YOUNG CHILDREN have deciduous teeth. Our species gets one free replacement. Sharks and horses do better – their teeth continue to grow as they wear, at least for many years. All trees lose their leaves, but some do it continuously and replace continuously, and are known as ‘evergreens’. Even though they may never be really green, as with many eucalypts, they are never, if an ‘evergreen’, leafless. Deciduous trees shed their leaves in a month or so, after first withdrawing the nutrients in the reverse succession to the new leaves: chlorophylls, the green pigments out first, then the anthocyanins, the luminous yellow, orange and red ones last. These are the splendour of the Fall, as autumn is known in North America – a dramatically fitting name and a reminder of Puritanical origins. It is also etymologically proper.

The word ‘deciduous’ has Latin roots. ‘Cadere’ is ‘to fall’, and ‘decidere’ is ‘to fall down or off’. The Latin has given rise to several closely related words in English. All but one are specialised. ‘The Deciduata’, for example, are ‘all placental mammals that have a decidua’, a ‘decidua’ being ‘the lining membrane of the impregnated uterus in certain Mammalia’ [including our own species]; it forms the external envelope of the ovum, and is cast off at parturition'. ‘Deciduity’ is ‘a casting off’; some insects, female ants for example, have deciduous wings that fall off after copulation.

HORTICULTURAL AUSTRALIA can be read as a dictionary with a changing vocabulary, some words in, some out. The rate of change has been variable, the additions, over time, coming in trickles or floods. The sources of the vocabulary have also varied: the names of the plants put in the antipodean ground can be found in letters, journals, above all in nursery catalogues. The nurseries have always been the midwives, often more.

At first the vocabularies of plant names were those that the new-comers brought with them: ‘the rose’ and ‘the violet’, for example, came early and stayed, although the entry for ‘rose’ can then be expanded into a host of sub-entries ranging from ‘Cecil Brunner’ to ‘Peace’ and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a cultural history in itself. Both words were also applied to indigenous plants, an attempt to accommodate a strange environment to an old culture: Dampier's species of Diplolaena (D. grandiflora) is sometimes called the native rose, although it little resembles a rose. More conveniently, the ‘native violets’ are indeed violets, and Viola hederacea is a common garden plant.

The introduction of indigenous plants into the gardening vocabulary has had a complex history. Some came early, and from one end of the continent to the other: the Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), the sugar gum (Eucalyptus cladocalyx) from South Australia, the Geraldton wax (Chamelaucium uncinatum) and other ‘waxplants’ from south-western Western Australia.

I THINK I have had an epiphany recently, but I am still thinking about it. It was about birds. The word ‘epiphany’ is not much used at the breakfast table, but assorted writers have had them, or claimed to have had them. James Joyce had them. William Blake had them, but – unpretentiously – called them ‘fancies’. Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Yeats had them, or something akin to them. An epiphany is more than an insight or an inspiration, which are positive. It is more like a revelation. The Bible has a whole book of them, and some of them are pretty scary, as was mine. When the veils are ripped off the mundane, what you see may well be confronting. Think of the Anglican Dean Swift writing in Catholic, conquered Ireland: ‘The other day I saw a woman flayed, and I have never seen anyone whose appearance was so improved for the worse’. The bite of this spare observation comes from the way in which several implied value systems come into violent collision: concepts of humanity, male respect for the gentler sex, his Christian role, the need to maintain public order in a repressive and fragile colonial society always on the boil and in constant danger of eruption, and the power of social institutions of which he was a part and a beneficiary.

My epiphany was modest, but still confronting. As I said, it was about birds, which have often been instruments of epiphany, from Greek tragedy (The Birds) to Edgar Allan Poe's raven, Coleridge's albatross, even Blake's Fancy: ‘How do you know that every bird that cuts the aery way is a whole world of delight, Closed off by our senses five?’

THE DUTCH SHIP Duyfken (Little Dove) charted the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in 1606 and its crew were the first Europeans known to have set eyes on the Australian continent, although there is no certainty that they landed. There is speculation about earlier Portuguese encounters at several places. The first incontrovertible evidence is a pewter plate fastened to a pole in 1616 by Dirk Hartog on what is now known as Dirk Hartog Island at Shark Bay, Western Australia. The visit of Dirk Hartog and his men on the Eendracht was thus a ‘first encounter’, followed, among others, by Willem Vlamingh in 1697, also recorded by a pewter plate at a site now known as Cape Inscription on the north-east prong of Dirk Hartog Island.

The French also played a part in the history of Shark Bay. The captain of the Naturaliste, Baron Emanuel Hamelin, also left a pewter plate, in 1801, but this has never been found. One of his officers, however, Louis de Freycinet, returned in the Uranie in 1818 and took, not the Hamelin, but the Vlamingh plate back to France.

