Talking about Native Plants

The American nature writer Barry Lopez exhorts his readers to “Take care for the spiritual quality, the holy quality, the serious quality of the language.” I would like to take up this implicit challenge to bind together ideas of language and landscape, and suggest that one way of being “true to the earth” is to take great care in talking about the earth and human interactions with it. One of the most intimate sites of such interactions is the garden; and one of the most passionately discussed garden types in Australia is the native garden.