Native Plant Stories

Four hundred years ago, a River Red Gum put its roots down at the edge of an underground river in the Australian bush. It has been drinking from it ever since. This is its story — told through centuries of wildlife sheltered in its hollow, the mycorrhizal network connecting it to every tree on the riverbank, and a botanist whose hand it felt against its bark across the full span of her life. Groun...

A Banksia cone has been sealed for eleven years. Inside it: everything the plant knows about surviving this particular patch of Australian earth, waiting for the one thing that can open it. Fire. This is a story about patience beyond human comprehension, the Aboriginal elder who knew the fire was coming, and the extraordinary science of a plant that cannot be killed by the thing it was made for. G...

Close your eyes and descend. Thirty metres below the surface of the southern Australian ocean, a kelp forest is swaying in a current that has been moving since before this continent had its current shape. Sea dragons invisible in the canopy. Seals banking effortlessly through the fronds. A holdfast gripping cold rock for decades, belonging to it completely. Kelp is not a plant. It is something old...

Close your eyes. Somewhere on a sandstone ridge in Australia, a Grass Tree is standing in the afternoon light. It has been standing there for six hundred years. This is its story — told with the patience of something that has outlived every human being who has ever walked past it. From a single seed pressed into ancient soil, through the first fire that burned everything and was answered with flow...