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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
APRIL 5
Arbor Day
Arbor Day has been celebrated in Australia ever since I was a child. In fact, I recall school tree planting ceremonies in which the goal was the beautification of our sterile playground. This was of course pure tokenism, but a start at least in the awakening of people to the importance of nature in general, and trees in particular, to our collective and individual well-being. A much larger tree planting project, such as the development of community botanical gardens is a fitting celebration of Arbor Day. One such is in Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales. A small acreage beside the Brunswick River right in the town environs has been transformed from a rubbish-covered eyesore to a place of tranquil beauty. This precious environmental resource is due wholly to the efforts of a small band of volunteers. Extending this concept to the creation of a similar garden in every Australian town will result in manifold benefits to the environment, the economy, and the local community. Surely this is an idea that deserves to take root, as it were, and flourish. The term ‘botanical garden’ would be thought tautology by some · language pedants; but grammar is far from the minds of most people as they wander through the shady paths of what is now known as Heritage Park. But one’s reflections, grammatical or otherwise, would soon be interrupted by Russ Maslen, the founder (with wife Beryl) of this wonderful ecological initiative.
Russ not only finds, plants, and tends most of the trees and other rainforest plants in the gardens, but protects them as well. Having established ones bona £ides, Russ proceeds to give one a lecture on the gardens, their history, geography, and botany. Meanwhile Beryl is likely to be close by – mowing the lawns! Russ has many anecdotes to tell about his creation – and it was his, if one considers the indispensable role one person can play in any enterprise. Many willing hands help, of course, but the fact remains that without Russ and Beryl there would still only be a degraded horse paddock next to the Brunswick River.
The ‘heritage’ in the park’s name relates to the merging of two cultures. Nearby is the old river ford, where protesting bullocks in the late 19th century would drag the ‘red gold’, as the precious red cedar was called, across the river for transport to England.
But much older is the aboriginal heritage. Two unique stone arrangements of basalt spirals were reassembled in the park from the heath a short distance away. The story of these, as reported by the elders of the Du-Rung-Bil tribe, was that in the Dreamtime, the mountain Yowies chased the frightened tribes out of the area. However, two brave spirits, a man, and a woman, reclaimed the country for their people (a bit like Russ and Beryl!). The stone emplacements are supposed to be their memorials.
One is anticlockwise, representing the woman, and the other the opposite. The tribal elders have committed the river-smoothed stones to the park for. safekeeping, knowing – or hoping, at least – that a respect for their sacred origins will prevail.
The far north coast of New South Wales is unique in the world among areas sharing the same latitude. Most are desert or dry savannah between about 25- and 30-degrees latitude; but because of a curious combination of a parallel north-south mountain range close to the sea, allied to high rainfall and rich volcanic soils, this region sustains an incredible variety of fauna and flora.
As the climate changed over the ages, with cool, temperate fingers reaching up from the south in one aeon, to be replaced by a warm, tropical northern invasion the next, remnants of both remained in pockets of different altitude and soil types that suited them.
Tropical fish swim happily among their less gaudy temperate cousins; cool-climate birds such as the albatross share the sunny skies over Cape Byron with the torrid-zone frigate birds; and both temperate and tropical plants merge in a dazzling array of flower and fruit. This geological zone is known as the Macleay McPherson Overlap, a fertile coastal region stretching from the Macleay River on the central coast to the McPherson Range on the NSW/Queensland border.
Heritage Park is a small acreage girding the bank of the river near the town. Pre-1980 it was a strip of despoiled, weed-choked land used to agist horses. Russ and company (The Byron Flora and Fauna Conservation Society) convinced the shire council that riverside land should be for the benefit of the whole community, not just for the exclusive use of the lessee. So the good councilors voted with their hearts and handed the land over for the establishment of a botanical garden.
The mandate was clear from the beginning: to devote the gardens to plants and trees native to the area.
However, the BF & FCS couldn’t bring themselves to remove the few stately poincianas, with their flame-red spring displays, that had been there for decades. When they say ‘native’, that’s just what they mean; the group won’t accept trees from any area but the Brunswick and Tweed Valleys, not even from the neighboring Macleay Valley, a mere hundred miles away. Those first plantings in 1980 are now mature trees 50 and 60 feet high, and more seedlings are going in all the time. This is rainforest country, so growth of local species is usually quick. The park currently has over 300 tree types.
A local primary school visits each February to collect the large seeds from the blue fig, the same we used as Chinese checkers as children. These nobbly, round seeds also polish up to make attractive beads. Russ enlightened me on the life cycle of the blue quandong, as the fig is more correctly called, as well as some dozen other rare and beautiful rainforest trees, all growing within a wallaby’s hop of where we stood.
