Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Fifth Letter from Far South
A Question of Action:
The Grasstree Story
John Cameron
This essay is one of a series of “occasional letters” that retired environmental educator John Cameron will be writing from his home on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state to the south of mainland Australia. For earlier letters, see EAP, winter and fall 2008, spring 2009, and winter 2010. Jcameronvking@optusnet.com.au .© 2010 John Cameron.
During the four years Vicki and I have lived full-time at Blackstone, the implications of responsibility for 55 acres of land have steadily become apparent. In tandem with our deepening love for the place and its inhabitants, our removing sheep (that had grazed on the property before our ownership) and planting trees for wildlife habitat have meant learning the language and skills of practical land management.
When we purchased the land where the historical site of a “sod hut” is located, we also became custodians of an area of great intercultural significance. I have had to undertake broad physical interventions while trying to remain receptive to more subtle, smaller-scale signals from the more-than-human world. I’ve often felt woefully unprepared for the task.
I’m not alone in this dilemma. Our near neighbor Pete Hay, who is partly responsible for our being here [1], writes that “throughout the Australian bush, other people, motivated by a deep biophilia and armed with nothing more tangible than love, are undertaking bush stewardship roles for which they are pitifully inadequate”[2]. He argues that “deep empathetic identification with our home range is necessary,” but he also points out that this is not sufficient for custodianship. We also need practical scientific and land management skills but, in his experience, those skills can pull us in directions different from the stirrings of love of place, and quickly expose our personal shortcomings.
Goethe’s way of science offers one possibility because it brings together different modes of knowing the natural world: direct observation, imaginative understanding, intuitive insight, and action in the service of the phenomenon under investigation.
In the 12 years I have been studying, teaching, and practicing Goethean science, I’ve been attracted to its function as bildung, the schooling of intuitive faculties in the practitioner, which enables greater sensitivity and more holistic awareness of the natural world. Scholars frequently refer to its effect as expanded perception and cognition. As Arthur Zajonc observes, “Goethe saw the possibility of developing new cognitive faculties whose emergence would bring the perception of novel and hitherto unseen coherences within nature” [3].
While I have occasionally had glimpses of what might be described as “hitherto unseen coherences” in the natural world here, I have no sense that I am developing new cognitive faculties. Nonetheless, it is enough to keep me pursuing my Goethean studies when I can, and to wonder what their practical consequences for daily life on Blackstone might be. Do they enable integration of practical science, love, and intuition? Or do I, as Pete Hay does, feel myself pulled in different directions?
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I ponder these questions as the result of my latest cycle of Goethean scientific studies involving the grasstrees scattered through the open woodland around our house. Visitors often comment on the strong presence these plants have, and we feel especially blessed having them so close to our home. For some time, I have wanted to investigate them more deeply through the combination of traditional and Goethean scientific methods that I’ve been applying to the local rocks [4].
Xanthorrhea australis, the grasstree, is a distinctive feature of Australian temperate zone woodlands. It has a palm-like woody trunk several meters tall topped by thousands of radial needle-like leaves nearly as tall as the tree. Every few years, a grasstree sends a “scape,” a long flowering stalk, upward for another two or three meters.
To the non-scientist, these trees seem to be ancient, harking back to a primeval time before there were trees with leaves and branches. Indeed, the grasstree is old for its size—a visiting plant ecologist who specializes in Xanthorrhea estimated that a three-meter-high plant near our house was roughly 500 years old. They are unlike any other plant in our woodland; their closest relative in appearance is a tree fern or small palm. The sharp, long, rhombic leaves give the plant great sensitivity to the wind. The slightest breeze sets them waving like antennae attuned to faint currents in the air.
Xanthorrhea means “yellow-flowing,” referring to its viscous resin, although our species, X. australis, has a dark blood-red resin visible on its trunk. It belongs to the older branch of flowering plants, the monocotyledons, and is one of the few monocots to have a woody trunk and treelike form. It grows in a helical pattern and, although its leaves are typically a meter long, the endpoint of each leaf marks the surface of a sphere perfectly.
