The Wasp and the Orchid Read online

  Every time I looked at her folder I wondered how a suburban housewife from Blackburn had embarked on such a remarkable career, so suddenly and so effectively. How did someone who had emigrated from England as a young girl develop such a passionate attachment to the Australian bush? What was it about her childhood, as Edith Harms, her training as a teacher, her marriage and her early years that led to her later success? How did she achieve such unstinting praise from such a conservative scientific community, which, on the whole, was not overly friendly to women in the early twentieth century? And, given her success, how is it that she came to be almost entirely forgotten?

  It is tempting to think that Edith has been forgotten because she was a woman, but it’s more complicated than that. She’s been forgotten because she was a scientist, and because she was an amateur. She’s been forgotten because she wrote for newspapers, magazines and academic journals, rather than books. She’s been forgotten because she was Australian, because she wasn’t Australian enough, and most of all because she was a nature writer.

  It’s over twenty years since I was first introduced to Edith Coleman’s work in the basement of the museum. In that time I have raised two daughters of my own to adulthood. I’ve drifted from zoology and psychology to literature and writing, dabbling in research, academia, editing and teaching. Maybe it’s time to take my writing seriously. I am 48 years old now, much the same age Edith was when she started her career in earnest. I want to know how she did it. I want to know what it is that has attracted me to Edith’s story for so long.

  Armed with a couple of half-page biographies, a typed list of 157 articles from the Victorian Naturalist and a handwritten page of newspaper and magazine articles, I set out to discover where one of Australia’s foremost nature writers had come from, and where, in the intervening decades, she had gone.

  A garden wilderness: Old-fashioned favourites and familiar friends

  By Edith Coleman, 1929

  All my hurts my garden shade can heal. – Emerson

  So sang the poet-philosopher, and, without accepting his assurance too literally, all true sons of Adam know the wisdom of his words. It may be only frayed nerves or it may be a very real grief – there are few hurts that do not yield in some measure to the balm of a garden.

  Mine is a garden wilderness. In it there are no firm borders, and few well-pruned shrubs, but instead a tangled growth that speaks of healthy plant-appetites, and a plebeian capacity for making the most of such conditions as offer. My edging-plants have a shameless way of breaking all restraint. Petunias, verbenas, and warm-scented ageratum seem to wander at will over the paths to my delight, and with, let me add, my encouragement.

  Other members of the household stand for law and order, even in a garden, but no mother grieved more over the loss of her baby boy’s curls than I over the shorn tendrils of my truant border plants. I grudged the petunias most, for those creatures of twilight, the swift hawk-moths, haunt their flowers, hovering for a moment over each scented trumpet and hastening away to the next. I linger to watch them until in the gathering dusk my eyes can no longer follow the phantom shapes.

  Many of my friends have what they call ‘memory-gardens’, where gifts from friends find honoured places. Instead, my garden has memory corners, where bloom plants which bear, in addition to their own, the names of garden loving friends . . .

  Mine is a garden of happy memories, of sentiment, if you will, dearer, perhaps, because some of us have grown up with it, and have watched the mellowing hand of time soften harsh lines of fence or shed. We have grown to fit it in the same comfortable way that we sink into our middle-aged armchairs.

  My wilderness is of the lavender and old lace period. I have little regard for flowers that do not add fragrance to their other gifts. I grow old-fashioned plants, like wall-flowers and flowering currants, purely as a concession to sentiment, for their perfume carries me back over the years, and I lean once more out of a little window in an ivy-covered English home, while the intermingled scent of these flowers is wafted up to me. And the memory is half pleasure and half pain, for

  Smells are surer than sounds or sights

  To make your heart-strings crack.

  When in autumn my garden is still gay with the fleeting charms of annuals, I gradually supplant them with herbaceous perennials and flowering shrubs. The demands made by annuals cannot be denied. Their frequent replanting and watering become wearisome. Perhaps Father Time has made a call and I foresee a time, not so far distant, when his cards may be left with more alarming frequency, and so, like the wise ants, I garner a store for my winter by setting more permanent plants.

