From Floral Aesthetics to Flor-aesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia


 

 

 

 

This is the post-peer reviewed version of the following article: 

 

Ryan, J. (2013). Botanical memory: Exploring emotional recollections of native flora 

in the Southwest of Western Australia. Emotion, Space And Society, 8, 27-38. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2012.09.001 

 

© 2013. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 

license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Downloaded from e-publications@UNE the institutional research repository of the 

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Red gum everywhere! Fringed leaves dappling, the glowing new sun 

coming through, the large, feathery, honey-sweet blossoms 

flowering in clumps, the hard, rough-marked, red-bronze trunks 

rising like pillars of burnt copper, or lying sadly felled, giving up 

the ghost. Everywhere scattered the red gum, making leaves and 

herbage underneath seem bestrewed with blood. 

-The Boy in the Bush, D.H. Lawrence and Mollie Skinner 

(1924/2002, 92-93) 

 

1. Remembering Plants 

In the biogeographically diverse terrain of Southwestern Australia, this article 

theorizes botanical memory through the exploration of environmental memory, 

multisensoriality, and human emotion. Infused with emotional responses to  

the conservation and extinction of plant species, botanical memory traces 

broader memories of nature and environmental change. Encompassing an area 

from Shark Bay in the upper northwest corner to Israelite Bay east of 

Esperance in the southeast corner, “the Southwest,” as the region will be 

referred to hereafter, is the only internationally recognized Australian 

biodiversity hotspot. The Southwest is a “botanical province” and one of the 

most floristically varied places on the globe with close to forty percent of its 

species occurring naturally nowhere else (Hopper 1998, 2004; Paczkowska and 

Chapman 2000; Corrick and Fuhrer 2002; Conservation International 2007; 



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Breeden and Breeden 2010) (Fig. 1). Since the establishment of the Swan River 

Colony in the 1800s, the Southwest has been a popular wildflower tourism 

destination during the spring months of September and October in particular 

when iconic species, such as kangaroo paws, wreath flowers, and everlastings, 

blossom (Ryan 2011; Summers 2011). Despite relatively recent recognition of 

the global importance of its biodiversity, the Southwest has been dramatically 

altered through modern agricultural expansion, urban development, and 

anthropogenic plant diseases (Beresford et al. 2001).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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Fig. 1. Places of Botanical Diversity in the Southwest of Western Australia. The Southwest 

comprises a diversity of places of botanical significance including Lesueur, Fitzgerald River and 

Stirling Range national parks as well as metropolitan Perth locales such as Anstey-Keane 

Damplands. (Image adapted from Figure 1, Western Australian Biogeographic Regions and 

Botanical Provinces, after Thackway and Cresswell, 1995 in Paczkowska & Chapman, 2000, 

inside cover; Inset image from Conservation International 2007) 

 

Connecting individual remembrance to collective remembering about thriving 

or declining plant environments, botanical memory entails bodily and cultural 

memory. The fragrances, sounds, tastes, and tactile sensations of plants 

summon this form of environmental memory that may be both shared amongst 

individuals and invoked through physical interaction with flora. Characterized 

by these collective and bodily traces, botanical memory broadens the study of 

individual sense-based recollection of flora to the human communities living in 

proximity to native plants. Memories may be of individual plants or wildflowers 

(e.g. wreath flowers shown in Fig. 3); communities of plants (e.g. an everlasting 

field shown in Fig. 2); or a landscape, region, or broader botanical scale (e.g. 

the Wheatbelt or the Southwest region itself). This paper will refer to all three 

scales. Recollections of flora are infused with sensory overtones, and are 

created by bodies and emotions. Such memories are derived not solely from 

inner imagery but from the sensuousness of plants and places. For example, in 

a study of the nexus between olfaction and memory, Waskul, Vannini and 

Wilson (2009) observe the capacity of odors to catalyze memories through 



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nostalgic feelings. One respondent notes that wild roses remind her of 

childhood visits to her grandmother’s house in Alberta, Canada, while another 

interviewee relates the smell of lavender to the comfort of “family, home, and 

safety” experienced as a child (Waskul, Vannini, and Wilson 2009, 11). These 

statements suggest that botanical memory may be defined as remembrance of 

plants though which a web of sensory, cultural, environmental, and familial 

memories is enlivened.   

 

As propounded here, botanical memory derives a theoretical framework from 

related precedents in environmental memory (Chawla 1994); sensory memory 

(Seremetakis 1994); sensory ethnography (Stoller 1989, 1997; Howes 2003; 

Pink 2009); bodily memory (Connerton 1989; Casey 2000); community and 

collective memory (Boyer and Wertsch 2009; Hua 2009); and emotional 

geography (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005; Jones 2005). This genre of 

environmental memory involves sensory and emotional interactions with 

plants. Yet, whereas allusions to memories of plants appear in ethnobotanical 

literature, they are nearly unheard of in emotional geography, community 

memory research, or ecocultural studies where, for example, research into the 

plants-people nexus is governed by the present tense of the ethnographic 

encounter (for example, Hitchings 2003; Martin 2004; Hitchings and Jones 

2004; Hoffman and Gallaher 2007).  

 



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Despite the underemphasis, memories of plants strongly inform human 

emotional and collective cultural bonds with environments. For early travellers 

in Western Australia like May Vivienne (1901) or contemporary wildflower 

tourists to the Southwest, the memory of a place may be indistinguishable from 

the memory of its plants. Amateur botanist Ayleen Sands (2009) expresses the 

intertwining of memory and flora as she recalls her first encounter with native 

orchids early in her proprietorship of Stirling Range Retreat, near the Stirling 

Range National Park:   

 

So we came in February, and in April one of our first orchids comes out. 

It’s a little orchid which doesn’t have a basal leaf. Someone came to the 

office and said to me, ‘Oh, your orchids are out, did you know?’ and they 

took me down to show me and I was absolutely rapt. 

 

Sketched as emotion-rich memories, Ayleen’s rapture exemplifies the felt 

engagements between people and flora. Initially, her arrival in the mountainous 

and biodiverse Stirling Range area from urban and suburban Perth, four 

hundred kilometres away, entailed anxiety about displacement: “I have to 

confess that I was really unhappy about coming this far away from Perth 

initially.” Ayleen’s statements recall the colonial botanist Georgiana Molloy’s 

experience of living in the isolated settlement of Augusta, Western Australia, in 

the nineteenth century. For both women, wildflowers attain emblematic 



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significance as consolations for displacement, distance, and loss (Lines 1994). 

Like Molloy, through the flowering of the orchids timed to her arrival, Ayleen 

has developed an emotional bond and a sense of place, gestated in part by the 

local flora of her immediate surrounds. With relief, she describes herself now 

as “very comfortable with the bush. I just absolutely love it. I love the way 

everything is interrelated.”  

 

2. A Method of Researching Memories of Plants 

This conversation with Ayleen in the field emerges from an ethnographic 

approach to the study of memories of Southwest Australian plants (see Ryan 

2010a). Ethnography is a qualitative method used in cultural studies and the 

social sciences to research lived experiences and elucidate the meanings of 

cultural practices (for example, see Brewer 2000; Hammersley and Atkinson 

2007). In particular, I employed the technique of semi-structured interviewing 

to bring forth and understand memories of flora in combination with my 

participation in wildflower tourism and botanical conservation activities to 

meet and establish trust with potential interviewees. My conceptualization of 

botanical memory—as sensory, bodily, and emotional—will be developed in this 

article through the analysis of seven interviews conducted during the spring 

wildflower seasons of 2009 and 2010 in the Southwest Australian region. 