The plant is highly responsive to fire, burns easily, and is first to regenerate after a bushfire—a shock of green filaments springs from the charred trunk. It usually needs to be burned to produce a flowering stalk, but several of our plants have flowered in recent years without a fire. Unlike most trees, it doesn’t renew its surface after fire, so its trunk is a manuscript on which hundreds of years of fire history are written.
The grasstree was highly valued by Aboriginal people, who had many uses for it. The scape, being light and durable, makes an ideal fishing spear. The resin is an invaluable adhesive once used in spear making and repairing implements and containers. When soaked in water, the flowers produce a sweet drink. Because the flowers on the north side of the scape open each morning before those on the south, the grasstree can be used as a compass.
For generations, Xanthorrhea plants were referred to colloquially as “blackboys,” presumably because of their human scale, blackened trunks, and leaves like long hair. This label is highly offensive to Aboriginal people and has been largely discontinued. Occasionally, a visitor will say to us with a strange smile, “Oh, we’re not allowed to call them blackboys any more, are we?” This thinly disguised racism sits uncomfortably with our knowledge of the history of the “sod hut” and past genocidal treatment of the Bruny Island Nuenone people [5].
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On my trips to a small cove [6] near our house, I noticed a striking Xanthorrhea tree just off the path. This grasstree was part of a cluster of six that created an enclosed space at the top of a rocky shelf tumbling down to the sea. The trunk texture immediately caught my eye. Successive, intense fires had left bulbous red blisters of resin erupting from the charcoaled skin. Whitish-grey patches of apparently dead wood showed through in places. Above the burnt areas, the helical growth pattern broke the trunk into small diamond-shaped sections that gave the appearance of snakeskin.
I embarked on the four stages of Goethean science outlined by Isis Brook [7]. In the first stage of close observation, I saw there were tiny blisters of resin scattered throughout the lower trunk, in between lumps of charcoal and tendrils of dried growth curling away from the bare patches of dead wood. It was as though the intensity of the fire had unraveled the fibers that previously had knit the trunk together. It was a striking contrast with the vigor of the spiky leaves sticking straight up in the air for a meter in all directions. The dead leaves cascaded down over the trunk to the ground [drawing, below].
Returning after several weeks’ absence, I was struck by the ruby light of the resin gleaming from blackened recesses. With open wounds, scars and blistered scabs, this tree was clearly a survivor. As I wrote this recognition in my notebook, I struggled with how to refer to the grasstree—was it “she” or “it”’? There were problems with each pronoun. “She” was more suitable for the degree of intimacy and care I was beginning to feel for the plant, but the designation seemed anthropomorphic. I didn’t want to reduce or sentimentalize the Xanthorrhea into a woman with long hair since it was so ancient and clearly non-human. On the other hand, for such a strong presence, “it” seemed too objectifying and distancing. Despite my “scientist” reservations, I decided to use “she” when referring to this particular plant because the designation felt more in keeping with my experience.
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Brook describes the second stage of the Goethean process as perceiving the time-life of the phenomenon. I realized I could not imagine the lifespan of the grasstree in isolation from two major features nearby—a dead casuarina tree (Allocasuarina verticillata) and the crumbling rock shelf that fell away immediately beyond the tree. The casuarinas, the hardiest of large Australian trees, also have long needle-like leaves, but they are soft and pendant, unlike the Xanthorrhea spikes.
This grasstree’s time-life was a tale of three characters, stretching back 300 years or more and probably projecting several centuries into the future. The casuarina tree sheltered the young Xanthorrhea, giving protection from the worst of the storms that erode the cliff, which originally was no doubt many meters seaward. At some point probably not that long ago, a devastating fire had swept through the area, blackening the vegetation. The grasstree survived, sending out new shoots, but the casuarina, its roots exposed from the cliff erosion, did not.
During a storm, this tree fell over the grasstree, pinning one of her two main branches. The Xanthorrhea had accommodated this setback and loss of shelter, growing one limb out horizontally and dividing off another vertical branch to establish her current situation. In the future, gravity and the increasingly exposed position will take their toll as the shoreline retreats farther inland and weakens her roots. She will eventually succumb. The only remaining mark of her presence will be a small resistant cone that is the tree’s hard core.