  Chapter 2

  THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG IS IN HER BLOOD

  ‘As I ramble among my simples I nibble a leaf and dream of other days and other ways. The tasting of each one is a rite. Their names are a song.’

  March 1887

  Tuesday is cattle market day in Guildford. It is the only day that the small English town can be called busy. Otherwise Guildford is ‘a retreat of country sleepiness’: so quiet that a trio of pedestrians talking on a street corner will be moved on by the local constabulary for fear they might disturb the peace.

  The four youngest Harms children – Edith, Harriett, Hervey and George – cut home to Denzil Road via North Street on a Tuesday. They dart through people, horses and carriages squeezed between crowded sheep and cattle stalls. The market town of Guildford doesn’t have a square, so North Street must make do.

  The lowing of the cattle is so loud it muffles even the cracking blows of the smithy, which can usually be heard right across town. Pedestrians dodge the milkman’s swinging pails, suspended from a wooden yoke across broad shoulders as he makes his afternoon deliveries from Lymposs’s dairy. A precariously balanced board of muffins and crumpets ducks and weaves through the crowds. The muffin man’s cries compete with those of the hot potato seller.

  The Harms children are on their way home from school. Harriett is the oldest, at sixteen, followed by Hervey at fifteen, Edith at thirteen and then tearaway George, the baby of the family, who is just ten years old. Their older siblings, Harry (twenty), Lottie (nineteen) and Annie Maria (seventeen) have all left school and, still living at home, stand at the gateway of their adult lives.

  The bullocks make their way slowly out of the yards and down towards the railway, swaying unsteadily. Every time they lie down, the boys shout in their ears, forcing them to take a few steps before they subside once more. The children laugh at the great plump beasts, fattened on the lush green pasturage down the hill, at the end of the street. These bullocks have never been hurried in their lives and see no reason for it now.

  ‘Come get a Bournemouth Rock,’ shouts the old girl on the corner, ‘and hurry home, it’s five o’clock!’

  It is the sweets that make the cattle market so exciting for the youngest Harms children. The pungent liquorice flavours of the round bullseyes, or Edith’s favourite – a prized ‘stick of “Spanish” dispensed [in] minute fragments to envious playmates’.

  Guildford is full of such delights. On the weekends the children explore the ruins of the castle or the woods just beyond the town boundaries. They trail along the quiet paths that meander between old stone walls, sprouting a profusion of the sweetest garden flowers. They hunt for birds’ nests (careful to leave them undisturbed), or follow the trail of a butterfly or spider on its homeward path. Or peek into Reverend Dodgson’s garden at the Chestnuts in the hope of glimpsing a white rabbit or a disappearing Cheshire cat, or at the very least of being offered a slice of cake by one of his sisters.

  Best of all, they might take a book with them into the woods and fields. All the Harms children love reading, a passion they have inherited from their mother Lottie, who always has time to read to them no matter how busy she is.

  ‘Barrie, Dickens, Thackeray were household words,’ Edith later recalled. ‘Dickens’ characters were our familiar friends. We knew them all as well as we did each other.’
/>   But this idyllic life is about to change. The peaceful world of the Harms family will be turned upside down. And within a year they will find themselves at the very opposite end of the earth.

  WAS IT ONE Tuesday like this that Harriett lagged behind the other three children, complained of a headache or a sore neck, seemed tired and confused? If it was, Edith does not mention it. Edith rarely wrote about her childhood or her family. In fact, she rarely wrote about herself, or other people, at all. Scientists are like that – nor was it the fashion among British nature writers of the time. Edith writes with the ‘eye’ not the ‘I’. I wonder what she would think of today’s ‘new nature writing’, so often a metaphor for the personal: not so much writing about nature, as writing about man in nature.