Memories of plants surface extensively in these seven interviews, and are 

representative of the varieties of botanical mnemonics encountered during my 



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research: from embodied and sensory to scientific and visual. As part of a 

broader project on wildflower tourism and aesthetic appreciation of Southwest 

flora, I interviewed twelve individuals, nine of whom I met on bus tours, 

wildflower walks on foot—leading to interviews based on walking in the field—

or by car, and wildflower shows or celebrations at community centres. I 

contacted three other  interviewees—whom I did not meet on tours—by phone 

or email to set up interviews with them because of their known expertises in 

Southwest flora (for example, Hopper 2009). The five interviewees not 

referenced in this paper are excluded because they did not discuss their 

botanical memories in detail but focused more on local conservation efforts or 

regional ecotourism realities (see Ryan 2011). Semi-structured interviewing of 

all individuals was based on the following questions: 

 How familiar are you with these wildflowers? Are they completely 

new to you? 

 Do you know the names for these plants? Do you use their 

scientific, common, colloquial or Aboriginal names? 

 Have you had opportunities to smell, taste, touch and listen to the 

plants today? What do you remember most about these sensory 

experiences? 

 Would you describe any of the plants or places as weird, grotesque, 

bizarre, strange, beautiful or picturesque?  



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 To what extent do the plants figure into your memories of 

Southwest Australia? Are there any old or new memories of flora  

you’d be willing to share? 

Interviews occurred, when possible, as “mobile interviews” conducted while 

walking with people amongst the wildflowers of interest or significance to them 

(Hitchings and Jones 2004, 8). Other interviews took place under less mobile 

conditions: in offices and cafes or over the phone. The semi-structured format 

deviated from the suite of questions above, and was normally tailored to the 

respondent’s expertise, interests, time, and the setting of the interview. I used a 

small, hand-held digital recorder to record the conversations, which were later 

transcribed. Each interviewee signed a letter—approved in 2009 by the Edith 

Cowan University Ethics Committee—granting me permission to discuss parts 

of the transcripts in academic publications and to name the people interviewed.    

 

Expecting varying levels of familiarity and involvement with the flora amongst 

participants, I sought out individuals from five broad, overlapping categories: 

scientific botanists, amateur botanists, eclectic botanists, Aboriginal botanists, 

and wildflower tourists. Scientific botanists have had formal university training 

and professional experience in plant conservation (Collins 2009; Hopper 2009). 

Amateur botanists are self-trained experts in field botany or plant propagation 

who have strong site-specific, local, or subregional understandings of plant life 

(Collins 2009; James 2009; Nannup 2010; Sands 2009; Williams 2009).  



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Whereas scientific botanists tend to be specialized and more technically concise 

about regional scientific issues and trends, amateur botanists tend to be locally 

focused generalists who are attached to and well-acquainted with a particular 

locale or, in the case of Kevin Collins (2009), a particular genus, the banksia. 

Eclectic botanists, who will not feature in this paper, draw variously from 

scientific, humanities-based, and experiential knowledges; they are often 

writers or artists with a keen interest in nature. Aboriginal botanists invoke 

indigenous worldviews and storytelling in which sensory experience of plants 

mingles with spiritual and ecological meanings (Nannup 2010). Due to the 

sensitivity of Aboriginal knowledges of plants, I interviewed only one member of 

the Southwest Aboriginal community, Noel Nannup, an elder and spokesperson 

for the Nyoongar people. Wildflower tourists are international, national, or local 

visitors who may have complex understandings of plants based on the 

flowering times of the desirable species they endeavour to see (Alcock 2009; 

Sands 2009). It is important to consider that these distinctions, though useful 

to some extent, blur in actual practice. For example, an amateur botanist, such 

as Lyn Alcock, may participate in wildflower tourism when visiting a new locale 

or a scientific botanist, such as Kevin Collins, may have strong local affinities 

and be a long-term resident.   

  

As indicated above, my conceptualization of botanical memory will draw 

primarily from interviews with amateur botanists and wildflower tourists. The 



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interviews suggest the dialectics between mourning and celebration, as well as 

the role of sensory memory of plants. Some conversations show significant 

emotional and embodied affinities, including mourning the loss of species and 

the homogenization of biodiverse habitats through suburban overdevelopment 

or invasive exotic plants. Whereas wildflower tourists tend to emphasize the 

beauty of flowers, local residents—who can be scientific, amateur, eclectic, and 

Aboriginal botanists—tend to convey a sense of despair over imperiled plant 

species and diminishing habitats. This is particularly the case for land owners 

and others who are materially attached to a specific property (e.g. James 2009). 

The emotion of grieving surfaces more for interviewees, such as David James 

(2009), Noel Nannup (2010), and Don Williams (2009), who have lived for an 

extended time at a locale, property, or multiple places in the Southwest region. 

These individuals exhibit a well-developed sense of place and have endured 

more long-term changes and floristic extinctions than seasonal tourists have. 

Indeed, interviewees do tend to construct and communicate memories 

differently depending on the longevity of their emotional bonds to the changing 

landscapes of which the plants they know are part. As a caveat, however, the 

firm distinction between mourning and celebration—and between residents and 

tourists—is fuzzy at best and emotional complexities are to be expected. For 

instance, long-term visitors—such as Jack and Lena discussed in the context 

of the Stirling Range National Park and tourism proprietor Ayleen Sands—may 

express emotions of loss over changes in the landscape tinged with feelings of 



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appreciation for the rare orchids that remain in remnant parcels of bush. Thus, 

for the sake of structuring the analysis of interviews, I deploy the categories of 

mourning, celebration, and embodiment to emphasize the themes stressed by 

the speakers, although these categories are not mutually exclusive. 

Interviewees who are not included were perhaps less inclined to broach 

emotional or experiential matters when the interview format appeared formal, 

where trust was not developed fully, or where the paradigm of scientific 

objectivity—the pre-eminent discourse of botany—held back the expression of 

emotional bonds to flora. Such concerns should be scrutinized in further 

studies of ethnography as a method for researching botanical memory. 

 

3. The Physiology of Human Memory 

What is the physiology of botanical memory in the context of contemporary 

research into memory studies, some of which emphasizes sensory or bodily 

memory? Memory has been well explored in literature, philosophy, and art, but  

some accounts of memory are acutely visualistic. Gaston Bachelard’s (1971, 

101) notion of “reverie,” for example, entails an involuntary plummet to “the 

beauty of the first images,” rendering the immediate world “completely 

colourless.” Similarly, for John Dewey (1967, 154), the mind produces memory 

as “knowledge of particular things or events once present, but no longer so.” 

Cognitively created, memory is an “active construction by the mind of certain 

data” (Dewey 1967, 157). However, rather than localized in the brain and 



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visually assembled, as Dewey and Bachelard’s assert, memory is the somatic 

extension of feeling into the world (Connerton 1989; Casey 2000). We recollect 

plants through corporeal sensations as smells, tastes, textures, sights or 

sounds, as well as the rhythm of walking in botanical sanctuaries (Hitchings 

and Jones 2004; Ryan 2010b). Thus, bodies are physiological and emotional, 

as well as natural and cultural, sites of memory expression.  