Thus there is a continuing history of European contact with these shores before and after the settlement of the eastern seaboard, mostly by the Dutch and French, who claimed the western third of the continent for the King of France in 1772. François de St Allouarn and his men buried a bottle 2 kilometres south of Cape Inscription, with a claim written on parchment and two silver coins.

THERE IS AN essential truth in this paragraph, that good design should respond to the demands of the immediate environment, in this case that of Sydney. The topography is steep and the soils meagre, so stonework and terraces make good sense, while the summer is hot and humid; the ‘Hindostanee’ model is not as extravagant as it might seem at first sight. The droughts are basic to any understanding of context, not just in Sydney but in most of southern Australia, especially its large cities.

If we invert the climate from Sydney's wet summer and autumn combined with dry winters and spring, the context changes to the southern arc of the continent, from Perth to Melbourne and Hobart, where the summers are dry and the winters wet. John Thompson's comments still hold: English lawns and flowerbeds are equally inappropriate, while his ‘Hindostanee’ desiderata remain relevant to design. Where the summers are dry, the style might be called Mediterranean rather than Hindostanee, but the two are linked historically, with origins in Persia, moving west with the ‘Saraceni’ in Sicily, the Moors in southern Spain, and travelling east to India with the Mughal Empire.

A GONDWANAN CONTEXT

Two hundred million years ago, all the world's continents formed one supercontinent, Pangea, the Australian section of which was near the South Pole. Soon after, in the mid-Jurassic, Pangea split into northern (Laurasia) and southern (Gondwana) supercontinents:

Gondwana was a name first used in this sense by the nineteenth century Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, derived from a Sanskrit reference to an ancient Indian people. The name was inspired by the Gond kingdoms, as caretakers of sites in peninsular India (the Narbada Valley) where the first of many fossils typical of the southern continents had been discovered. The Gondwanan rocks range from 350 to 150 million years in age and are replicated in seven major landmasses – India, Africa, Madagascar, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica.… Geologists H. B. Medicott and W.T. Blandford, in their Manual of the Geology of India, noted the abundance of fossils, particularly of ancient seed-ferns (Glossopteris) in Carboniferous-Permian coal measures from peninsular India, and adopted the term Gondwana for the whole series of fossiliferous rocks.… Suess extended the term to the southern supercontinent.

…the split of Pangea … set in train two separate evolutionary pathways for the world's modern biota – northern and southern. The effects of this monumental continental divergence are evident today in the geographical distribution of plants, animals and microorganisms and underpin the second significant shift in scientific conceptual understanding we wish to highlight – the development of a Gondwanan understanding of the biota of southern continents and islands, especially Australia.…

KNOWLEDGE OF THE PLANTS of Australia can be thought about under three heads: the scientific, the practical and the aesthetic. This chapter is about the scientific and the practical.

Scientific collecting and study began in the seventeenth century and blossomed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This flowering came before knowledge of genetics, and thus lacked a theoretical foundation, but it was scientific in that it was orderly and systematic, proceeding by an internationally agreed set of rules – although ‘international’ in this context of course meant ‘European’. It was a part of an imperial appropriation of the earth's natural resources, and the plant material ended up in European herbaria, beginning with Dampier's material in Oxford, and continuing, in my account, with George Grey, Phillip Parker King and Allan Cunningham, all of whom reported home to king and Kew (as did Banks from the east coast).

Practical knowledge, the subject of this chapter, was concerned with utility: what could be eaten, what not, all the other uses of the flora, for building, for stock fodder and, later, as ecological indicators. For example, ‘jam’ country was considered good for wheat in south-western Australia, which is to say that a species of wattle (Acacia acuminata) was found to be an indicator of soil quality. This is an area of continuing overlap, as ecological understanding (scientific) becomes a tool of better management (practical).

‘THE OLD COUNTRY’ for my mother, Australian born, was Britain, as for most of her generation, although she had never set foot on its sacred soil. Neither had she ever been Home, although she first left it (in central Queensland) at the age of twenty–three to be married, and returned to it often.

For my generation, Australia is the old country. Many of our landscapes are old. Although they have undergone countless cycles of weathering, they have not experienced the cataclysms of mountain building resulting in the Rockies and the Sierras that transformed the ‘New World’ and the Alps in the ‘Old World’ (thus made new). Massive glaciations later scoured both continents in the Ice Age, wiping the slate clean, a new beginning for plants and man.

Our last comparable Ice Age was in the Permian, not one million but more than two hundred million years ago, when most of the western third of the continent was scoured and scored, the striations sometimes still to be seen in the ancient granites and gneisses of the Darling Plateau near sunny Perth.