He assured me that this tall, straight tree, its green, glossy leaves interspersed with scarlet ones, was not a true fig at all, but a member of the Eleocarpus. I felt more comfortable when he used the vernacular names, such as the onion cedar, a lovely tree that is · now extremely rare.
In fact, there are only a handful of onion cedars known in the wild; Heritage Park has two, both doing well. This fine timber tree is almost indistinguishable from its notable brother, the red cedar, but the wood has a highly pungent onion scent the canny old timber-cutters could get away with selling it as red cedar if they soaked the logs in the river for a few months to remove the smell. How many polished dining suites gracing the fine houses of the elect are really ma.de from the lowly onion cedar? We’ll never know, and neither will they!
Being a public area, one would think the existence of lots of expensive looking trees, ferns and orchids would attract plant thieves; or their less-informed colleagues-in-crime, vandals. But Russ lives just over the road! Apparently he is hypersensitive to the scrape of spade or the crunch of tire on gravel. Instead of a leafy booty, the would-be thief finds Russ. His “Can I help you?!!” is deterrent enough, it seems; as almost nothing has ever been stolen from the gardens. With a superannuated Cerberus guarding the place 24 hours a day, it’s not surprising!
The group is virtually self-sustaining; mowing, weeding, and maintaining the gardens all year round. They also supply most of the seedlings; either finding them in the bush or germinating them. All the trees the casual onlooker might take for granted are like children to these dedicated, civic-minded souls.
Although it’s not all thankless toil, as they do enjoy the field trips looking for seed. And if they find something rare, it’s better than buried treasure to these nature-lovers – much better! Man’s treasures come and go, but the miracle of a beautiful plant species is a once-only event, and as they say, ‘extinction is forever’.
Talking about seeds, I desperately hoped Russ wouldn’t see my pocket bulging with Chinese checker replacements; but I was reassured when he went on ‘to explain that the trees – and the group! – don’t mind you taking them. The perennial problem for plants, being such sedentary beings, is seed distribution. Some, like the blue fig, surround their seed with succulent, cobalt-colored flesh: both color and taste attract the flock pigeons, which eat it, pass it through, and deposit it far afield. The trees are not fussy; they don’t mind a human distribution service; you don’t have to pass it through of course, just plant it normally! Russ went on to explain that even if there is a bureaucratic proscription against seed collection, one should still indulge in · this wholesome bower bird pursuit. This would be obeying a higher dictate, a divine edict even! As such, l felt more confident as I scanned this treasure chest of rare and beautiful plants – dripping with seed!
Ready access to the kind of seed smorgasbord · as occurs in these town gardens assures proliferation and botanical diversity outside of them. Apart from birds etc., people of all ilks poke them in pots, or just plant them in the garden – and presto! – in ten short years or so a splendid tree is providing a sun hat for the earth, aesthetic pleasure for its human denizens, and food and shelter for its wildlife. A garden like Heritage Park will potentially spawn thousands of other trees around the countryside, carried by both human and other distributors. In fact, if every town had its own specialized native garden, the greening of Australia would be in full clip. But how to launch this botanic Titanic?
The solution was elusive as I worried about the tragedy of species depletion; the town gardens could be the last redoubt for some plants; having a role such as that played by zoos in staving off extinction for many endangered animal species.
Australians were lulled into complacency a couple of years back with the fatuous promise by an erstwhile prime minister of ‘two billion trees planted in the next ten years!’. There are two billion tree seedlings (I’m sure) coming up all by themselves in Australia in any given season; the point is, what kind of trees? And where? Two billion slash pines won’t do a lot of good for the natural environment, but two million trees of stunning beauty and variety planted on desecrated land will.
The very essence of these town gardens is variety. There are about 7000 towns in Australia; if each had a small botanical garden of about 300 trees this would mean 2,100,000 seed trees! With their capacity to reproduce in their home environment, it wouldn’t take long at all to reproduce two billion new trees – every year!
That’s it! The solution was at the top, with the government. Only they could initiate a nation-wide program to save the earth, and thousands of small country centers (creating jobs) by, in every town in Australia, funding a community botanic gardens project! It would also, to use an economist’s metaphor, kick-start one of Australia’s most important industries – the plant nurseries. Crown land of one kind or another, railway yards, greenbelts etc., could be bequeathed to responsible trustees.
Talk to a politician today (Arbor Day’s a good time!), promise kudos and good press, but most of all promise community respect – that one they can’t resist! There are absolutely no losers in a nationwide botanic gardens program.
The Mullumbimby enterprise is obtaining surprisingly wide recognition; with Russ receiving requests from all over Australia to advise on the establishment of similar projects; from as far as Albany in Western Australia, even. So go on, start a botanical garden in your town today!
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