8 Gardening 0417 294 778 A Touch of Grass Garden Care GARDEN CLEANUPS / REJUVENATION & MAKEOVERS A SPECIALTY We offer an experienced, professional and reliable service Call Jeremy on ... Est. Gold Coast since 2001 Let us create your new and rejuvenated garden where you can sit back, relax and enjoy your tranquil surroundings ... Specialising Garden Makeovers & Rejuvenation * Garden Care * Plant Selection * Soft Landscaping “It is not half so important to know as to feel”. Kate Heffernan Tucked into a book, ‘World without Trees’ written by Robert Lamb in 1980, are my handwritten words taken from an essay ‘Sense of Wonder’ 1955, by Rachel Carson. “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1955, “he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in”. These words of Carson in her essay ‘Sense of Wonder’ were discovered by me as an adult researching two Designer Gardens I was creating with TAFE students for an ABC Gardens Alive Exhibition in Brisbane in 2003. The title of this short ramble into the past is also a quote from Carson’s essay. Scandinavian research I also read some time ago, and sadly can no longer locate, reported how a great number of people professionally engaged in the natural sciences were influenced as a child by an adult. The report also cited how simply a deep love and strong commitment to environmentalism was also often from the influence of a single adult, and at times perhaps just from one experience. The report was more exacting than my humble interpretation, providing both evidence and statistics. When ‘Sense of Wonder’ was published I was a toddler spending time in my Grandad’s sprawling garden, or picnicking and walking with my parents in Sydney’s Botanic Garden just a short ferry ride from home. I also sometimes consider my gardening genes are from my 5 times greatgrandfather, a gardener in Co. Cork Ireland at the time Australia was being colonised. But perhaps it is simply that each generation along the way shared their love with the next, rediscovering the awe of it themselves when spending time in a garden or forest with a child. Almost every person I speak with in these sometimes deeply troubling times comments on the often-senseless destruction of our natural environment. Too often their words include the same unanswered question – “what can we do”? Perhaps find a volunteer organisation that works for nature across our city. They are listed on the City of Gold Coast website. https://www.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/Things-to-do/Getinvolved/Want-to-volunteer/NaturallyGC-Volunteer-LandcareProgram As a Regional Botanic Gardens in our rapidly urbanising City of Gold Coast we have a chance to ensure children (and adults) experience nature up close. To learn to love nature for nature itself, through experiencing the sight and the sounds of perhaps the She Oak Grove. Or watching the wildlife that moves in and out of the hollows in our veteran trees, or native bees, birds and butterflies sipping nectar. Seeing the red carpet of fruit under a Small leaf Tamarind or hearing stories of the sustainable way our First Nation Australians lived while feeling the power of nature all around them. Please take time to engage the little folk in your lives with a ‘one on one’ nature experience, and the Botanic Garden’s children’s more formal outdoor activities. These are the words that inspired the TAFE students Designer Gardens. “In the jungle of competing values that has grown up around our dealings with trees, one proposition must stand taller than the rest; we always need trees and there may always be times when trees need us. Any creature comfort we happen to reap from particular trees is a tiny bonus added to the inestimable gifts which the collectivity of trees had never so far failed to heap on us. A world without trees would be a world chasing its own tail, falling over itself to replace the irreplaceable. For all we know the turning point between that world and the world we know pivots on the stem of a single leaf.” Robert Lamb, World Without Trees, Magnum Books, 1980. by Kate Heffernan Honorary Life Member Friends of GCRBG, Botanic Garden Consultant Pictured: Kate admiring an Elaeocarpus grandis – Quondong, planted just 11 years ago by volunteers!
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NjM5MTE=