A New Year, a New Blog

In the first year of a Trump presidency I thought it time to kickstart a new blog with lots of pretty flowers and vegetables to distract from the downwardly spiraling cesspool of geopolitics.

A photo posted by James Beattie (@the_horticoligist) on Dec 20, 2016 at 3:36pm PST

Plants nourish, heal, inspire and deepen knowledge of the world around us

I'm not a hippy, far from it, but I believe plants and gardening have the ability to nourish the soul, feed creativity and sustain a long and fulfilling life.  The cherry on the cream is a plant, after all.  I chose horticulture as a career after working in an office for years while studying.  I grew to loath the idea of working in an indoor career.  Gardening was and still is a discipline that satisfies me both physically and intellectually.  The physical side of it is obvious, there's nothing more satisfying than digging a big hole and putting a plant in it.  The intellectual side is lurking just below the surface, waiting to be discovered like the chink of a spade hitting a water main.  Hit it hard enough and you'll be engulfed in a wondrous fountain of knowledge not even the most reliable plumber will ever quell.  Every plant has a story to tell.  Whether they're the clothes on your back, the beer you drink or the infuriating weeds in your paving, all plants have come from somewhere in the world and the stories of how they've found their way into your garden are often no less thrilling than the plants themselves.  Wars have been fought over plants.  Pivotal events in history have happened because of them.  We mark births, deaths and marriages with plants.  They nourish, heal, inspire and even intoxicate, both literally and figuratively, and in the process help to deepen our knowledge of the world around us.

My road to this besotting with botanics has been a long and meandering one.  I have worked in numerous gardening roles in my 15 years in horticulture.  After graduating from the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Horticulture in 2007, I took a road not often travelled by hortos or other gardening-inclined folk.  I took up a job in bushland management, initially as a year's stopgap to figure out where it exactly was I wanted horticulture to take me.  I enjoyed it so much I stayed for three years, and as years do when one is enjoying ones self, they flew by at an alarming rate.  Over those years I worked in some pristine bushland around Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, as well as many degraded sites that needed nurturing.  I fell in love with our indigenous flora, particularly our grasslands, whose story is an interesting but tragic one for another time.

After three years I worked briefly as a jobbing gardener before scoring a job working for Gardening Australia, the national telly program on the ABC.  It's been a mainstay for the green and black thumbed alike in Australia for over 25 years and it was privilege working with a show that I grew up watching and loving (it was a secret pleasure as a teenager watching Peter Cundall on Saturday nights before going out to party).  It sounds like a dream job and in many respects it was, but that early-learnt loathing of office work was an ever present Blundstone boot, gently kicking me in the back of the head.  Very rarely did us behind-the-scenes-hortos get out into the gardens we wrote about.  While producers had the privilege of flitting about the country filming some of our most spectacular gardens and natural landscapes, we were daisy-chained to the desk 99% of the time.  It was an indoors job, stressful most of the time, and it was only a matter of time before I packed it in.  Which I did late last year.  So to keep my writing brain from atrophying I decided to write - and here I am, and you are, hopefully enjoying ourselves together in this wondrous Garden of Eden we call Earth.

So follow me as I delve headlong into the compost heap of life, bringing humour and humus together in a way that engages and stimulates, titivates and intoxicates, elucidates and educates in a way garden writing never has before.

Until next time, get out there and get dirty.

Jimmy