F is for Fairy

Fairies at the bottom of the garden

In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s greatest detective, was hoodwinked by two Yorkshire girls.

The girls, cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright (no relation to your humble correspondent), had taken a series of photos that seemed to clearly show them with the fairies they played with in Elsie’s large and enchanting garden in Cottingley.

Frances Griffith in the garden with fairy visitors. Image: Science & Society Picture Library

Elsie Wright and fairy friend. Image: Science & Society Picture Library.

Although Elsie’s Dad laughed off the photos, her Mum, like many at the time, was quite taken with ideas of the supernatural.

After attending a lecture on spiritualism she showed the photos to the speaker, to get his opinion on their veracity.

He took them to the leader of the Theosophical movement, who in turn asked a leading photographer to examine them.

Having been declared “genuine, unfaked photographs” they rocketed through the British spiritualist crowd, quickly gaining the attention of Conan Doyle, who not only encouraged the girls to take more photos of the fairies but also wrote an article in their defence for The Strand magazine.

To those of us living in an era of photoshop and instagram filters the pictures of the Cottingley Fairies are blatantly staged.

(Curiously, the word blatant, is said to have been coined by Edmund Spenser in his epic poem The Fairie Queene to describe a thousand-tongued monster representing slander. The meaning of the word changed over time, until 1889 when it settled in as "noisy in an offensive and vulgar way.”)

Nonetheless, the girls stuck to their story until 1981, when Elsie finally admitted the fairies were paper cutouts, copied from images in a book and secured in place with hat pins.

“There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?”

— Richard Dawkins

Fairy Rings

So if no one’s managed to capture a fairy – yet – what about the evidence of their parties and gatherings?

Fairy Ring of Clitocybe nebularis (Clouded Agaric) Image: Josminda, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

Fairy rings are circular enclosures of mushrooms that appear in the landscape after fairies have visited for a knees-up. You never see them being constructed: it all happens in the dead of night after the human realm has stopped paying attention.

Image: Richard Croft, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

Image: Kelisi, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

Some (boring) humans are not satisfied with this explanation. They believe that fairy rings are the result of fungi that live in the soil, causing the organic matter to break down, resulting in rings of dark green grass, occasionally brown or dead grass, and, in wet conditions, mushrooms following the same circular pattern.

Image: Zorba the Greek, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

The fairy ring starts with a single spore and at a single point in the soil. It grows outward at a uniform rate, creating the circular pattern. About 50 species of fungi form lawn fairy rings.

In Your Garden

Some websites provide information on how to get rid of fairy rings. This is not an approach endorsed by Landscapology – would you mess with a supernatural creature known for its mischievious malice when dealing with interfering humans?

Image: Cropcircles, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

Keep in good by planting Grevillea 'Fairy Floss', a small rockery grevillea with pale mauve flowers, or attract the Superb Fairy Wren – voted Australia’s most popular bird in 2013 - with Acacia fimbriata, Melaleuca linariifolia and Pandorea pandorana.

Grevillea 'Fairy Floss'. Image: Tatters, under CC Licence via Flickr.

A pair of Superb Fairy Wrens. Why is the lady always the dull one...don't get me started... Image: benjamint444, under CC Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

Above all, keep your eyes and ears open…who knows how many other creatures are enjoying your garden when you’re not around…

D is for Dune

It came as no surprise to me that Peter Greste chose an image taken at the beach to show the world he was free after 400 days in an Egyptian jail.

Australians claim it’s the outback that makes us, but it is to the coast we cling, to the beach we flock, drawn as far out and away from the red heart of the continent as it’s possible to be.

This country has nearly 36, 000 kilometres of coastline, and the beach threads a long line through our literature and art.

Byron Bay

With apologies to Max Dupain...

In Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Long Road to the Deep North, it is to a South Australian beach that hero Dorrigo returns, as a young man before the war, and then in a lifetime of memories.

On the gallery wall Sydney’s beaches shine, from the voluptuous ladies reclining across Brett Whiteley’s sparkling shores, to the young bloke immortalised in Max Dupain’s Sunbaker.

Of course it’s a similar story in any island nation: the beach is a place of transition - no longer solid land, not quite water – and there’s something equally fragile and terrifying about such places that speaks to us.

The great gardens of history, though, tend not to be found on the coast. Garden-makers could channel water from snow-capped mountains to the desert, bend rock and stone to their will, and summon forth plants from all corners of the globe.

Just not at the beach.  I wonder why?

The beauty of dunes

From top: Barchan, Parabolic and Transverse dunes.

My love for the coastal garden began when I was given the opportunity to work on a project that had been designed as a contemporary interpretation of Queensland’s perched lake sand islands.

The first thing I became captivated with was dunes.

These beautiful, sensuous three-dimensional forms are a precise manifestation of the interaction between wind and sand.

Where the wind has pushed its way forward the sand eases up, long and flat. Behind, where the wind has passed over, the sand falls steeply away, at the precise angle it can support itself without collapsing.

Fraser Island’s dunes are parabolic: vast sweeping fingernails of sand created by ancient erosion of the Great Dividing Range.

