Posthuman Plants: Rethinking the Vegetal through Culture, Art, and Poetry

Abstract

Loss and hopelessness. This is going to go on and on. We're never going to see these wildflowers again. What I experienced out there is gone. There's still some left, but it's under pressure all the time. All the time. It's sad for me to see this happen. (Kim Fletcher, Perth, Western Australia, April2013) Scented or brown boronia ('Boronia megastigma') is a slender shrub endemic to the South-West comer of Western Australia (WA). Said to possess a "heady, sentimental perfume" (see, for example, Parker 1962, 4), the fragrant blossom is found in the heath lands and eucalypt forests between Busselton and Albany, south of the capital city Perth. Bearing small brown and yellow flowers toward the end of winter (late July-September in WA), boronia was collected in the wild, shipped by train, and sold as an ornamental by Perth street sellers in the early to mid-1900s. In 1947, novelist and columnist James Pollard (1900-1971) wrote of boronia in the Perth newspaper 'The West Australian'. Evoking his experience of the wildflower in sensuous terms, Pollard (1947) extols boronia's "perfume stirring memories" (4). He shares a "scented memory" with an onlooker in the street as Pollard - then in his middle years - recollects picking boronia in his youth. In Pollard's account, the flower's aesthetic appeal and the regional economic network, to which it was integral, bridged the divide between city and country: "The young people of the boronia country go out in the rainy dawns of July and August, to gather and dispatch to the city the flower that in this season gives to Perth one its few town cries" (Pollard 1947, 4).