Geology is a continuum so, like every other land-mass, Australia has rocks of all ages from the Archaeozoic – almost the beginning of earth-time – to the present, including comparatively recent volcanic activity in Victoria and the drowning of a substantial fringe of coastal land when the seas rose with the melting of Pleistocene ice some 10 000 years ago.

BEFORE THE ARRIVAL of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, Aboriginal societies, which were many and diverse, made up a multicultural complex. They had in common that they were all, perforce, adapted in their different ways to the physical realities of the territories of Australia. The words ‘Aborigines’ and ‘Australians’ are both European coinages. ‘The Aborigines’ was used for convenience to generalise the earlier groups of disparate people, making the same confusion between nationality and ecological provenance as is still made with plants. In the case of the Aborigines, the process is now in reverse, with a return to pre-invasions groupings like Nyoongah in south-western Australia, the Kaurna of the Adelaide area or Krautungalung of Gippsland. This is healthy, since the European generalisation is both imposed and inaccurate in its implication that the various groups were ‘here from the beginning’, the literal meaning of the term.

‘Australian’ in a different way is just as arbitrary, whether applied to people, plants or animals. ‘Australian’, if taken literally, means ‘of the southern hemisphere’, which includes New Zealand, most of South America, half of Africa and all of Antarctica. It is one more linguistic example of the European global domination that has characterised the last three hundred years. The corresponding term, Borealians, of the northern hemisphere, is not heard, for the obvious reason that it would include Asians as well as Europeans and a variety of North Americans.

THE GARDEN AS MYTH is a place of primal innocence. In practice, it is a place of unending conflict between human aspiration and natural forces. Although the most innocuous version of the totalitarian state, the garden nonetheless is a bounded territory ruled by an arbitrary despot from whom there is no appeal. The wise gardeners adapt their practice so far as may be to natural forces, but this can never be total; if it were, there would be no garden. The very concept of a weed illustrates this to perfection.

Weeds are stateless persons with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution. They are dissidents against the established order, that of an hierarchical and apparently static world, and therefore must be excluded, ruthlessly exterminated or expelled beyond the boundaries of society to the furthest corners of the earth. In this, they resemble the British settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century, and inversely, the White Australia policy one hundred years later.

A familiar definition of a weed is that it is a plant out of place, a splendidly ambiguous concept. Who decides the proper place and rank of a given plant, and by what criteria is it considered to be out of it? A kinder definition is that a weed is a plant whose use we have not yet found. Weed-dom is always contingent; belladonna might not be tolerated in backyards where there are children, but be cultivated in a homoeopath's garden.

Keywords

Biomass burning; greenhouse gas emissions; emission mitigation

Abstarct

A review of available literature published on biomass burning and trace gas emissions in Africa reveals household biofuel use, land use and land-use change to be the most important trace gas emission sources in Africa, contributing about 4% to the overall global CO2 budget. This may not be significant in so far as altering global climate through temperature rise is concerned. However, through the contribution of about 35% of the global photochemical ozone formation, biomass burning in Africa significantly influences important atmospheric processes. Although the total greenhouse gas emissions from Africa are very low compared to those of other continents, countries on the continent could still contribute to global greenhouse gas mitigation efforts through ways that could simultaneously deliver urgent development needs.

INTRODUCTION

Many African governments have for long underplayed their countries' contribution to regional and global greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels. The general assumption that their countries contribute insignificant amounts of these gases – responsible for the earth's warming – has influenced their hard stance, witnessed at international negotiations, against any meaningful roles in concerted efforts to mitigate GHG emissions. But intensive atmospheric research work on Africa over the past two decades (e. g., SAFARI 2000, www.safari2000.org) have confirmed the significant contribution that biomass burning has made to the regional and global tropospheric trace gas budgets. The land-use and energy sectors dominate African GHG emissions (UNEP, 1998).

Keywords

African policy maker needs; end-to-end model; IMAGE 2; integrated assessment model; impact assessment; national integrated model; SADC

Abstarct

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are important tools for assessing impacts and adaptation options for climate change at the global level. This chapter discusses some requirements for integrated models at the national and regional level in Africa. It is based on two meetings in southern Africa in April 1999, and subsequent discussions. The first meeting was held in Harare, Zimbabwe, and included representatives from different agencies and institutions doing work in the southern African region; the second was held in Lilongwe, Malawi, and involved representatives from different government departments and university scientists within Malawi. There is great potential for application of IAMs in African countries to help understand problems of water and food insecurity in the face of climate change. Alternative development futures will need to take into account how climate variability and extremes interact with health, social and economic factors such as HIV/AIDS and poverty in impacting upon development. In this chapter we outline important elements of an integrated model suitable for application at the national to regional level, and discuss important next steps for Africa.