Like all coastal dune systems they are exposed not only to wind, but to sun and salt. This makes the dunal landscape a very particular one for plant growth.

Dunal systems

Spinifex sericeous

Taking a slice through a coastal dune system reveals the rhythm and timing of its creation, and also the diversity of locations for which specific plants have adapted.

Closest to the ocean are the beach berms, the sandy dunes with no vegetation.

Behind are the incipient dunes, home of the pioneers: low, spreading grasses and creeping plants like spinifex (Spinifex sericeous) that bind and stabilise the sand with its deep and expansive roots, and trap windblown sand, allowing the dunal system to grow.

Next rise the foredunes, or frontal dunes.

This is where bigger groundcovers, small shrubs and short-lived trees start to make an appearance. The plants of the foredune are fast-growing, prolific re-seeders, and can survive periodic burial under windblown sand.

The frontal dunes sweep down to a swale and then rises up again to the hind dunes. With the protection of the dunes, long-lived trees can establish, and beneath them a more permanent array of understorey plants.  

Plants of the dunes

Ipomea pes-caprae

Healthy coastal dune systems are critical buffers between ocean storms and our settlements, and vegetation is essential to maintaining healthy dune systems.

Luckily for garden-makers, coastal dune vegetation is extremely beautiful.

 In the incipient dune zone we’ve already talked about spinifex, with its beautiful, silver-green foliage, but for more colour there’s the bright green foliage and violet purple flowers of the Beach Morning Glory (Ipomea pes-caprae).

Banksia integrifolia

The frontal dunes give us the Coastal Wattle (Acacia sophorae), the noble Coastal Banksia (Banksia integrifolia), elegant She-Oak (Casuarina equisetifolia), architectural Screw Pine (Pandanus pedunculatus) and excellently named Pigface (Carpobrotus glaucescens), amongst many others.

And moving back into the hind dunes we find the Wallum Banksia (Banksia aemula), Cotton Tree (Hibiscus tileaceus), Coastal Rosemary (Westringia fruticosa), Macaranga (Macaranga tanarius) and more.

If selecting coastal plants for your garden don’t just consider what they look like.

When Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes (sigh…soundtrack to my Grade 12 school camp) moved to Australia he built a house by the beach in Tasmania. A stand of existing she-oaks stood between the house and the beach, blocking views of the water but giving the musician a greater gift: the constantly changing sound of the wind moving through the trees.

Dunal plants put up with a lot, meaning there will often be a species that can handle your situation, be it fast-draining ground, hot sun, or strong winds.

They can be combined to look naturalistic, a bit shambolic and cottage-y, or sculptural and contemporary.

I bloody love them don’t you?

Delight: mystery beach structure

This week's Delight takes us to the sea side. We are off to Yamba, a town with a truly spectacular coastal setting in northern New South Wales.

In November last year, this intriguing structure was seen at the southern end of Pippi Beach.

Is it a shelter? A play structure? A den of iniquity for unsavoury practices? 

Does it really matter? I think not. Isn't it lovely though...

Delight: the magpie nest

Sharp-eyed observers may have noticed the jumble of wire and sticks keeping me company on my Twitter feed.

The jumble is, in fact, the crown jewel in my small but treasured collection of birds' nests.

(Before you start panicking, no innocent avian families were evicted to fuel my curiosity. All the nests I've collected have been found long-abandoned, usually dislodged from trees during storms.)

The magpie nest is no exception.  It came to ground in a park close to Landscapology HQ during a skull-rattling thunderstorm at the end of last year, along with several trees, many branches, and a potentially lethal confetti of Kauri Pine cones.

The Australian Magpie (Cracticus tibicen) is a handsome birdy, dressed and ready for the ball in glossy black and white plumage.

Image credit: John O'Neill, Wikimedia Commons, released under GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Australian_Magpie_2%2C_jjron%2C_5.07.10.jpg

Magpies build up their flat, shallow nests in layers - generally tough on the outside and softer in the centre - using sticks, twigs, grass and hair.

In urban environments, human-made materials are often found, such as the wire in this nest. 

Even when this is the case, the heavier gauges are still found on the outside, in this case forming a strong triangular armature for the rest of the nest, with the finer wires closer to the top and centre.

The strength of the magpie's beak is evident when you realise just how substantial some of these wires are: this is no unfurled paperclip we're talking about, the base wires here are twice the thickness of a dry cleaner's wire hanger.  Those same beaks have then also placed the flimsiest fibres just so.

This nest holds a special place in my heart for the way it seamlessly weaves together the natural and the artificial - the landscape and the architecture, if you will - to create something of create strength, adaptability and beauty.

Delight: the girl in pink

This week we’re trialling a new addition to the Landscapology blog.

Delight will be an occasional post featuring something curious and delightful that doesn’t really fit within our regular Design 101 sessions or stories about great parks, gardens and landscapes.

Today is the wonderful girl in pink, who emerged out of a compound of small stone buildings beside the Karakorum Highway, high in the mountains of western China, and quietly walked over to watch our bus roll past, with its cargo of Silk Road tourists.

When it’s been raining for a long time, and the sky is grey, I often think of how strikingly she commanded attention in that clear, cold, breathtaking and harsh landscape.