 

Research of the last twenty years in the field of memory studies argues 

similarly that memory is not purely a cognitive construct of psychology or 

history, but a multisensorial faculty of the body, environment, and culture 

(Connerton 1989; Chawla 1994; Seremetakis 1994; Stratford 1997; Casey 

2000; Jones 2005; Boyer and Wertsch 2009; Hua 2009; Waskul, Vannini, and 

Wilson 2009; Hamilakis 2010). The embodied aspects of memory are 

particularly important to the term “memory work,” introduced in the 1980s by 

the Frauenformen, a group of West German feminists interested in how various 

forms of femininity are imposed on female bodies (Stratford 1997, 207). 

Memory work links bodily experience to memory research as a method for 

examining “how we are socialised [sic] in and through our bodies — complex 

sites that are ‘natural’, ‘cultural’, and intimately connected to how we 

experience and construct our worlds” (Stratford 1997, 214). As an interrogation 

of knowledge production derived through privileged scientific and social 

discourses, memory work entails the exploration of embodied subjectivity. 



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Thought to “elicit ‘only’ the anecdotal and folkloric,” place memory in this 

context instead provides “richly heterogeneous stories” that attain their own 

validity and importance (Stratford 1997, 214).  

 

Botanical memory may also comprise bodily memories. Casey (2000, 147) 

defines bodily memory as “memory that is intrinsic to the body, to its own ways 

of remembering: how we remember in and by and through the body.” While 

bodily memory is based in the senses, memories of the body can often be visual  

because sight “subtends most acts of recollection” and “has the effect of 

blurring the distinction between body memory and memory of the body” (Casey 

2000, 147). In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton (1989, 72-73) 

distinguishes between “incorporating” and “inscribing” practices of memory. 

Incorporating practices involve transmissions between bodies—for example, 

smiles, handshakes, or words spoken in conversation—that occur when bodies 

are co-present. These practices produce “a mnemonics of the body” (Connerton 

1989, 74).  Thus, for example, the memorization of the correct posture for a 

ceremony and the subsequent transmission of a cultural practice involving that 

posture occur through words or gestures between people present to one 

another. In contrast, inscribing practices require memory storage technologies, 

such as books, photographs, and computers, that “do something that traps 

and holds information, long after the human organism has stopped informing” 

(Connerton 1989, 73). Yannis Hamilakis (2010, 191-192) problematizes 



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Connerton’s categories, arguing instead for incorporating practices of memory 

that necessitate material culture. She cites eating and drinking as examples of 

mnemonic behaviors involving habits and gestures transmissible between 

individuals as well as the inscriptive materials of memory (i.e. the table, 

utensils, food, etc.). Hamilakis (2010, 192) argues that it is “time to collapse his 

binarism, which will also mean the collapse of his implied distinction between 

habitual, ‘internal’ memory which supposedly leaves no traces, and ‘external’ 

material memory with its associated recording devices.”      

 

The dynamics between visual and bodily memory are further taken up by some 

cultural scholars. The anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (1994, 9) in The 

Senses Stilled argues that memory is not constrained to ocularcentric 

cognition, but is rather mediated by ongoing cultural and bodily 

(re)enactments:  

   

Memory cannot be confined to a purely mentalist or subjective sphere. It 

is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied 

acts and semantically dense objects. This material approach to memory 

places the senses in time and speaks to memory as both meta-sensory 

capacity and as a sense organ in-it-self.   

 



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A material practice of memory through “semantically dense objects” reflects the 

notion of the indivisibility of “objects, settings, and moods” as integral to the 

formation of environmental memory (Chawla 1994, 1). Seremetakis’ notion of 

“sensory memory” augments environmental memory by emphasizing its 

embodied nestings. Seremetakis (1994, 9) explains that the senses and 

memory are coterminous and “co-mingled.” The senses coalesce to produce 

botanical memory, which is not purely a recitation of aestheticized plant 

images, constituting what Connerton (1989, 73) refers to as an “inscribing 

practice” of memory. Along with pictorializations, the smells, tastes, tactile 

sensations, and sounds of plants impart corporeal qualities to the act of 

remembrance (for example, Lawrence and Skinner 1924, 92-93). Paul Stoller 

(1997, 85) also suggests that “the human body [and non-human bodies, I 

would add] is not principally a text; rather, it is consumed by a world filled with 

smells, textures, sights, sounds and tastes, all of which trigger cultural 

memories.” Sensory research into cultural practices, for Stoller (1989, 8), 

entails a post-Kantian critique of the alignment between vision and reason 

characteristic of much ethnographic writing. Research into human sensory 

experience in its fullness attends to “the sensual aspects of the field,” making 

us “more critically aware of our sensual biases and [forcing] us to write 

ethnographies that combine the strengths of science with the rewards of the 

humanities” (Stoller 1989, 9).    

 



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Memory furthermore engages collective abilities to interpret embodied events 

and experiences. Hence, memory is not only the experience of a body in a place 

but of bodies in places; the content of memory varies with collective cultural 

meanings and values. Whereas individual memory is accepted in psychology 

and physiology, collective memory has been introduced relatively recently into 

human geography, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology to describe 

memories held in common by a community or social group (Boyer and Wertsch 

2009; Hua 2009). Collective memory “requires a public re-interpretation of 

personal memories that are placed at the service of the collectivity” (Hua 2009, 

137). Boyer and Wertsch (2009) observe that collective memory’s primary 

shortcoming is its assumption of monolithic collectivity in the form of 

homogenized countries, communities or social groups. Collective memory 

raises the question of “whose voice, experiences, histories and personal 

memories are being forgotten” by the community, institution or nation (Hua 

2009, 137).  

 

Memory may be bodily and collective as well as emotional and topographic. 

Collective memory, in particular, offers interesting intersections with emotional 

geography, a field which attempts to understand the spatial aspects of memory 

and its associations with environments (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 2005). 

The emotional content of memory suggests that “memories always will have a 

spatial frame (even if it is unremembered or latent) and they will be always 



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emotionally coloured in hues ranging from pale to vivid” (Jones 2005, 210). 

Emotions construct how people make sense of the natural world through 

memory. Jones (2005, 207) argues that the call towards emotion in landscape 

research is 

 

part of the movement away from the claim that knowledge is, and should 

be, an abstract, disembodied, purely rational and objective construct. It 

recognises [sic] the role of emotions in the construction of the world, and 

in interpretations of the world [italics in original].  

 

Emotional geography responds to the objective imperatives of empirical 

research by expressing “something that is ineffable in such objectifying 

languages, namely a sense of emotional involvement with people and places, 

rather than emotional detachment from them” (Bondi, Davidson, and Smith 

2005, 2). Urry (2005) further argues that the emotions of place have been given 

visual form through modern ocular technologies. In the middle nineteenth 

century the language of the Claude glass, sketching, and photography spurred 

a “particular visual structure to the emotional experience of place” (Urry 2005, 

78). Indeed, when conceptualized as landscape, place and its associated 

emotional hues assume a visual structure. Stephen Daniels and Denis 

Cosgrove (1988, 1) define the term “landscape” as “a cultural image, a pictorial 

way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings.” An 



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iconographic orientation toward landscape values images of places and 

historically conceived such “pictures as encoded texts to be deciphered by 

those cognisant of the culture as a whole in which they were produced” 

(Daniels and Cosgrove 1998, 2).  

