Biggest Mob Plant Blog: Introduction

Amongst the tropics and its trees I was educated on the world. Amongst jungle yards and humidity I learned to love the leafy green landscapes of my childhood.

I was born in the cold beauty of Tasmania. In the leafy Hobart surrounds. This didn’t last long and I have no memories attached to this period.

Before I was two I was whisked to the stunning desert landscape of Alice Springs and her arid surreal location where we lived on Plumbago crescent and the grass didn’t grow but the red dirt was thought prettier as a front lawn anyway. The Todd river flooding is a rare event and forms one of my first memories.

After a few years in Alice my parents decided to gravitate further north to the end of the country, to the last stop before Asia and a home to those who have run till they cannot run any further. To the isolated tropics of Darwin we went. This is where my childhood was played out for the most part and this is where my memories received their humid, hot and remote, monsoonal hue.

I remained in Darwin for the next 13 years or so spending much time camping in the near by national parks, exploring mangrove forests and dodging spiky pandanis fronds as we traipsed bare footed to the next water hole beyond the spear grass that rested secretly and sinisterly amongst its dependent melaleuca trees.

We changed home place once for a brief stint on the remote desert island atoll of Cocos Keeling when I was eight to live utopian childhood liberation in paradise for eighteen months. I have been constantly looking unsuccessfully for that lost freedom since then and still get pangs at the site of coconut trees.

We returned to Darwin after this where I lived through many a cyclone season until I made the irresponsible decision to terminate my schooling to make way for travel.

The last personally significant environments I lived in before my eighteenth birthday included the semi arid savannah of the Motopo foothills in Zimbabwe and my actual birthday was spent on the edge of a valley in the lush, green, mean, spiky mist belt in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains, Kwa-Zulu Natal province South Africa.

These landscapes are the things that crash and seep into my minds eye on remembering my childhood. Each landscape supports vastly different flora. With its aesthetics and eerie spiritualism its properties, histories, secret intricacies and treacheries the plant world has evoked emotion in me for as long as I have known.

This is the subject of my blog. I would like to pay tribute to the plants that helped shape, sway and shade my childhood and me. The ones that I found awe inspiring and interesting, the ones that evoke memory within me whenever I smell touch taste or see them.

Hugh Kelly