It took 15 drawings for me to record the tree’s imagined life and demise. It was salutary to note Vicki’s and my arrival in the ninth drawing and likely departure in the tenth. At first I saw our presence here as having no impact on the Xanthorrhea’s life story, but then I noticed a small casuarina tree in its plastic tree guard just to the south of the fallen casuarina. Long before I had paid any attention to this particular grasstree, I had planted several dozen young casuarinas along the shoreline to slow the rate of coastal erosion and create protection for subsequent eucalypt plantings. Growth in these exposed conditions has been slow, but if all goes well, this young tree will serve as shelter for the grasstree in her old age, even as she carries the remains of the old casuarina lying across her branch.
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The third stage of Goethean science is the most complex because it requires one to “allow the thing to express itself through the observer” [8]. The form of this expression is often called “the gesture,” and one means of discovery is drawing quick sketches repeatedly for many days until something essential about the phenomenon reveals itself, either on the page or from the physical act of repetitive drawing. I found this process of drawing the Xanthorrhea invigorating. The slender leaves leapt off the page with vitality, while drawing the falling “hair” of the dead leaves required long flowing motions of the wrist. In turn, the intricacy of the different textures of the trunk needed short broken jotting movements [drawing, below].
Arriving at the gesture involves shifting the locus of perception within the observer. In the first stage, one uses the eyes and visual memory directly; in the second stage, the “screen” of visual imagination behind the eyes. Brook describes the third stage as “heartfelt getting to know,” which implies a response to the phenomenon that is deeper within one’s body and emotions.
At this point, I took up Brook’s suggestion that poetry can be helpful in the third stage of Goethean science. I wrote:
Surging from your crown in splendor
Your leaves constantly pulsing
Alive to the slightest of breezes
Vigor erupts from your charred core
Burnt down to the bones
Blistered and bleeding and scarred
Stories of fire written on your body
So alien with rhombic reptilian scales
Yet so human with your hair hanging down
To the ground in intimate space
Life springing from your wounds
Earth and fire becoming air
While I was writing this description, the words of a Bruce Chapman song came to mind: “The suddenly compact universe/Of skin and breath and hair.” To take in the whole of the Xanthorrhea plant, I’d been sitting back three or four meters. From that distance, I was aware of the expanse of shoreline behind the grasstree, the wind ruffling the surface of the Channel waters, and Mount Wellington rising 4000 feet on the far horizon. Now I was drawn to sit much closer, into the enclosure of the fallen leaves, and the universe did indeed become suddenly compact. There was an odd juxtaposition between the intimacy of the space created by the “hair” hanging to the ground, the breath of the breeze, and the harshness of the snake-like “skin” seared black.From within the fibrous cave beneath the grasstree, I could imagine the movement of the plant drawing nutrients from the earth upward, meeting fire and producing such delicate elongated leaves that seemed to be merging with the air. This motion seemed to bring me closer to a sense of what the gesture of the grasstree might be.
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For the next four months, we had unusually hot dry winds and virtually no rain in the height of summer. I was occupied with watering the thousands of young native trees we had planted in previous years. When I was finally able to return to the Xanthorrhea, I was shocked at what I saw. Some of her top green leaves had turned yellow and a few had died. The ends of the leaves were crisped from the heat. Although Xanthorrhea australis is regarded as a drought-tolerant species, this plant was clearly suffering. I was faced with the possibility that she might perish or, at the very least, that her hundreds of years of future life would be curtailed, especially in view of predictions that climate change will likely bring increasingly hotter and drier summers to eastern Australia.
I also felt dismay. “Oh, no, not again, not here,” I thought. A year and a half ago, we had been perplexed when three of the healthier Xanthorrhea plants just below our water tank had died within weeks. We took samples to a scientist in a government laboratory in Hobart. A fortnight later he gave us the bad news that our plants had been infected with Phytophthora cinnamomi.
Phytophthora, from the Greek meaning “plant destroyer,” belongs to a family of organisms including those that caused the Irish potato blight and are currently ravaging oaks and chestnut trees in North America. It is an ancient life form similar to fungi but belongs to a different kingdom, more akin to algae. Like plants, its cell walls are made of cellulose, whereas fungi have walls of chitin, the substance that makes up the outer skeletons of insects and crabs.