 

Yet, not solely a space or landscape demarcated by sight, place is a sensory 

and corporeal topography. Sensory scholarship of the last twenty years in the 

anthropology of the senses recognizes this complexity and responds to the 

historical hegemony of vision in structuring sense of place and human 

perception (Stoller 1989, 1997; Synnott 1991; Classen 1997; Howes 2003; 

Hamilakis 2010). This scholarship acknowledges the importance of the senses 

to human experience and stresses that cultural research should acknowledge 

the body as a sensorium in which sensory interplay molds cultural values and 

practices. Sensory experience, as such, is “the basis for bodily experience. We 

experience our bodies—and the world—through our senses [italics in original]” 

(Classen 1997, 402). In Sensual Relations, David Howes (2003, xi) argues that 

sensation is a cultural milieu and that, in preferencing vision, Western 

anthropologists of the twentieth century also tended to study each of the five 

senses in isolation “as though sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch each 

constituted a completely independent domain of experience.” Howes (2003, xi) 

suggests that dynamics between the senses create culturally important 

“combinations and hierarchies” of sensory experience and expression. In 



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contrast, ocularcentric research obscures “sensory meaning—the associations 

between touch and taste, or hearing and smell—and all the ways in which 

sensory relations express social relations” (Howes 2003, 17).        

 

4. Botanical Memory at the Intersection of Embodiment, Environment, 

Emotions, and Ethnography 

 

When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people 

are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and 

smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more substantial, more 

persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, 

remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and 

bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their 

essence, the vast structure of recollection.  

Marcel Proust (1913/2008, 30) 

 

Proust argues that smell and taste affect memory with particular poignancy 

and primeval endurance. As such, memory not only comprises a visual theatre, 

but a sensory interweaving of  tastes, smells, tactile sensations, sounds, and 

visible features. Jonah Lehrer (2007, 80) argues that “one of Proust’s deep 

insights was that our senses of smell and taste bear a unique burden of 

memory.” The potent connection between smell and memory, exemplified by 



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Proust, has a physiological basis and has often been labelled the “Proustian 

hypothesis of odor memory” (Engen 1982, 98). Receiving brain stimuli in the 

form of odors, the olfactory system of mammals regulates and integrates 

emotional responses, social behaviors and bodily memories (for example, Engen 

1982, 25-29, 97-112; Engen 1991; Herz and Cupchik 1995; Lledo, Gheusi, and 

Vincent 2005). In this passage from Swann’s Way, Proust articulates the 

phenomenon of odor recognition or “knowing that an odor being experienced is 

one that was experienced on a earlier occasion” and, importantly, he intimates 

the possibility of odor recall, debated amongst physiologists and defined as the 

bringing back of “odor sensations from memory storage without any external 

aids” (Engen 1982, 14-15).      

 

Extending Proust’s metavisual mnemonics and the strong association between 

smell and memory he describes in particular, botanical memory can be said to 

comprise sensory, bodily, and emotional modes of remembering. Botanical 

memory goes beyond the individual psyche and the imagistic proclivity of the 

aesthetic imagination. Anh Hua (2009, 137) characterizes memory as “a 

construction or reconstruction of what actually happened in the past,” but 

memory in practice is a composite of bodily experiences and sensations, mental 

images, cultural values, and environmental stimuli in addition to a chronology 

of occurrences. Indeed, memory is beyond individual capacities and faculties. It 

invokes collectively all mnemonic modes to produce “tangled memory” in which 



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collective desires and needs are expressed (Hua 2009, 139). Hence, memory is 

a nexus of environmental, social, and personal factors, rather than purely a 

mental function of recall.   

 

Chawla (1994, 1) defines environmental memory as the convergence of the 

natural world, poetic deliberation, and childhood memory, including:   

 

all the fittings of the physical world that surround us: the natural world 

of animal, vegetable, and mineral, and the built world of human artifice. 

Its scope covers three dimensions of perception: individual objects; 

settings such as home, city, and region; and global moods or feelings for 

the world. These three dimensions—objects, settings, and moods—may 

be isolated for study, but in lived experience they are inseparable. 

 

Emotional responses to a landscape constitute environmental memories of 

particular natural and cultural phenomena. Memory and emotions, or moods, 

are inseparable; environmental memory develops from a stratum of feelings 

held in the body. So, in addition to temporal, spatial, and material memories 

aligned to the processes of thinking, the content of memory is a sensory and 

emotive scape, or an “emotional geography.” Liz Bondi, Joyce Davidson, and 

Mick Smith (2005, 3) further characterize the central aim of emotional 

geography as endeavoring “to understand emotion – experientially and 



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conceptually – in terms of its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather 

than as entirely interiorized subjective mental states.” Transcending individual 

cognition and the construction of memory as the outcome of the rote processes 

of the brain, memory is influenced by society and space, culture and 

landscape, collective and personal proclivities. Reflecting Chawla’s claim for the 

indivisibility of “objects, settings, and moods” as unified lived experience, 

memory is an anatomical topography, orchestrated by cultural and natural 

cues. As the interview process reveals, memory may be said to live, particularly 

when spoken and when embodied.    

 

Research into the embodied, emotional, and environmental aspects of memory 

is well-suited to the narratives that come out of interviews. Memory narratives 

may emerge from the process of ethnography when interviewees are given 

space to reconstruct their sensory or emotional memories through a semi-

structured or open-ended format (Brewer 2000, 63-66; Hammersley and 

Atkinson 2007, 97-120). Indeed, the exploration of memory is amenable to 

inscriptive forms, including interview transcripts, that record memory (Jones 

2005), but the movement between the incorporating practice of the interview, 

especially one in the field with the interviewee, and the inscribing practice of 

the transcripts exemplifies Hamilakis’ (2010, 192) call to “collapse” Connerton’s 

binarism between the two. Working with interviews and transcripts prompts 

reflexivity between incorporating and inscriptive practices of memory. The 



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connection between memory and ethnography is emphasized by anthropologist 

Johannes Fabian (2007, 132) who observes that ethnographic investigation 

inherently probes human memory: “cultural knowledge, once articulated, is 

memory-mediated.” In other words, the process of speaking during an interview 

is naturally an invocation of remembering. Fabian (2007, 132) asserts that 

“memory makes articulation possible whilst also coming between the person 

and the statement.” Memory is often an unavoidable mediating formation in 

ethnobotanical interviewing in which usage or significance of plants is compiled 

from the recollections of the interviewee (for example, Martin 2004). During an 

ethnobotanical interview, plant specimens, images or other cues can be used to 

“jog interviewee memory” about actual plants in the field and to access 

information about the cultural uses of flora (Hoffman and Gallaher 2007, 203). 

