Challenging perceptions

Exploring the darker sides of herbariums

Danielle Clode

The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium

by Prudence Gibson NewSouth

$39.99 pb, 254 pp

Herbariums are strange places. Part archive, part library, part museum collection, they hover in a space of plant, paper, print, and preservative. Time and space are pressed between pages representing far more than their often unprepossessing appearance suggests – complex interwoven stories of evolution, ecology, and scientific history. The herbarium is a compactus of shared and public scientific knowledge created by the collected efforts of men and women from diverse cultures, backgrounds and countries often unacknowledged and unknown, their identities subsumed to the multigenerational task of revealing the taxonomic architecture of plants, fungi, and algae.

Not everyone shares this perspective. Some might find a funny-smelling building filled with shrivelled plants slightly odd or intimidating. Not everyone shares the botanist’s fascination with the floral reproductive proclivities of plants or the intricacies of their leaf margins.

The Plant Thieves leans into the aesthetics of this world with a beautiful cover – inked annotations across the sepia tones of a pressed Mount Buffalo wattle. The image nostalgically references the long history of botanical artistry. The title, however, carries different connotations. It reminds me of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (2000), which gave rise to Charlie Kaufman’s tangentially metafictive movie Adaptation (2002). Perhaps this book is not what it seems after all.

Prudence Gibson, an art academic interested in our relationship with plants, has previously published on plants and death in art. Despite its origins in a university research project, this latest book is far from being dry or academic. To the contrary, the tone is light and chattily conversational, skipping swiftly from one entertaining topic to another with whimsical offbeat chapter headings like ‘Barbara is Amazing’ and ‘Denise and the Black Bean’. This is not so much a story about the National Herbarium of New South Wales as thoughts triggered by the herbarium.

The passion, curiosity, and creativity of science appear in politely encouraging conversations with scientists, but Gibson rarely dwells on the evolution, taxonomy, and ecology that interest her informants. Much of the book diverts into plant psychotropics, which appeals to the author far more than to the herbarium staff, generating some mutual bewilderment. With a predisposition for spells, shamans, and spirit plants, Gibson brings a gothic talent for seeking out the dark side of every story: exploitative, unhealthy, or illegal. She is ‘desperate to find out more, even the dark-hearted side of plants’.

The abundance of stories arising from the herbarium would rapidly become overwhelming without some organising taxonomy or editorial pruning. But some absences are surprising. We might have expected more on aesthetics: the delicate stitching that composes older specimens on the page or the accompanying illustrations, photography, and botanical art. Margaret Flockton sketches remain elusive, scattered, as past herbarium director Hannah McPherson puts it, ‘like morse code. Like tagging. The signature of collectors and illustrators through history, across objects.’ Fragile glass plant models immortalising ephemeral plants remain in the shadows at the back of the collection shelves, fading from memory.

There is no such thing as a new species, botanist Marco Duretto reminds us, just things that are new to science. The beneficial development of a respectful collaboration between Indigenous knowledge and Western science is highlighted in this book. Gibson relates how the spread of black bean trees growing from Cape York to northern New South Wales led scientists to wonder how their heavy and very toxic seeds had dispersed. Indigenous knowledge solved a mystery that genetic research had been unable to confirm and identified new populations along ancient songlines and trading routes for this valuable (if labour intensive) food source.

The origins of plant sciences and collecting are uncomfortably embedded within a broader history of acclimatisation, transportation, and colonisation. This ‘ongoing colonial legacy’ leaves the author, and others, struggling with cognitive dissonance. John Waight, a Mangarayi descendant, describes how this ‘botanical commodification through hundreds of years of empire building’ leaves him feeling that he has ‘aided and abetted in some kind of criminal activity when I look at my garden’. But as the black bean story illustrates, humans have shaped and altered plant communities across the world wherever they have lived, spread, and travelled, whether from migrants bringing the food crops of their homeland to new countries or the government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller infamously spreading blackberries in the Victorian forests and blue gums around the world. As Gibson notes, Australian plants too, in the past few hundred years, have become ‘diasporic aliens’.

The escalating environmental catastrophe that has accompanied the rapid expansion of an increasingly industrialised and mobile human population places us in an ‘undescribed’ or unprecedented space. In a recent story of plant adaptation and dispersal, Gibson relates how the African beach daisy, an invasive weed, has adapted so rapidly to Australian conditions that, after one hundred years, it is now taxonomically a separate species from its African progenitors. The ‘African’ beach daisies that grow here are Australian.

Gibson’s stories reveal the many ways the collections in the now digitally global herbaria challenge our perceptions of who we are and where we belong. We are all inherent plant collectors, in our gardens, our farms, and our supermarkets. Whether or not this is theft or simply an inevitable reflection of the importance of plants to our everyday survival is a question that Prudence Gibson leaves us to ponder. g