Phytophthora cinnamomi spreads most rapidly through human disturbance of the soil, such as excavation and road building, and is killing native vegetation in various parts of southern Australia. It requires moist soil to be active, but its damage occurs in dry periods when plants are drought-stressed; they can’t absorb enough water through their damaged roots. There is no effective way to control Phytophthora cinnamomi and grasstrees are particularly vulnerable [9].
Vicki and I felt dismayed at the prospect that something we had inadvertently done had caused the death of some of our beloved grasstrees, and anxiously looked back at any activities that might have disturbed the soil. Two visiting friends with botanical training were able to trace the likely cause to excavation by the previous owners to install a water tank. The friends pointed out that now Phytophthora was in the soil, further deaths downslope from the tank were likely to occur. Although we were spared the guilt of having caused the death of these plants, we now had the responsibility of averting further damage by diverting water flows and minimizing activity and disturbance in the area. It was yet another reminder of how fragile the native vegetation on our land was. We vowed not to bring in any “foreign” soil and to keep disturbances to a minimum.
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The fourth stage of Goethean science is sometimes described as “being one with the object” and involves practical action or being of service to the phenomenon under study. After sitting on the parched ground in front of the grasstree asking how I could help, I noticed my water bottle alongside my sketchbook, charcoal, and notebook. The least I could do was to share my water with the plant whose leaves were curling further in the drought. The water didn’t penetrate the soil unless I poured very slowly, paying closer attention to where it was seeping onto the roots. On my next visits, I brought a bucket of water, and I’ve felt very tenderly toward the grasstree as I’ve made my offering.
In her commentary on the fourth stage, Brook observes that “the moral implication of being empowered to act by having an intimate knowledge of another being is often experienced as an awesome responsibility” [10]. As I contemplate what action flows from my closer connection with the Xanthorrhea plant, I am painfully aware of the damage that has been done by previous human actions. It now seems likely that this tree was so badly affected by the drought because it, too, has been infected by Phytophthora. Because it is some distance across a small gully from our water tank and not downstream, it must have been infected by some other previous human disturbance. A study of threatened species on Bruny Island six years ago identified sporadic outbreaks of Phytophthora in our local area; thus, its presence on our land might date back further than I had originally realized [11].
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As a result of these Goethean studies to date, I am left with greater sensitivity to this particular grasstree and the species in general. Late last year, we took a hike farther south on Bruny Island and encountered a dense grove of grasstrees beneath a forest canopy. There were hundreds of Xanthorrhea taller than ourselves, and our little band of walkers fell into silence as we entered. It felt like hallowed ground. As the months go by, we see a few more Xanthorrhea starting to die, with no discernible pattern. Clearly, there is more happening in the soil than I can make sense of at the moment. I feel the “awesome responsibility” that Brook describes but as yet have no clear reading from the fourth stage of my studies on how to discharge that duty. I can only continue to hold open the question of how I might be of service to these remarkable plants and seek to do no further harm.
In my feelings of inadequacy about how to act, I think of Peter Hay, who laments that “concerning the embattled coastal woodland over which I hold a steward’s charge, I really haven’t a clue” [12]. The problem is that, without some form of active management involving physical invention and fire, his woodland will suffer inevitable ecological decline. He suffers, however, from a “knowledge deficit” that runs the gamut from plant identification to practical skills. As a poet and philosopher, he has—and I can vouch for this—a “deep empathetic identification” with his beloved bushland. Unfortunately, that is more of an obstacle than an aid in his ability to take any concerted physical action.
As Hay observes, we are not alone with this problem, and there are no simple prescriptions. How to proceed? Can Goethean science point the way into the unknown? Arthur Zajonc observes that “If we would create the capacities for understanding our future, we must dwell precisely in the tensions, paradoxes and annoying anomalies of our time…. On nearly every front, we are called to reimagine the world we inhabit” [13]. A similar theme is highlighted by John Shotter: “To many, there are only two categories of difficulty facing us in the world: problems which can eventually be solved and mysteries which cannot. But what Goethe and the late Wittgenstein show us is that there is a third category: mysteries that we can enter into and begin to find our ‘way around’ inside of” [14].