 

An interface with memory through the interview process prompts questions of 

how memories are expressed and what values inform their communication. The 

accounts of botanical memory produced during an interview could entail a 

series of visual images, a recounting of bodily sensations, or a chronological 

recitation of events devoid of emotional context. But how does the interviewee 

feel about an experience of plants? Is there an emotional or sensory narrative 

behind the facts or the timeline of experiences? For the purpose of sensory 

plurality in the interview process, anthropologist Sarah Pink (2009, 2) points to 

the growing literature of multisensorial ethnography. The term “sensory 



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ethnography” is defined as “a process of doing ethnography that accounts for 

how this multisensoriality is integral…to the lives of people who participate in 

our research.” Reflecting Seremetakis’ (1994) conceptualization of memory, 

multisensorial ethnography assists researchers in understanding “the 

meanings and natures of the memories that research participants recount, 

enact, define or reflect on to researchers” (Pink 2009, 38). The research 

discussed thus far collectively suggests that memory is more than a series of 

images recalled cognitively. Due to the heterogeneous ways in which human 

memory can be approached, botanical memory considers these multiple 

aspects. Crossing into embodiment, environment, and emotions, botanical 

memory encompasses feelings and facts about plants, particularly with the use 

of ethnography to bring forth accounts of engagements.  

 

5. Botanical Memories Of Mourning: Biodiversity, Beauty, and Grieving 

As both collective remembrance and embodied subjectivity, memory intersects 

with emotions and place (Jones 2005). Mourning in particular may form an 

emotional node between people and places in response to what Porteous (1989) 

terms “topocide” or the annihilation of place, and what Giblett (1996) calls 

“aquaterracide,” or the killing of wetlands. Glenn Albrecht (2010, 227) defines 

solastalgia as “the pain or sickness caused by the ongoing loss of solace and 

the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and 

territory.” While emotional in quality and tone, the statements of loss conveyed 



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in interviews are not necessarily embodied evocations that point to a visceral 

absence in the felt worlds of the interviewees. Multisensoriality may be evident, 

but respondents also tend towards chronologies of despair or narratives of loss: 

a sequence of events set in temporal, rather than in embodied, space.  

 

Themes of loss are evident in an interview with David James (2009) of 

Forrestdale, Western Australia. Born in the early 1950s, a passionate activist 

and self-trained botanist, David has lived near Forrestdale Lake all his life. 

Forrestdale Lake is located on the Swan Coastal Plain, shared by Perth, and 

protects numerous indigenous animals and plants (Giblett 2006). Nearby 

Anstey-Keane Damplands is one of the most botanically significant places on 

the Swan Coastal Plain and more diverse than the popular Kings Park, 

adjacent to Perth Central Business District (Giblett and James 2009) (Fig. 1). It 

lies at the northern tip of the Pinjarra Plains, a system of flat damplands—

moist, shallow sinks—including the most suitable soil on the Swan Coastal 

Plain for pasture and devlopment (Beard 1979, 27).  A member of multiple local 

conservation organizations, David expresses exasperation over the seemingly 

insurmountable pressures on the bush exerted by development in his area. 

Forrestdale Lake Nature Reserve and Anstey-Keane Damplands constitute 

“emotional geographies” for him, linked to conservation agendas in the rapidly 

suburbanized southern areas of Perth. When asked about his local efforts, 

David responds that he spends “more time trying to protect wildflowers than 



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actually going out trying to enjoy them for what they are.” His involvement with 

different organizations dedicated to preserving native habitats is “a period of—

shall we say—activism [with] organisations that are actually trying to preserve 

the environment.” Activists, such as David, exemplify commitment to 

preserving a sense of place connected to the protection of floristic character.    

 

During David’s childhood in the 1950s, the bush seemed limitless and immune 

to modern suburban expansion: “we’d walk through bush to catch the school 

bus.”  His memories convey a perception of the flora as all-encompassing. The 

abundance of the bush intermingles with recollections of the encroachment of 

development and attendant emotion of powerlessness:    

 

In those days, the bush was everywhere. Nowadays, you realize how 

threatened it is, but in those days, it was common. We’d walk through 

bush to catch the school bus. We took it all for granted. Even in those 

days, people were destroying bushland but, because there was so much, 

as a kid, you just accepted it.  

  

David’s recollections reveal how botanical memory marks the gradual 

transformation of the land by the juggernaut of modern progress. His childhood 

reverie has been displaced by an anxiety over the manifold threats to the local 

landscape, compelling him to align with conservation initiatives:  



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What we took for granted is now threatened by housing, expansion of 

agriculture and roads. The piece of bush that we took for granted as kids 

is now being threatened and it’s a bitter shame because now I spend 

more time trying to protect wildflowers than actually going out trying to 

enjoy them for what they are.   

 

David’s interview exemplifies botanical memory as a reservoir of emotions 

about nature. Moreover, the memory narratives of amateur botanists and local 

conservationists like David can impart a sense for the scale of change. For 

example, the proliferation of exotic species on road verges is a distinct 

difference: “Years ago roads were narrow and roads with vegetation in good 

condition was quite normal.” His recollections evidence the progressive 

incursion of exotic plants on the west side of Forrestdale Lake and the gradual 

disappearance of certain orchid species. These distinctive intrusions to the 

composition of the landscape near his home have occurred during his lifetime:     

 

Nowadays this side of the lake’s pretty much weed infested but in those 

days the weeds weren’t quite so bad. We used to get orchids growing 

alongside the road here, spider orchids and different species growing 

amongst the weeds.  

 



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Slow-growing plants, such as banksias and the zamia palms, have been 

severely affected by development of bushland areas like Anstey-Keane 

Damplands and Forrestdale Lake (Giblett 2006). According to his direct  

observation, the climax character of the bush has been permanently altered, 

despite claims about the regeneration of the bushland by replanting:    

 

After thirty or forty years, it looks quite natural, but believe me, if you 

went back before that, there was a lot of big stuff in there. But that won’t 

be seen again in our lifetime because you need five-hundred years to 

grow big zamia palms or big banksias. 

 

Here, David evokes one of the distinguishing qualities of the Southwest flora: 

its ancientness and slow-growing tendencies (for example, Breeden and 

Breeden 2010). Certain plants require hundreds of years to reach a mature 

state, posing an amplified sense of loss comparable to the emotional debates 

surrounding the clearing of old-growth forests (for example, Humphries 1998). 

 

The emotions surrounding mourning are further elicited in an interview with 

Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup (2010). From 1978 to 1989, Noel served as a 

National Parks ranger and became the first Aboriginal head ranger in Australia. 

Noel recalls the destruction of native vegetation near Geraldton that he 

witnessed as a child. He expresses a “mixed” emotional state of despair over 



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the clearing of a million acres a year and affection for the botanical heritage of 

his birth region: 

 

When I say mixed, I mean loving it and watching it get smashed to 

smithereens as they cleared a million acres a year during the 60s and the 

70s. That’s heartbreaking. And the old man says, “This is Australia’s 

greatest asset, its natural vegetation and look what we’re doing to it” as 

we followed the bulldozers along around places like Dalwallinu, Wongan 

Hills, Ballidu, Talingeri, to ‘round that country there. We were sad to 

watch it. 

The loss of native plants is more than an ecological abstraction, but has 

cultural and spiritual ramifications. Noel expresses being torn between affinity 

for the plants that are his totems and dismay over the onslaught against native 

bushland, and hence against Aboriginal spirituality, as the two are 

consanguineous (for a discussion of Australian Aboriginal relationships to land, 

see Rose 1992; Graham 2008). He says:   

But I've always had that, you know, tried to balance that. How do you 

cope, when your dad’s telling you that these things are our totems and 

yet we’re watching them get smashed to bits.   

