‘native plants’ have been crucial to the construction of Australian national identity and examine the different meanings ascribed to ‘native’ and ‘indigenous’ gardening, historically and in contemporary Australia.

These investigations will lead to the more practical tasks of exploring the reasons for the popularity of, and the extent of the resistance to, gardening with native plants.

Another important aspect of the project is the pursuit of the fi rst scholarly crossdisciplinary study of the use and meanings of native plants in domestic gardens in Australia from settlement to the present day. The term ‘native garden’ was invented only as late as the second half of the 20th century and the popularity of this concept reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s. The popularity of native flora has long been with us – but has never managed to alter many gardeners’ preference for exotics.

This is despite some recent offi cial coercion to limit in some municipalities, mainly those on the fringe of bushland, the kinds of exotics that can be planted.

‘Pressure is being applied and in some cases is being resisted,’ says Dr Holmes.

This is not new. Drs Martin and Holmes say that 19th century gardeners were encouraged to plant or retain gum trees in recognition of the land in which they lived. The association between nationalism and native plants took root.

In their submission for the ARC grant, they said that at the time of Federation, native plants were seen as a way of expressing allegiance to the newly formed nation.

The earliest ‘native gardens’ date from this period, and the stained glass windows, carvings and decorations of ‘Federation’ homes featured native flora. Wattle Day celebrations, first held in 1910, were explicitly intended to ‘cultivate Australian national sentiment’.

‘There are some who take a chauvinistic view and oppose all but natives,’ says Dr Martin. ‘We believe it is not a question of replacing the “evil” geranium with the “patriotic” grevillea, but of coming to an understanding of the cultural resistance to native gardens,’