  I wonder what Edith would think of this biography; I suspect that she would prefer a strictly objective authorial voice relating the results of painstaking research, as if a life story is a simple recitation of known facts. I could tell you that story, as if I know everything about her life – from beginning to end. It’s very tempting, in fact, to take on that reassuringly knowledgeable biographer’s voice, to paper over the gaps and pretend they are not there. But I only have small fragments of Edith’s life to piece together and every one I find upends all the others and changes the way I understand her. I didn’t start at the beginning and work to the end. I have been working, intermittently, with Edith for over twenty years. The true delights of research come as much from the process of discovery as from the final conclusions. I think Edith would appreciate that.

  My reconstruction of the children’s early life in Guildford comes from a much-loved book in Edith’s library, W. H. Bateman’s Rambling Recollections of Old Guildford, published in 1936. The book now belongs to Peter Harms, Edith’s great-nephew, grandson of her older brother Harry, and the family historian and archivist for the Australian branch of the Harms family. The margins are annotated in pencil, by Edith we originally presumed, but the more I read, the more I realised that the notes must have been written by her youngest brother, George. George also wrote a brief account of his own childhood and adventures. Fragments of Harry’s recollections have been recorded by his son Ivo and passed on to his grandson Peter. As such, Edith’s youngest and oldest brothers are the major source of information about the Harms family before they came to Australia.

  Without Peter’s compilation of the Harms’ family history, much of Edith’s childhood would have remained a mystery. But before I could find Peter Harms, I had to find Edith’s immediate family, her descendants. All I knew from her biography was that she was survived by two daughters, one called Dorothy: daughters who might have married and changed their names and become all but untraceable.

  Edith’s father, Henry Harms, was one of Guildford’s most successful builders – as well as an architect, undertaker, naturalist and beekeeper. He moved the family here, in around 1886, from nearby Old Woking. Despite the ups and downs of the building trade, business was booming. Henry’s enterprise was so hectic that he kept several apprentices fully occupied, building coffins as well as houses. They had recovered from some disastrous church work – for which they had never been properly paid – and were just in the process of completing a row of terrace houses for a fine profit. Lady Bouverie’s estate at Send was also in need of renovation; the Harms family had a long and fond association with Lady Bouverie and her mother. George often accompanied his father on a Saturday to the estate, where he was given free rein to explore the fine old English mansion and gardens filled with unknown luxuries and exotic animals.

  Map of 1896 Surrey with Edith’s family homes in 1. Guildford, 2. Old Woking and 3. Warren Farm

  Henry had grown up on the outskirts of Old Woking, on the 58-acre Warren Farm, which is today a Woodland Trust property. The farm had been purchased by his father John, who had moved his young family to the property in 1846, a year after Henry’s birth. Warren Farm lies just off a track from Warren Lane, which leads to a pretty little lock house at the weir on Wey Canal. Across this river lived a young local girl, Charlotte Sarah Edmunds, known as Lottie, whom Henry would marry in 1866.

  In later years, their children would visit their grandparents at Warren Farm and go swimming at the lock where their parents had first met. The lock keeper would throw his lock keeper’s bar into the weir to see which of the children could dive to fetch it from a depth of ten feet or more.

  Warren Farm in 1928: home of Henry Harms

  If building was his business, bees were Henry’s passion.

  ‘There had always been a hive, sometimes two, in his garden,’ recalled Edith.

  I’m watching my own newly acquired bees hanging off the front of their hive as the temperature exceeds 40 degrees Celsius. With the anxious care of a rank amateur, I water the ground around them, put up an umbrella. The bees maintain their constant thrum, oblivious to my concern. The hive is one of those new designs with plastic honeycomb sheets that crack in half to release the honey from a tap. Honey extraction suddenly became a lot less work, less disturbing for the bees. The old guard was sceptical.

  ‘People have been keeping bees since Roman times – if there was a better way to do it, they would have found it,’ declared a friend, who has done everything before.