 



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As with David James, Noel’s memories track changes in the character of the 

Southwest landscape. Near Geraldton, plant biodiversity occurred along 

railway lines and road verges before the introduction of herbicides and 

developments in motorized technologies that impacted species such as the 

more prominent everlastings: 

 

I used to ride a pushbike from Geraldton out along the railway lines 

towards Mullewa. In those days they didn't use a lot of herbicides and 

sprays, and all the wildflowers were still there, including big pink 

everlastings. You’d watch them from little plants that come up, grow, and 

flower in the railway line. They started to bring out an X-class diesel 

which didn't have spark arresters on it. The railways had to burn. You’d 

watch the burning and you’d know that the seeds of the everlastings 

were all getting burnt. And because they burnt them all the time, some of 

them coped and some didn't.  

  

This statement points to the heterogeneous quality of botanical memory, 

comprising emotional impressions of plants linked to memories of childhood, 

communities, and changes to each.  

 



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For Noel, everlastings also prompt associations with family and place. 

Memories of pom-poms (Fig. 2) call to mind his father who taught Noel to snip 

the stems and preserve the flowers in hot wax:  

 

There used to be pom-poms, little round ones, just north of Three 

Springs, near Arrino, and also in Coalseam [Conservation Park] at 

Mingenew. There’s still a lot of them there but they’re little ones. I’d 

always cut them into bunches and put rubber bands on them. Dad 

always said, ‘if you want them to last a long time, snip them off and dip 

them in hot wax’. That seals it. Then your flowers stay colourful for a 

long time. 

Noel’s recollection of flowers near Mullewa affirms the mixed quality of the 

botanical memory of someone with a lifelong history in a place. Memories of 

plants can be concurrently of wonderment and loss over the destruction of a 

place. Whereas the colours of the pom-poms would last indefinitely, the wreath 

flower was notably evanescent and delicate. Noel associates the rarity of the 

wreath flower with the mining of Tallering Peak where he recalls that the flower 

grew:    

 

They were rare.  I remember if you picked those, by the time you stood 

up after you picked one, it started to wilt.  Talk about an amazing flower.  

Just pick it up and it’s gone, it’s finished.  But they were up around 



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Mullewa, north of Mullewa and Bullardoo Station. There's a big hill there. 

It was iron ore, sadly, and they loaded it onto trucks and railway lines 

and carted it away. Tallering Peak was a really important place.   

 

Memory itself is ecosystemic. Southwest plants instigate recollections of birds 

and the broader landscape, reflecting the concept of environmental memory 

posited by Chawla (1994, 1) as encompassing natural “objects,” landscape 

“settings” and emotional “moods.”   

 

The notion of ecosystemic connectivity as integral to botanical memory and 

mourning is referenced by conservationist and proprietor of Hi-Vallee Farm in 

Badgingarra, Western Australia, Don Williams (2009). He implies ecologically 

integrated mourning, in which the loss of one species has larger consequences 

for the biotic system of which it is part, including other animals, insects and 

plants:   

 

No one can put a value on individual species. Some people will say if we 

lose it, it doesn’t matter, more will evolve. It would appear that they won’t 

evolve as quickly as we can wipe them out. What a lot of people forget is 

that if you lose a plant species, you could lose an animal or insect 

species. And a lot of the orchids have evolved around one individual 

insect which pollinates them. 



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The exploration of memories of plants unavoidably confronts mourning the loss 

biodiverse habitats. All three interviewees have been life-long residents of the 

Southwest, and have thereby engendered emotional attachments to plants 

through regular exposure to the land and immersion in the depths of the 

botanical integrities of their respective places. All have been involved in 

conservation efforts. Although their responses shift between lament and 

celebration, their long-term perspectives on the Southwest express a startling  

sense of the bush in transformation by social and environmental pressures of 

suburban development, pesticides, technology, and mining.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 2. Pink Everlastings in the Eneabba Region of Western Australia. The common name 

“everlasting” denotes various species of the cosmopolitan Asteraceae family, such as the pom-

pom head (Cephalipterum drummondii). (Photo by the author) 



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Fig. 3. Wreath Flowers in the Northern Wheatbelt Region of Western Australia. With a 

genus name celebrating the French botanist Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour and a 

species name derived from Greek for “large flower,” wreath flowers (Leschenaultia macrantha) 

are prostrate-growing plants endemic to the northern Wheatbelt areas near Mullewa and 

Perenjori. (Photo by the author) 

 

6. Botanical Memories Of Celebration: Orchids, Love, and Rapture  

Whereas botanical memory may be characterized by mourning, it may also 

express the emotions of celebrating flowering beauty. Wildflower tourists such 

as Lyn Alcock (2009), originally from the Eastern States of Australia, 

emphasize the beauty and awe-inspiring qualities of native Western Australian 

plants. They do recognize the threats to botanical diversity, but more 

tangentially than David James, Noel Nannup, and Don Williams. Of all the 

Southwest plant species, Lyn is passionate about orchids and dryandras. When 



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I asked her about the attractiveness of orchids, she relays her first memory of 

encountering wild-growing orchids in the Murchison River area after having 

first grown them in her home:   

 

I think I had been given some Cymbidium bulbs at home and started 

growing orchids. Then, ten years ago on our first trip, [my husband and 

I] were travelling up north around the Murchison River area. I came 

across all these tiny little orchids about ten centimetres high. They were 

in a mass like the little snail orchids we saw this morning. For some 

reason they just grabbed me and I said ‘Wow, these are amazing!’ 

 

For some flora enthusiasts, the promise of spotting rare or elusive iconic 

species can invigorate botanical passions. When I asked about which orchids 

she feels particularly drawn to, Lyn reflected on the characteristics of rarity 

and visual strikingness. A beautiful and hard-to-find localized plant, such as 

the Queen of Sheba (Thelymitra variegata) or the winter spider orchid 

(Caladenia drummondii), is a peak moment for an ardent wildflower aficionado:     

 

Obviously the Queen of Sheba because it’s such a spectacular orchid. 

Just recently, we were up at Kalbarri and I saw a little orchid I thought I 

would never get to see. It’s called the Winter Spider Orchid. It’s a very 

tiny orchid, which only occurs mid-winter. And because it’s not very 



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common I never thought I’d see it, but I was walking through the bush 

and there it was. 

  

Similarly, the uncommonness of the Western underground orchid (Rhizanthella 

gardneri), with only two hundred and twenty recorded sightings, impacts the 

intensity of her recollection. As an orchid enthusiast, the underground orchid 

holds a prominent position in Lyn’s memory, as well as the botanical 

imagination of the Southwest region. First identified by its sweet smell in 1928 

by John Trott on his farm near Corrigin, Western Australia, the white leafless 

orchid is perhaps the rarest endemic plant species in the state and is known to 

occur in only two locations in the Southwest. Lyn relates the delicate tactile 

memory of digging through the soil to unearth the extremely unusual, and very 

easily disturbed, subterranean species. The orchid requires a mutualistic 

relationship with the broom honey-myrtle or broom bush (Melaleuca uncinata) 

to survive. Lyn summarizes:    

  

My most amazing sight has been the underground orchid. Because it 

only ever grows underground, you have to have sand for it to grow. You 

have to have a particular type of broom bush that it seems to grow with, 

and you of course have to have the fungus that stimulates this orchid. So 

you have to have all these three things. It grows very near the roots of the 

broom bush, but you could look under the roots of a thousand broom 



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bushes and you won’t find one. It won’t be the thousandth that it’s 

under. Yes, I was taken, there were three of them all growing in a similar 

spot. And for me that was absolutely spectacular. It grows under leaf 

litter, and so you need to pull the leaf litter apart very, very carefully and 

then the flower is just sitting below the leaf litter, and then slowly 

excavate it, very carefully, very, very carefully.  

