CHAPTER ONE: THE POISON GARDEN

We are stardust

We are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon / We are caught in the devil’s bargain

And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden

– Joni Mitchell, Woodstock (139)

The living world – this ambiguous realm that we experience in anger and joy, in grief and in love – is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.

–David Abram,The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception

In the beginning is a garden. Some might say a kind of paradise garden, for this subtropical haven is flourishing and verdant and it offers seemingly endless gifts – of food, medicine, scent, aesthetic beauty, shade, shelter, oxygen, and perhaps above all, knowledge. It is an elemental masterpiece from its dense canopy to its hidden subterranean networks of mycelium and other lifeforms. The harmony of its gestalt hints at a divine geometry, and the considered curation and cultivation of its species the result of finely-honed knowledge and skills, sensitivity and attunement, dedication, reciprocity, hard labour, and love.

This chapter digs into the poetics of a unique botanic garden – a pharmacopoeia of psychoactive and medicinal plant species – as the generative soil from which this research emerges, and to which it returns as compost, hopefully giving life to ideas and encouraging xenogenesis for new forms to appear. The garden’s ecosystem is the subject of the research’s experimental documentary portrait, and it contains two humans, a house, and a library, amongst many other things. The research positions the human element as belonging to the whole, not separate, above or below. While the laws of property ownership in Australia have allowed for the garden’s creation, development, and preservation for over more than twenty years, its human inhabitants do not overly regard a sense of its ownership beyond the transaction at its genesis (I suppose it existed before then, but it was an altogether different being). Both the research and garden are premised on the view that so-called Australia is unceded, stolen Aboriginal land, and that if a capitalist, settler colonial society insists on subdividing it to serve its aims, it is imperative as a recipient and beneficiary to give back in some way, through ecological care, or knowledge sharing, or other means.

The garden’s human inhabitants are its caretakers, yet the garden also takes care of them. It is informed by and thrives through the application of their substantial knowledge and loving attention, and they, in turn, learn from it through intimate co-existence. They are physically and psychologically entangled with the garden’s ecosystem in ways that are particular to those who live amidst nature in this way, tending to it daily. This symbiotic mutualism is reflected by the research across its multiple, meandering manifestations. In fact, the research is analogous to a garden – of knowledge, language, images, sounds, scents, conversations, dreams, and so on. Concurrently, it is a map of a garden for future “gardeners” to pick up where tools are laid down. Never complete, this “mud map” is elusive and shapeshifting. Parts may be nebulous or coded like the cryptic glyphs that hoboes drew in dust on the freight trains they hopped, indicating to each other where to shelter and who to trust. It requires initiations and sometimes non-ordinary states of consciousness to understand and navigate and access its more subtle details. Occasionally, rainfall washes its lines away, only for them to appear again when the sun returns. Some paths lead to dead ends, while others spiral, or loop infinitely. Microclimates and seasonal weather systems bring cycles of fleeting chaos or calm, while moonlight illuminates and stars guide, darkness activating neglected senses. As above, so below. The research, like the garden, is a continuum of growth and flux, wildness and cultivation, expansion, and retraction, always holding space for new species and techniques to become enveloped by its multifarious existence. It looks to the patterns, forms, behaviours, and relationships of both the human and the more-than-human to scheme its transdisciplinary / undisciplinary / anti-disciplinary ontological relationships and design the unruly architecture of its artistic practice.

Embarking on this research, when it was still just a glimmering daydream, I broached the idea with the garden’s caretakers and inhabitants, D and E. As they are private people, and the prospect of filming around their home might be considered invasive, I was not expecting them to agree to it, but the garden, their combined knowledge and interests, and the way they live on the land was incredibly fascinating and inspiring to me, so I gave it a shot. To my delight, they responded in the generous spirit I've come to know well:

Photographing in this garden, I often wonder about the stories that could be told here. Clearly, there's a lot going on! And we all see it differently. For me, it's a constant play of light and colour that shift with each breeze and cloud, with the days and with the seasons; and also textures and scents. I struggle to capture some fragments of these fleeting delights as photographs. For D, the garden is a constantly shifting puzzle, trying to make conditions here and over there suitable so that each plant has somewhere it can thrive.

We both often wish that others could feel the joys we feel living here as we do. We're lucky in many ways but I think we're particularly fortunate to have been able to imagine our way into this life here. Although we're reclusive, we'd also like people who might not imagine it by themselves to know that quiet lives like ours are possible and can be deeply rewarding. But it's not clear how we might exemplify this scarcely visible life.

I like the idea that you might make a poetic and exploratory portrait of this "garden with a house in it", drawing together in a way that's fresh to us not only the plants that have attracted our attention, but also the authors and cinema directors, and even scents and maybe sounds. I have no idea how you might do this and I applaud your bravery!

(Email correspondence from E in late December 2023)

Like all gardens, it is the nexus at which the wild and the tamed entwine in a swooning slow dance over long tracts of time, in a push and pull of rebellion and attraction. If wildness takes over, the garden falls into disarray and ceases to be. Certain voracious species will dominate, and others will succumb. But the master gardener, keenly observing daily changes, understanding the effects of shifting seasons and the movement of celestial bodies, always pruning and propagating, and helping to provide the right nutrients and conditions, ensures an equilibrium between its many parts so that it may flourish as a both a botanic collection and as an ecosystem. Humans contain "multitudes", as the writer Mark Twain famously wrote of his own contradictions in his 1855 poem, Song of Myself. We are, to varying degrees, both wild and tamed, just like the natural world of which we are part. Our lives – and our evolution – are propelled by these seemingly opposing forces and the struggle to find their harmony.