This essay, published in critical-plant studies text Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales, is a playful exploration of the vexed, and often violent, relationship between gardener and garden. An excerpt:
I’m prowling the garden like a psychopathic cowgirl. Secateurs in holster slung low on hips, ready for attack. Spade tucked under arm. I am a villain or a god, depending on who you are and where you take root. It is both violence and growth I’m after. The plants may or may not be quivering.
Today’s victim is a blameless Lomandra longifolia, or mat rush: a strappy-leafed perennial plant endemic to much of the east coast of Australia, from Hobart to Cairns, coastal sand to country clay. There is nothing particularly striking about poor old Lomandra. Flowers, yes. But not gorgeous, iconic blooms like waratah, banksia, or wattle. Rather: tiny and hidden by not-so-tiny-and-very-sharp spikes puncturing shins of unsuspecting passers-by. Fragrance, yes, but not romantic and evocative like jasmine or frangipani. Rather: semi-toxic, like nail polish remover. They—yes, I am “they-ing” rather than “it-ing” because a plant is a being, not an object— grows in sun and shade, swamp and sand.
It is somewhat paradoxical highlighting the subjectivity of a being whilst also defining them by their scientific, binomial name. Genus: Lomandra. Species: longifolia. Classification, separation, objectification. Yet to name, surely, is to see and assign value. At a time in which all beings without eyes that can meet our own are perceived as an indistinguishable backdrop to the grand human odyssey, a name might act as a thread of recognition and connection. Love, even. I have many names for my partner, precisely because I love him. I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t. […]