 

Digging through the leaf litter and slowly excavating the flower of the 

underground orchid are “sense making rituals” (Waskul, Vannini, and Wilson 

2009) that invoke incorporating practices of memory—here between plants and 

people—and sensory recollection. The memory of the orchid is intrinsically 

bound up with the tactile and olfactory practice of exhuming it in order to 

momentarily see it. As collective or cultural memory (Hua 2009; Boyer and 

Wertsch 2009), the unearthing of the flower is practiced by anyone who wants 

to claim the experience or participate in exposing it. Other than digging 

through the leaf debris, there is no way to perceive the orchid. The action of 

pulling the leaf matter apart very carefully becomes part of a practice shared 

collectively by orchid enthusiasts, as part of the cultural network of memory 

surrounding the plant.    

 

Orchids furthermore play a significant role in the formation of sense of place 

for Ayleen Sands (2009) of the Stirling Range Retreat who recounts her first 



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spring in the area through her experiences of learning the orchid species of her 

property. The mountainous Stirling Range National Park consists of about one-

thousand and five hundred plant species, or about one-third of the flora in the 

Southwest, including eighty-seven endemic species dispersed throughout five 

main botanical communities (Keighery and Beard 1993). Her sense of place has 

developed through the progression of time synchronized to the flowering of 

orchids:  

 

In May someone came to the office and asked me, ‘did you know your 

Hare Orchids were out’? I said, ‘ooh, Hare Orchids, have we got Hare 

Orchids here’? Off they took me. They showed me hundreds of orchid bed 

basal leaves of the little Hare Orchid, so I began to think, ‘oh, this is 

quite an important place’. 

 

Like other self-trained botanists, Ayleen learned through the tutelage of more 

experienced local orchidologists. The local transmission of botanical  knowledge 

may occur as a type of informal apprenticeship based on experiential and 

verbal guidance by mentors:  

 

In August, a lovely couple named Jack and Lena came. They were both in 

their late seventies. We introduced ourselves. ‘My name’s Lena, and my 



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husband’s name is Jack, and we’ve been coming here for thirty years’. 

And I said, ‘you must love it’. ‘It’s the orchids we love’, she said. 

 

As mentioned also by Lyn Alcock, the Queen of Sheba is a sought after orchid 

for its iridescent visual wonder. Ayleen recalls her ecstatic first encounter with 

“the Queen” as a ceremonious baptism into the natural world of the Stirling 

Range:  

 

A day or two later they both bounded in with big smiles on their faces 

and said ‘The Queen’s out. You’ll have to come and see the Queen’. And I 

asked, ‘what’s the Queen?’ And they both were stunned. So off I went 

with them and I found the Queen. 

 

Ayleen’s memories of the Queen of Sheba orchid are highly associated with 

interpersonal memories of Jack and Lena, demonstrating that botanical 

memory crosses into the natural and cultural worlds and that memories of 

plants are not merely of plants alone. A larger narrative of cultural memory  

contextualizes the orchid flower in a network of social relations.   

 

For Lyn Alcock and Ayleen Sands, the celebration of the Southwest flora 

emanates from appreciation of visual beauty embedded in personal accounts of 

acquainting themselves with their places, as well as collective memories that 



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are shared by a community of wildflower enthusiasts. Revealing human 

topographies of the plant world, botanical memory may consist of such storied 

engagements with plants. The interviewing of people in communities, therefore, 

is an integral approach for eliciting the emotional and multisensorial content of 

human memories, for tracing the landscapes of emotions and remembrance in 

the Southwest. However, in my sample of interviewees, memories of celebrating 

wildflowers tend to characterize the experiences of itinerant interviewees whose 

sense of place is nascent and for whom the notion of topocide (Porteous 1989) 

may go unregistered because of affinity with legally protected reserves where 

pressures are diminished. For Ayleen and Lyn, orchid flowers are cause for 

celebration because of their rarity, colour, and delicate structure, as well as 

community knowledge of orchids provided by senior figures like Jack and Lena. 

Botanical memories may consist of storied engagements based in emotional 

absorption or corporeal involvement, but may also be distanced from concerns 

of habitat destruction or, in the case of the Stirling Range, alarming rates of 

plant disease. Further studies of botanical memory should focus on the 

dynamics between the closely related emotions of mourning and celebration 

environments.       

 

7. Botanical Memories of Embodiment: Sucking Banksia Nectar  

Botanical memory influences how people construct a sense of place through 

multisensorial interactions with the living landscape. However, sense 



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experience may be rendered non-corporeal through the construction of 

remembrance as a procession of images rather than bodily and sensory 

memory (Connerton 1989; Casey 2000). Although vision is integral to the 

process of recollection, memories of plants may be rich with sensation. In 

practice, Kevin Collins (2009) of Banksia Farm in Mount Barker, Western 

Australia, exemplifies the conceptual frameworks of sensory ethnography 

(Stoller 1989, 1997; Pink 2009), sensory memory (Seremetakis 1994), and 

bodily memory (Connerton 1989) as constitutive of botanical memory. His 

embodied approach to educating the public about the flora of the region uses 

incorporating practice as one strategy for engendering appreciation of plants. 

This section details an autoethnographic approach to botanical memory, 

tracing my generation of bodily memory through multisensorial interaction 

with native Southwest flora on Kevin’s farm.    

 

Kevin and his family bought the property that is now Banksia Farm in 1984 

and began planting banksias a year later. By 1987, thirty species had been 

planted. In ensuing years, the family completed a collection of all seventy-six 

species while developing overnight facilities for visitors. His interest is a long-

term passion for propagating and cultivating banksia:  

 

We thought to ourselves, well we’ve got thirty species and there’s only 

seventy-six, so let’s keep going. It became an obsession and drove the 



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kids barmy, driving up and down looking for banksia seeds. In fact we 

flew to Cairns [in Queensland] to get the last species which grows on 

Hinchinbrook Island.   

 

Kevin draws from botanical science, Aboriginal bushtucker knowledges, and 

actual bodily contact with seeds, flowers, and leaves to foster appreciation not 

solely hinging on detached perception of flowers as aesthetic objects. For 

instance, the checkerboard symmetry of the banksia flower head consists of 

thousands of tiny flowers, which he encourages me to experience through 

touch: “So there’s thousands of flowers in there and they’re always in that 

pattern. Touch some of the little buds, run your fingers up the flower stalk and 

go down.” Kevin’s approach to the wildflower tourism public is the interactive 

and corporeal generation of botanical memory.  

 

Half of my interview with Kevin occurred as a “mobile interview” (Hitchings and 

Jones 2004, 8) as we walked amongst his collection of plantings (Fig. 4). 

Participation in the learning act involved tasting the nectar of the banksia 

flower and eating its nutty seeds. The ritualistic aspects of plant encounters 

recur as Kevin advised me to pluck the nectareous flower bunches and suck 

out the sweet liquid, then put a flame to the seeds to roast them before eating:    

 



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There are plenty of flowers. Get one on a bending stem at the base and 

pull out the recently opened ones. Pull out a handful while you have 

them, chew them and you will have sucked the nectar like Aboriginal 

people did. You can eat the seeds. They are delicious. Usually we put a 

flame on them just to take the kernel off but just try chewing. They are a 

little bit like a peanut and quite nutty. 