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What does this mean in practice? If I am to dwell in the contradictions and tensions of our current predicament, I must be patient and perseverant, resisting the urge to view stewardship of the land either as a problem to be solved managerially or as a fathomless conundrum that is beyond me, an occasion to relinquish accountability. If I enter into the mystery of a responsibility for which I am inadequate, holding intuition, knowledge and love that might well be incompatible with each other, how can I find my way around?
One instrument for this journey that is both interior and exterior is suggested by Zajonc’s phrase “to reimagine the world we inhabit.” I referred in my second letter to “imagination of the real,” the ability to imaginatively enter what presents itself, whether it is the external form of a plant or the question of what action to take. Another guide is what Shotter calls “withness thinking,” which I understand to be the capacity to think with the grasstree, the heron, or the shore’s rock formations, rather than thinking about them from the outside.
When I attempted to do this with the rocks, I intuited the injunction to be more receptive, to allow myself to be worked upon by the elements. Now with the grasstree, as I dwell in the paradox of her alien-ness and human qualities, it seems that I’m being called upon to be active as well as receptive, even though every human action so far seems to have been detrimental to the Xanthorrhea.
“Withness thinking” leads to “withness action”—the capability to be actively receptive and receptively active. I have experienced how heightened sensitivity can bring greater awareness of suffering and reluctance to act, but these qualities must be tempered. The toughness and alien-ness of the grasstree did not allow me to turn sensitization into sentimentality or anthropomorphism. The Goetheans, I take it, are telling me that it is all right to feel uncertain, not up to the job, pulled in different directions. These feelings indeed should be embraced as part of the way forward (along with the obvious step of educating oneself as much as possible scientifically, technically, and practically).
Ultimately the mystery may not be so much about what’s happening to the grasstrees or even the complexity of my response to them. The relationship itself is the enigma. I sense that there is some kind of liminal space between the grasstree and me in which a different kind of knowing is possible in the same way Vicki knew that the heron had summoned us here to this island for a reason. Similarly, when I sat beside the “sod hut,” I knew we should bid to buy Blackstone.
This knowing goes beyond the shortcomings of personality, beyond the prescriptions of land management, and seems to originate in the relationship with the more-than-human world pointed to by Goethean science. Difficult though this may seem as a way to move forward, I do know that on no account should I, or Pete Hay, or any of the ill-equipped land stewards out there, give up. There is too much at stake.
Notes
1. As described in “First Letter from Far South,” Pete Hay and a heron originally brought us to Blackstone Bay.
2. P. Hay (2002), “The Red Steer at Rat Bay,” Vandiemonian Essays (Hobart, Tasmania: Walleah Press), p. 145.
3. A. Zajonc (1998), “Light and Cognition,” in D. Seamon & A. Zajonc, eds., Goethe’s Way of Science (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), p. 312.
4. See “Second Letter from Far South.”
5. See Third Letter from Far South” for that history.
6. As described in “Second Letter from Far South.”
7. I. Brook (1998), “Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape,” Landscape Research 23 (1).
8. Brook, p. 56; also see my 1998 article, “Place, Goethe and Phenomenology: A Theoretic Journey,” Janus Head 8 (1) [special issue on Goethean science].
9. Wikipedia article on Phytophthora, accessed 15/2/09. I’m struck by the features shared by Phytophthora and Xanthorrhea: they are both ancient and more primitive transitional life forms (between fungi and algae for Phytophthora; between grass and trees for Xanthorrhea). They have coexisted in Australia for millions of years; perhaps the advent of human activity has tipped the balance in favor of Phytophthora.
10. Brook, p. 57.
11. T. Cochran (2003), Threatened Species, Bruny Island and You (Horbart, Tasmania: Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment), p. 144.
12. Hay, p. 140.
13. Zajonc, p. 313.
14. J. Shotter (1998), “Goethe and the Refiguring of Intellectual Inquiry,” Janus Head 8 (1), p. 15.