  I think about the long and constantly evolving history of beekeeping and wonder what kind of hive Henry Harms used. Was he a traditionalist, sticking to the old woven skep baskets, or was he an earlier adopter of framed hives, like the Sussex Shallow? I have a vague image of rounded beehives hanging from trees like a wasp nest, falling on people’s heads. I’ve never seen honeybees make hives like that in the wild. In Australia, feral honeybees nest in hollows, filling them with their dripping yellow combs. But Edith had a swarm of bees build a hive that hung naked from a tree in her garden.

  Maybe that traditional image comes from a woven skep beehive. Did they hang them in trees? But then I realise the picture comes from Winnie the Pooh, from the Hundred Acre Wood, eighty kilometres south of Edith’s hometown. In A. A. Milne’s original book the bees emerge from a tree hollow. It was the Disney cartoonists who turned the beehive into a hornets’ nest, confounding generations of children with their own inability to tell the difference between a wasp and a bee.

  Whichever hives Henry Harms kept his bees in, it wasn’t in a hornets’ nest.

  Surely Edith’s father would have pointed out the tiny bee orchids (Ophrys apifera) of English grasslands, with their bold black and yellow markings like a bumblebee? Or the tiny fly orchid (Ophrys insectifera) which seems, at first glance, to have a fly resting in its midst, wings folded, antennae upright. I remember finding my first British orchid, an early purple (Orchis mascula) tucked among the Scottish heath: unmistakable in form, its bright pink tongue protruding in spotted glory. I must have taken it home to identify, surprised to find such delicate exoticism in the wild heaths of the Outer Hebrides. Twenty-five years later, I retrieve my guide to British wildlife from the bookshelf to refresh my memory and a tiny pressed flower falls from the orchid page, yellowed and indistinguishable: testimony to a long-forgotten fascination.

  The history of Edith’s mother’s family is less documented than that of her father’s. Lottie’s mother, Maria Kaye, died shortly after the birth of Lottie’s younger brother George in 1847. The two children seem to have been farmed out by their father Richard Edmunds, when he remarried in 1850. George was listed as a ‘nurse child’ while Lottie lived with Maria’s sister, Jane Bonsey.

  It was an inauspicious start. In the 1850s there was only a 50 per cent chance that the motherless and abandoned Lottie would even be literate, let alone inspire her own children with a lifelong love of fine English literature and flowers.

  The maternal line is repeatedly snapped and realigned by marriage and name. Wealth, property, title, occupation, interests – all are assumed to flow along paternal lines. The flow of maternal influence sweeps unseen through the generations.

  Biographical research must travel
forwards as much as it travels backwards. When I started this project I did not know if Edith had any living descendants. It took time to confirm the names of her two daughters. In the archives at the Australian Academy of Science I discovered, to some considerable surprise and relief, that her second daughter Gladys had married Donald Thomson and had two sons. Relief because here was a name I recognised – a pioneering anthropologist whose collections and works feature prominently in the Museum of Victoria, about whom much is written and documented. A well-known, well-recorded figure in whose shadow I might hope to find traces of his first wife. And sons, John and Peter, whose surnames will not change through their life.

  But Thomson, like Harms, like Coleman, is a fairly common name. It is not easy to find the right John Thomson and Peter Thomson. They will be in their eighties now, but they are still infants and children in the archives, already with an interest in natural history and collecting. If they follow their mother’s and grandmother’s inclinations they will go to university, and in 1950s Victoria that means the University of Melbourne.

  By chance I come across an old staff list from the university. I think it was from the 1960s: there is a Peter Thomson, who seems to be in the physical sciences, engineering perhaps, and a John Thomson in the zoology department. I know two of the names next to John’s. They were still in the department when I joined it, twenty years ago. My colleagues tell me John is a geneticist, who went to the University of Sydney. I trawl through the contact lists at Sydney, through their lists of alumni. And there he is. Retired, but not relinquishing his research. I send an email, crossing my fingers that I have found the right John Thomson and that he can lead me to his brother Peter as well.