 

This passage expresses physical encounter involving gestural language; pull, 

chew, suck and eat are actions necessitating the closing of distance and the 

removal of the sensory distance associated with taxonomic knowledge. Kevin 

interfaces with plants with sensorial openness and abandonment. Although 

scientifically competent, his knowledge is partly imbued with the sensation of 

contact:     

 

This one smells quite sweet. You have to put your nose right into it. As 

kids we would part the flowers, poke our tongue in there and suck the 

delicious nectar from the flower. 

 

Recollections may be sense-rich, expressing the assertion by Seremetakis 

(1994, 9) that memory is a “culturally mediated material practice that is 

activated by embodied acts.” Memory of sweetness crosses into smell and taste 

actively constituted by the diction “poking” and “sucking,” implying an 



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Southwest of Western Australia 

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44 
 

intimacy with his plantings. He further encourages me to “squeeze,” “chew” and 

“suck” the flowers to draw out the sweet nectar:  

 

Sometimes you can just squeeze them and see little balls of nectar come 

up. There’s one in the middle there that’s showing. But just chew the 

yellow bits, suck it and you should get a little bit of nectar. 

 

Odors also shape a visitor’s experience when, for instance, Kevin points out the 

smell of boronia, one of the characteristic fragrances of the native Southwest 

vegetation: “This is boronia. One of the highly aromatic plants. Just have a 

smell of that.” References to modern taxonomic nomenclature commingle with 

his treatment of ancient aromatic qualities of the cosmopolitan Rosaceae family 

of which boronia is part:     

 

Boronias are in the Rosaceae family and all Rosaceae have highly 

aromatic foliage. Not only aromatic flowers but aromatic leaves. This is 

another Rosaceae. And this will be a little bit different. But they’re all 

very aromatic plants. 

 

Kevin bridges seamlessly the technical language of scientific botany and the 

sensuous language of bodily experience in a manner similar to nineteenth 

century American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1993, 2000) and 



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Southwest of Western Australia 

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45 
 

Australian place writers such as Edmund Banfield (1968). Sensory practice 

subtends his understandings of plant ecology:   

 

Feel how soft they are and put your head near one of these flowers. Very 

few banksias are aromatic. And these are pollinated by moths. See those 

tiny little pollen presenters. They’re very close together. They’re very thin 

and the little moths push in to suck the nectar to pollinate this one. 

 

He hybridizes scientific facts with embodied experience, emphasizing material 

human and non-human interdependencies. Also featured at Banksia Farm, 

dryandras offer possibilities for multisensorial involvement with visitors, 

affirmed by the appellation “honey pot flowers:”  

 

Most of the dryandras that have their flower seeds just coming into bud 

have what we call ‘honey pot flowers’. And when those little loops come 

out you can put your finger in there and just lick the nectar off. 

 

This mobile interview with Kevin Collins occurred at the crossroads of botanical  

science and human corporeality. As sites of memory expression, bodies 

mediate the natural and cultural worlds (Giblett 2008).  Smells, tastes, and 

textures undergird abstract scientific explanations that may seem meaningless 



Botanical Memory: Exploring Emotional Recollections of Native Flora in the  
Southwest of Western Australia 

_______________________________________________ 
 

 

46 
 

or irrelevant to wildflower tourists. Incubated in the fibres of the body, 

memories of plants gestate ongoing re-enactments of sensoriality. 

  

 

Fig. 4. Menzies’ Banksia (Banksia menziesii). With common names such as firewood 

banksia and flame banksia, Menzies’ banksia is known for its quick-burning timber. (Photo by 

the author) 

 

8. Conclusion  

I have advocated in this paper a sensory and emotional approach to the study 

of botanical memory, just as Classen (1997, 410) outlines the timeliness of “a 

sensory approach to culture” through an anthropology of the senses. Memories 

of plants are inextricably tied to the complexities of the human faculty of 

remembrance and its sensory and emotional aspects. As an area of potential 



Botanical Memory: Exploring Emotional Recollections of Native Flora in the  
Southwest of Western Australia 

_______________________________________________ 
 

 

47 
 

research into human-plant interactions, botanical memory represents a 

poignant component of environmental memory that is intimately related to the 

flora of diverse scales of place, from locales to regions. The beginning of this 

paper outlined various memory frameworks including sensory memory 

(Seremetakis 1994), body memory (Connerton 1989; Boyer and Wertsch 2009), 

collective memory (Hua 2009), emotional geography (Bondi, Davidson, and 

Smith 2005), and environmental memory (Chawla 1994) to show potential 

directions for botanical memory research and to establish the modes through 

which plant enthusiasts wend during the act of recollection. Through readings 

of excerpts from interview transcripts organized under the overlapping 

categories mourning, celebration, and embodiment, I have argued that 

botanical memory may be multisensorial, emotional, and place-specific, but 

more typically alternates between these various mnemonic modes.  Indeed, it is 

more germane to consider a plurality of botanical memories reflecting cultural 

and place values, rather than to conceptualize memory as a homogeneous 

discourse shared by people who interact with flora in a particular locale or 

region. Botanical memories reflect personal and collective proclivities, values, 

and dispositions towards plants and places.  

 

Different kinds of interviewees have been presented: wildflower tourists and 

proprietors involved in the consumption of wildflower tourism or the provision 

of tourism services (Alcock 2009; Sands 2009); scientific botanists and 



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Southwest of Western Australia 

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48 
 

horticulturalists who can control, within limits, the health and longevity of 

their plant collections (Collins 2009); and long-term Southwest residents 

turned conservationists who have witnessed the destruction of plant 

biodiversity first-hand (James 2009; Nannup 2009; Williams 2009). As an 

educator, Kevin Collins could be considered a facilitator of botanical memory 

involving the senses. The experience he allows for visitors galvanizes the 

multivalent capacity of memory for sensorial content, but his interview largely 

excludes feelings or “moods” that foster emotional attachments to flora. Lyn 

Alcock and Ayleen Sands, on the one hand, express celebratory emotions of 

flowers fixed firmly in their personal stories but missing the technical 

specialization of Kevin Collins or the comfort he displays with sensory 

immersion in the botanical world. David James, Noel Nannup, and Don 

Williams, on the other hand, refer to attachments to place through memories of 

flora reflecting a sense of mourning as plant populations vanish. 

 

In a rapidly changing place such as the Southwest of Western Australia, the 

study of human and plant interactions is a much-needed complement to 

botanical conservation research. Increasingly, the region’s native flora exists as 

remnant pockets within agricultural, pastoral, industrial, or suburban places. 

As actual plants become less common, so do memories of those plants; 

memories which contain rich emotional and sensory narratives with the power 

to instill in others the emotions of appreciation, wonder, and dismay. The 



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Southwest of Western Australia 

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49 
 

botanist Stephen Hopper (2009) affirms this in saying “When I grew up, having 

a patch of bush in the backyard or close enough within walking distance to the 

city was normal. Increasingly, as areas of bushland diminish and the city 

expands, that experience is on-offer less and less. So, I think this is where we 

have to be vigilant and continue to celebrate Western Australia, what’s special 

about it.” An integral part of celebration and its obverse, mourning, is the 

faculty of memory in all its diversity.     

 

 

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