A photo of Edith standing at the gate suggests thick native bush, but photos of the house itself show signs of a garden under sheoaks and stringybarks – ivy covering the back wall, deciduous trees and indeterminate shrubs. Perhaps this is the garden Edith described as her ‘second wilderness which none may invade’.
Edith at the gate of Goongarrie, 1932
‘Here my rambling roses grow in sweet profusion,’ she said, ‘smothering my trees and taking possession of every available space.’ She lists Dorothy Perkins, Ellen Poulsen, Illawatha, Orleans, Papa Gontier, Lady Medallist and Madame Abel Chatenay.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these roses still flower in the garden. Goongarrie still looks out over the forested ranges, up towards Kinglake and Toolangi, where fern gullies and tall forests remain, surviving the cyclic destructions of fires and the ever-encroaching urban sprawl of outer Melbourne. And in the forests and the grasslands, in pockets of undisturbed bush, there are the orchids that Edith loved: tiny, strange, colourful and with curious habits that resist easy comprehension.
The house at Goongarrie looking out across the ranges
For ten years I lived on a bush block in the ranges that Edith could see from her verandah. When we moved in, the previous tenants, both artists, dropped by with a bottle of port and a painting of a donkey orchid as a welcoming gift. Felix Borsari was locally renowned for his orchid walks. Each year before the orchids opened, he would suspend picture frames around them, so that visitors would see them as emerging works of nature’s art. Felix promised to come back and show us the orchids on our new block, keen to make sure we would look after them. Tragically, he died before he had a chance. So we had to find out about the orchids by ourselves.
‘A strange hobby, perhaps, this collecting of orchids,’ Edith mused, ‘but a very fascinating one and once you are caught in its toils the love never wanes. We have most of us lived through various phases of the collecting fever. In your youth it may have taken the form of match-box brands or cigarette cards. Later came stamps, coins or even fossils. But the most fascinating part about collecting orchids lies in the fact that the years never bring satiety. They are not to be pinned to boards like butterflies or beetles, not to be shut in boxes or cabinets. Each season brings them to us in their fresh living beauty, and we greet them as old friends.’
The collecting of orchids might conjure images of vast heated greenhouses filled with heavy nodding spikes of fragrant tropical beauty. Or the cultivation of rare and exotic breeds. Or perhaps the art of breeding – hybridising, mixing, mutating forms – to produce the most spectacular blooms. The strange aesthetics of the orchid lend themselves to modification and ‘improvement’. But these are not the orchids that attracted Edith, nor the type of work that she enjoyed. Edith did not favour the ‘primrose path by means of the glasshouse’. She was a ‘lover of the open’ where the thrill of the hunt was combined with the joys of the outdoors.
Edith’s collaborator and friend Rupp explained their charms a little differently.
‘Most people are attracted secretly, if not avowedly, by anything which is unconventional, out of the ordinary. Orchids are the most unconventional family of flowering plants in the world. You never know what they are going to do next.’
‘Have you met Mrs Edith Coleman?’ Rupp asked Alec Chisholm. ‘If not you must – I am sure you will like her – she’s just A1 and a splendid naturalist.’
Edith first sent Rupp ‘a charming letter’ after he published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1925 on the ‘Cult of the Orchid’. She was soon sending letters and specimens ‘pretty much every week’ – more than any other of Rupp’s correspondents, a communication they maintained until her death.
‘She wrote so much for publication that I often wondered how she found time for her private correspondence at all, but her letters were always delightful,’ Rupp declared. ‘Every subject on which Mrs Coleman wrote she illuminated, for she was no merely superficial observer . . . her work has a place in that great fabric of scientific truth . . . and it shall not perish.’
In January 1927, Rupp finally got to meet his penfriend, spending a couple of days with the Colemans at their Healesville ‘cottage-in-the-bush’, where he also met the photographer Ethel Eaves, whose stereographic photographs of Edith’s orchids and wasps are now in the State Library of Victoria collection.
Rupp named the doubletail orchid Diuris colemanae in honour of Edith’s work, although this species has now been revised and included within Diuris tricolor. No doubt Edith would have accepted this relegation stoically.
‘I agree with you as regards splitting of species,’ she said to a colleague. ‘I take my seat among the lumpers quite cheerfully.’
Whether to split various forms into new and separate species or to lump them together under a single name is a constant source of contention among taxonomists. Edith believed it took time and careful
