Welcome to my Growing Passion Website.

This is the companion site to my
Growing Passion Blog.

I hope you'll visit both. They're meant to be complimentary, with some tasters and chat on
the blog, and more detail and photos here. They're devoted to my delight in horticulture,
Australian indigenous plants, botany, native animals,
ecology and conservation.


Lambertia formosa

We live on Sydney's upper upper North Shore, on the city's very outskirts. Our new back garden adjoins Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

I've now finished studying Horticulture at TAFE. Much as I loved it, undertaking the Plant Science Internship Program at the National Herbarium of New South Wales in the first months of this year completely spoilt me. I need more science! 

I'm now enrolled at Macquarie University in a B.Sc in Conservation and Biodiversity, and shortly take up a position at the National Herbarium, working on its bryophyte collection and Australia's Virtual Herbarium, a project that provides online access to the country's plant specimen data, using the resources of all the nation's herbaria.

My other career is writing. For details of productions, broadcasts, recordings and publications, see my other website, Heliotrope. A CD of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's recording of my last work, "Night and Dreams: the Death of Sigmund Freud" (with composer Andrew Ford) is being released this year. Details closer to the date.

My first career was as a lawyer, but that's so dull I won't inflict it on you--or me. As my old mate Rex says, a career path of Law, Letters and Leaf Litter. Hey, it works for me.

Cheers,

Margaret

Pogona barbata, Eastern Bearded Dragon
at Mount Annan Botanic Gardens

"If you would be happy your whole life long,
Become a gardener."
--Old Chinese Proverb


Biophilia is a word I love, but here's another: viriditas. It's first recorded use is apparently by the composer and writer Hildegard von Bingen in C11th CE, but more recently by the author Kim Stanley Robinson. From Green Mars, the second in his trilogy about the colonisation and terraforming of Mars:

Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see.

In my terms, mathematics and the fundamental laws of physics, ineluctably leading, whenever possible, to life.

Life isn't rare. It's virtually inevitable given the appropriate chemical conditions. I don't need the "holy" bit. But I do believe that if there is anything in my life that might be described as spiritual, it's my sense of humility and awe in the face of the complexity of nature and the poetry of self-replication in all its forms.

But enough of the philosophising. I like getting dirt under my fingernails!