Last night I dreamed I was standing in a tall spinney of ginkgo trees that I had never noticed before. It was on a golden hillside overlooking an aquamarine sea and the trees were flowering, but with the shocking pink blooms of kapok trees, not the modest catkins they would usually be expected to produce. In my dream I was just discovering this grove that my father had apparently planted. It was a dream that carried me right through to 8.30 this morning, two hours later than I would ordinarily be sloughing off the sheets. There was a lot going on but I’ll spare you the rest of it.
I suspect the dream was triggered by my spending yesterday evening rummaging on my iMac looking for early drafts of my novel in the hope of salvaging a few paragraphs here and there, and then finding myself surprisingly engrossed in one of them, so that I was glued to the screen and reading for several hours. I think it may be time to invest in a printer. I think it might be easier (and more satisfying) to physically cut and paste sections and write over the top of them with a fountain pen than find myself lost between flickering files.
Dreaming of ginkgos reminded me that I had promised to write about them for you. So here I am, except that while I was writing the above paragraph a horrible hairy fly has committed suicide in my tea which was less than half drunk and now has to be discarded along with the precious teaspoon of wandoo honey that I had dissolved in it. Bother. If you have ever tasted Wandoo honey you will understand the sense of loss. It is honey made by bees who have devoted themselves to gathering goodness from Eucalyptus wandoo, a species endemic to Western Australia, that in my experience prints in an exquisite chocolate mousse shade (which may be a result of the water I was using at the dye site). I tried to grow several seedlings here but local kangaroos voraciously undermined my efforts.
It is a species that while not officially described as being endangered has certainly been in decline since European invasion and settlement. This remarkable tree has great significance to the Noongar people and is practically a living pharmacy.
Wandoo flowers could be soaked in water to make a sweet drink, and the juicy outer layers of the roots were frequently scraped off and eaten. This doesn’t surprise me, the flavour of the honey is akin to butterscotch, with a warmth and richness and depth that bring absolute magic to a cup of tea. When I taste it undiluted, I automatically close my eyes and pretend I have a piece of darkest amber melting slowly on my tongue. I buy wandoo honey when I can get it, which is infrequently, given the hammering this species received from logging once the Europeans got here. Efforts to regenerate by replanting have not met with much success and existing trees are showing signs of distress (look at their crowns if you find them in the wild and you’ll see what I mean).
“By the end of the twentieth century, most of the wandoo woodlands had been cleared for farming or placed in forest reserves, where the timber was harvested with varying degres of intensity… the remnant wandoo woodlands were generally those areas unsuited to agriculture such as those with gullies, rock outcrops or the presence of York Rd poison or other poisonous plants in the understorey.
What remains is therefore quite unrepresentative of the original vast expanse of wandoo woodlands.”
Andrea Gaynor, Wandoo in health and decline: a history
Curiously it is the only species of eucalypt whose traditional, common and “botanical” names are one and the same. I was thinking that the same might apply to ginkgo, but then recalled that I had first been introduced to it as ‘Maidenhair Tree’, given the leaves have a similar shape to maidenhair fern…neither of which look at all like maiden’s hair unless you consider that the shape of the leaf bears some similarity to the shape of Tasmania. If you grew up in Australia you’ll have heard countless stupid jokes about the shape of that island state. I suspect the ‘maidenhair’ refers more to the approximate shape that pubic hair forms than (as some references would have it) the “fluffy roots” of Adiantum aethiopicum (the fern).
The leaves of the tree and the leaves of the fern have a similar shape, but neither of them are fluffy or hairy. They have a resilient quality to them, something which makes them keep their colour nicely when pressed between the pages of a notebook, but is less satisfying when trying to coax prints into cloth. The first time I included them in a bundle, I found that they soaked up the colour of the Eucalyptus cinerea leaves that were also present. On my second attempt, deliberately placing them as a resist, I unrolled lovely red-ochre coloured cloth and found beautiful ginkgo-shaped ghostshadows. I pinned the sunset red leaves from that bundle to my studio wall in a kind of tideline. There will be a print photo of them lurking somewhere, but I have no digital image as that was around 1999.