It is tempting to think that Edith has been forgotten because she was a woman, but it’s more complicated than that. She’s been forgotten because she was a scientist, and because she was an amateur. She’s been forgotten because she wrote for newspapers, magazines and academic journals, rather than books. She’s been forgotten because she was Australian, because she wasn’t Australian enough, and most of all because she was a nature writer.
It’s over twenty years since I was first introduced to Edith Coleman’s work in the basement of the museum. In that time I have raised two daughters of my own to adulthood. I’ve drifted from zoology and psychology to literature and writing, dabbling in research, academia, editing and teaching. Maybe it’s time to take my writing seriously. I am 48 years old now, much the same age Edith was when she started her career in earnest. I want to know how she did it. I want to know what it is that has attracted me to Edith’s story for so long.
Armed with a couple of half-page biographies, a typed list of 157 articles from the Victorian Naturalist and a handwritten page of newspaper and magazine articles, I set out to discover where one of Australia’s foremost nature writers had come from, and where, in the intervening decades, she had gone.
A garden wilderness: Old-fashioned favourites and familiar friends
By Edith Coleman, 1929
All my hurts my garden shade can heal. – Emerson
So sang the poet-philosopher, and, without accepting his assurance too literally, all true sons of Adam know the wisdom of his words. It may be only frayed nerves or it may be a very real grief – there are few hurts that do not yield in some measure to the balm of a garden.
Mine is a garden wilderness. In it there are no firm borders, and few well-pruned shrubs, but instead a tangled growth that speaks of healthy plant-appetites, and a plebeian capacity for making the most of such conditions as offer. My edging-plants have a shameless way of breaking all restraint. Petunias, verbenas, and warm-scented ageratum seem to wander at will over the paths to my delight, and with, let me add, my encouragement.
Other members of the household stand for law and order, even in a garden, but no mother grieved more over the loss of her baby boy’s curls than I over the shorn tendrils of my truant border plants. I grudged the petunias most, for those creatures of twilight, the swift hawk-moths, haunt their flowers, hovering for a moment over each scented trumpet and hastening away to the next. I linger to watch them until in the gathering dusk my eyes can no longer follow the phantom shapes.
Many of my friends have what they call ‘memory-gardens’, where gifts from friends find honoured places. Instead, my garden has memory corners, where bloom plants which bear, in addition to their own, the names of garden loving friends . . .
Mine is a garden of happy memories, of sentiment, if you will, dearer, perhaps, because some of us have grown up with it, and have watched the mellowing hand of time soften harsh lines of fence or shed. We have grown to fit it in the same comfortable way that we sink into our middle-aged armchairs.
My wilderness is of the lavender and old lace period. I have little regard for flowers that do not add fragrance to their other gifts. I grow old-fashioned plants, like wall-flowers and flowering currants, purely as a concession to sentiment, for their perfume carries me back over the years, and I lean once more out of a little window in an ivy-covered English home, while the intermingled scent of these flowers is wafted up to me. And the memory is half pleasure and half pain, for
Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack.
When in autumn my garden is still gay with the fleeting charms of annuals, I gradually supplant them with herbaceous perennials and flowering shrubs. The demands made by annuals cannot be denied. Their frequent replanting and watering become wearisome. Perhaps Father Time has made a call and I foresee a time, not so far distant, when his cards may be left with more alarming frequency, and so, like the wise ants, I garner a store for my winter by setting more permanent plants.
Chapter 2
THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG IS IN HER BLOOD
‘As I ramble among my simples I nibble a leaf and dream of other days and other ways. The tasting of each one is a rite. Their names are a song.’
March 1887
Tuesday is cattle market day in Guildford. It is the only day that the small English town can be called busy. Otherwise Guildford is ‘a retreat of country sleepiness’: so quiet that a trio of pedestrians talking on a street corner will be moved on by the local constabulary for fear they might disturb the peace.
The four youngest Harms children – Edith, Harriett, Hervey and George – cut home to Denzil Road via North Street on a Tuesday. They dart through people, horses and carriages squeezed between crowded sheep and cattle stalls. The market town of Guildford doesn’t have a square, so North Street must make do.
The lowing of the cattle is so loud it muffles even the cracking blows of the smithy, which can usually be heard right across town. Pedestrians dodge the milkman’s swinging pails, suspended from a wooden yoke across broad shoulders as he makes his afternoon deliveries from Lymposs’s dairy. A precariously balanced board of muffins and crumpets ducks
