About The Wasp and the Orchid
‘Have you met Mrs Edith Coleman? If not you must – I am sure you will like her – she’s just A1 and a splendid naturalist.’
In 1922, a 48-year-old housewife from Blackburn delivered her first paper, on native Australian orchids, to the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Over the next thirty years, Edith Coleman would write over 300 articles on Australian nature for newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. She would solve the mystery of orchid pollination that had bewildered even Darwin, earn the acclaim of international scientists and, in 1949, become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion. She was ‘Australia’s greatest orchid expert’, ‘foremost of our women naturalists’, a woman who ‘needed no introduction’.
And yet, today, Edith Coleman has faded into obscurity. How did this remarkable woman, with no training or connections, achieve so much so late in life? And why, over the intervening years, have her achievements and her writing been forgotten?
Zoologist and award-winning writer Danielle Clode sets out to uncover Edith’s story, from her childhood in England to her unlikely success, sharing along the way Edith’s lyrical and incisive writing and her uncompromising passion for Australian nature and landscape.
The
WASP
and the
ORCHID
THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF
AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST
EDITH COLEMAN
DANIELLE CLODE
Contents
Cover
About The Wasp and the Orchid
Dedication
Extracts by Edith Coleman
Family tree
Chapter 1: Edith Coleman of Walsham
Chapter 2: The blackbird’s song is in her blood
Chapter 3: Ships that pass
Chapter 4: A teacher of great promise
Chapter 5: Marriage among the flowers
Chapter 6: Maternal devotion
Chapter 7: Down to busyness
Chapter 8: A perfect partnership
Chapter 9: Across the continent
Chapter 10: Fairy tales from nature
Chapter 11: The most interesting race on earth
Chapter 12: One of us
Chapter 13: Come back in wattle time
Chapter 14: Winter visitors to a Blairgowrie cottage
Epilogue
Images
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index of names
Index of species
List of images
Copyright page
To my family for their support and inspiration: especially my grandparents and my parents but most of all to Mike, Lauren and Rachel
Extracts by Edith Coleman
‘A garden wilderness: Old-fashioned favourites and familiar friends’, by Edith Coleman, 1929
‘Wind in the willows: Nature’s Æolian harps’, by Edith Coleman, 1930
‘Ships that pass: Fascination of Point Lonsdale’, by Edith Coleman, 1931
‘Forest orchids, Flowers of winter and spring’, by Edith Coleman, 1926
‘Fishy, maybe, but what a father!’, by E. C. Walsham, 1936
‘Some social insects: A caterpillar company – defensive tactics’, by E.C., 1929
‘Some autumn orchids’, by (Mrs.) E. Coleman 1922
‘Wasps and orchids: A remarkable partnership’, by E. C., 1927
‘A silent sentinel of the coast: Cape Leeuwin lighthouse’, by Edith Coleman, 1931
‘The poetry of earth: Return of the flowers’, by Edith Coleman, 1931
‘Magic rain carpets the “Inland”: Many and brave are the flowers of the inland – blooms of a “desert” that is no desert’, by Edith Coleman, 1938
‘A forest huntress: The praying mantis – her beauty, her skill and her way with lovers’, by Edith Coleman, 1935
‘Flowers of the eucalypt: A source of national pride’, by Edith Coleman, 1930
‘Winter visitors to a Blairgowrie cottage’, by Edith Coleman, 1951
Chapter 1
EDITH COLEMAN OF WALSHAM
‘If you love trim, tidy gardens in which roses grow as they are bid, my wilderness will make no appeal to you, for in it the roses long since took advantage of my pronounced dislike of the secateurs and wandered out of bounds. But if I lead them with a silken thread, as indeed I do, they reward my leniency with a wealth of colour and fragrance, and never were there sweeter roses than mine.’
December 1942
The roses are still blooming at Walsham, tumbling down tangled brambles in floral abundance. Fragrance floats on the viscous hum of insect industry, distilling under the searing sun. Crackle-dry leaf litter collects in the curving paths that meander, creek-like, between islands of marigolds and foxgloves, herbs and delphiniums. The shady lace of gum leaves drifts overhead, barely veiling the cloudless sky.
For two young boys visiting their grandparents, the garden at Walsham is a wonderland. Few would realise what lies behind the impenetrable wall of pittosporum lining Blackburn Road. The plain paling fence, stained with Condy’s crystals and sump oil, reveals no secrets. But through the unassuming gate lies the loveliest garden you would ever see, a memory garden. A riot of perennials flourishes in every bed – salvias and borage beloved of bees and spinebills. For John, the cottage garden is ‘full of colour and scent – always something in bloom with lots of insects visiting’: fuchsias and petunias, hollyhocks and hydrangeas, wallflowers and roses. For other visitors there is a ‘profusion of shrubs: the myrrh, the cinnamon, the calamus, the lavender, the thyme, the balsams and the other herbs’.
The turtle pond is Peter’s favourite. A white-ringed eye rises, unblinking, from beneath the dark surface. Here and there, water bowls and feeding trays fill with the raucous fluff of feathers and beaks. Gleaming dark Australorps proudly declare the delivery of each egg from the poultry run out back. You could never be entirely sure what new creature you might find in their grandmother’s garden. Resolute bees swarming in the apple tree have their city protected from rain by a groundsheet. Stickles and Prickles, the famed echidnas, and their various successors patrol the yard stretching along the southern fence. Museum jars and glassed boxes reveal mantids and grasshoppers. A section of closed-in verandah, occupied for years by the possums Bill Baillie and Mandy, now contains phasmids. A glass-fronted, two-storey ‘Mansion House’ might hold two, twenty or two hundred pink-tailed white mice. Cheerful flocks of colour-bred budgerigars sing in the night rains from aviaries along the fence. Fat-tailed dunnarts might emerge from the pebbles in a small crate, or a hidden nest box covered in grass might reveal a sleeping blue-tongue lizard. Even spiders are warmly welcomed in this house.
To the north of the weatherboard bungalow, native eucalypts join the extensive fruit, herb and vegetable gardens that have
