Plant Conversations

About me

My name is Craig (he/him). I am an artist who loves plants. I’ve also worked extensively with people in a range of different learning contexts, and have 20 years experience in teaching and workshop facilitation with adults.

In my classes and workshops, my focus is on creating inclusive and enjoyable learning environments where connection, creativity and experimentation can happen.

In my personal creative practice, I garden, draw, take photos and jot down thoughts and ideas.

I have completed studies in art (RMIT and VCA) as well as linguistics (Monash), and have an Advanced Certificate in Relational Gestalt Counselling (Gestalt Therapy Australia).

I work and volunteer at VINC (Victorian Indigenous Nurseries Cooperative) and am passionate about Indigenous plants and local ecologies.

Learn more about my Current Activities

About Indigenous plants

Indigenous plants are also known as ‘local native’ plants. Indigenous plants are from ‘here’.

They are strongly connected to place and to the conditions of their environment. Their forms vary along with changes in the landscape.

Indigenous plants in Narrm

The current edition of ‘Flora of Melbourne’ describes 1,367 plant ‘species and forms’ found across Narrm – the Woi-wurrung name adopted for this city – on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country and Boonwurrung / Bunurong Country.

Narrm sits at the easternmost edge of the Victorian Volcanic Plain (VVP), that streches westwards, almost to the border of South Australia, across many Aboriginal Countries. The ecosystems of the VVP are unique and are now extremely vulnerable, with only 1% remaining of what once existed prior to colonisation and the introduction of sheep farming.

Prior to land theft and dispossession, great numbers of Aboriginal people called the VVP their home. Particular plants, such as murnong (Microseris species) and Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra), were important food plants and were widespread and abundant, thriving with Aboriginal knowledge and care, across many generations of living together – humans and plants – over 65,000+ years.

Today, many First Nations and non-Indigenous people are working towards protecting what remains of the VVP and revitalising Aboriginal land practices to ‘Care for Country’. Traditional food plants are being grown as food, and Victoria now has a Traditional Owner Native Foods and Botanicals Strategy to support a Traditional Owner-led native foods and botanicals industry.

Some of the Indigenous plants commonly found here in Narrm are plants from across the VVP, while others grow on the other geological substrates of the area.

Indigenous plants commonly on our streets and in our parks are Correa glabra (Rock Correa), Dianella revoluta (Black-anther flax lily) and Goodenia ovata (Hop Goodenia). These, among others, including Poa labillardierei aka ‘Poa lab’ (Tussock grass) and Lomandra longifolia (Mat Rush / Basket Grass), form the base of most urban plantings.

Indigenous plants in urban environments play significant roles in attracting a whole range of Indigenous pollinators, including many species of native bee as well as pollinating wasps, flies, beetles, ants, birds and flying foxes that still dance the symbiotic dance of multi-species interwoven life – even though a city has been built on top of them.

Remnant vegetation

Most Indigenous plants you see around you in urban Narrm have been cultivated and planted since around about the 1970s onwards. However, it’s still possible to encounter ‘remnant vegetation’ in reserves or State and National Parks or in some spots around the city.

The relatively undisturbed places where remnant vegetation grows are a glimpse of the vastly richer worlds that existed prior to the onset of colonisation. In these places, plant communities have survived the rapid and brutal changes of the last two-and-a-bit centuries and are intact.

Remnant plant communities are often very beautiful and are usually also very diverse and complex. The genetic diversity of remnant vegetation now plays a key role in the revitalisation of local Indigenous habitat in places where it has been lost.

Why Indigenous plants now?

We live in times of mass extinction and rapid biodiversity loss, right up alongside times of human isolation, increasing human consumption, ossified systemic inequity, chronic short-term thinking and endless screen-based ‘entertainment’.

At the same time, when cared for, plants respond in beautiful and unexpected ways.

And caring for plants can make us care for each other more, and can make us attentive to conditions and to change.