Karnpuka
Wonderground » Botanica
by Tanya Patrick
1y ago
23.11.2022 Words by Zena Cumpston Issue 4 Botanica Culture Gallery WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my mum discovered a quandong tree close to our house – the thirty-ninth she had lived in since marrying our grass-is-greener eternal-wanderer dad – deep in Adelaide suburbia. Her excitement was curious to me; she was almost crying with joy. I wondered how good this fruit could possibly be to provoke such an exuberant, full-body reaction. She collected lots and made a jam. Her ingrate children, including me, rejected it: too tart for our deeply Westernised palates. On my Barkandji homelands, we see our plant ..read more
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Tiny Tree Tales
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
1y ago
23.11.2022 Images by Daniel Shipp Issue 4 Botanica Gallery Six very short stories about trees.  1. ‘So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He want ..read more
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Indoctrinated by Plants
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
1y ago
28.07.2022 Words by Dr Prudence Gibson Botanica Culture Gallery There is a growing body of research evidence suggesting plant psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could be useful not only for the treatment of a variety of mental health conditions, but even for the improvement of wellbeing in healthy people.  These new scientific insights traverse ancient pathways and knowledge with the goal of improving lives. But will the latest psychedelic boom put plant populations at risk? The medicalisation of psychedelics is a divisive topic. Many argue that legalising psychedelic medicine pro ..read more
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Conversations with Plants
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
1y ago
16.06.2022 Words by Georgina Reid Issue 3 Botanica Gallery Coleman Barks is one of the leading scholars of the Persian poet Rumi yet he does not speak Farsi, the language in which the poems were originally written. His work is not that of translation, but interpretation. Of feeling the way the words written by the 13th-century mystic land in his body, digging deeply into what they might mean, rather than pinning them down precisely. Knowing and knowledge. Interpretation and translation. There are differences. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary biologist who does not stand, but sits on the s ..read more
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My Pal Mel: An Ecstatic Encounter with an Endangered Plant
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
2y ago
29.04.2022 Words by Robert Champion Images by Robert Champion Issue 2 Botanica Gallery Late 2019, two years into a drought. I’m out at Mt Annan botanic garden, on the outskirts of Sydney, looking for plants that should be grown in gardens, but aren’t. It’s hot and I’m thirsty. The irrigated plantings are a peculiar oasis in the surrounding landscape of dry, crusty grasses and eucalypts. I wander around, contemplating why botanic gardens always leave me slightly underwhelmed. Is it the way that plants are employed as display pieces – exhibits – rather than in associations? The worship and fe ..read more
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Making Meaning not Mulch
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
2y ago
29.04.2022 Words by David Godshall Issue 1 Botanica Gallery Angel City Lumber is a progressive lumber yard in Los Angeles that takes trees being felled across the city, and repurposes them for flooring, furniture, tabletops and so on. Prior to ACL’s existence, urban Angeleno lumber was chipped down as mulch or compost, and so it fills a once regrettable void in the materials supply chain in a way that is both direct and meaningful. Though unpacking their unique and inscrutable business model could make for a delightful little essay, it’s technically not the focus of the words that follow.&n ..read more
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Memories of Soil
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
2y ago
29.04.2022 Words by Alisa Bryce Illustration by Ameli Tanchitsa Issue 1 Botanica Gallery If the soil could speak, ‘unprecedented’ would not be in its vocabulary. After all, what is unprecedented to a medium that has persisted, in some places, for billions of years? There is not much on this planet that the soil has not seen. At least twenty pandemics, countless economic crises and a multitude of revolutions; and that’s just in human history. In the East Pilbara Shire, Western Australia, there is a soil that remembers a time before higher life forms roamed above. When the world was a drab, r ..read more
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Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
2y ago
18.04.2022 Words by Felix de Rosen Issue 1 Botanica Culture People Gallery The location is West Oakland, California, but it’s impossible to say exactly where, or what time it is. It’s a botanical tour – not in a park or garden, but under a freeway, on a piece of undeveloped land forgotten by the city. Rusty fences, mounds of rubble and a few abandoned cars dot the ground. In the background there are homeless encampments and recently built million dollar condos. This place was open water a hundred years ago and eventually filled to feed the city’s growth. The guide is Joey Santore. He’s ever ..read more
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Deity, Demon or Somewhere In-between: Eucalyptus Trees in California
Wonderground » Botanica
by Tanya Patrick
2y ago
13.01.2022 Words by Jeff Perry Botanica Culture Gallery Eucalyptus: a resilient and often enormous tree endemic to Australia and a few surrounding islands. A deity or demon, depending on who you’re talking to. The story of the eucalyptus tree is inextricably linked with the increasing panic, over the last few centuries, of an ever-growing world population and associated demand for natural resources. The same panic, paired with a deep-rooted psychology in some Western populations that humanity transcends nature (either as stewards who must look after it, or as consumers who must exploit it ..read more
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The Dwindling Glades of Gondwana
Wonderground » Botanica
by Georgina Reid
2y ago
18.11.2021 Words by Peter Grant Images by Peter Grant Botanica Culture Gallery “The glades in Gondwanan forests are the most traditionally beautiful places I have been. No great garden exceeds them in beauty. . . . They are the essence of Tasmania.” – J.B. Kirkpatrick In Tasmania’s Central Plateau the day has reached its hottest. An intensely blue sky is broken only by a few mares’ tails clouds. As I stoop to scoop water from a creek the air shimmers around me. Highland water satisfies, as always, but I crave shade. Spotting a small stand of pencil pines nearby, I crunch my way towards it t ..read more
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