On a remote island in the South Atlantic, a short, stout man in a Chinese coolie hat is seen labouring in his garden … he pushes his spade into the lush green turf to reveal the rich red volcanic soil … digging rhythmically he soon has the makings of another garden bed.
This morning, his enthusiasm for the task has been ignited by the discovery that his labours in a nearby hedge garden have been repaid. There he had sowed some of his most treasured seeds and there he has spied several young plants breaking the surface with delicate sprays of tiny leaves.
These seedlings are those of the Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia longifolia), natives of an island 14,000 kilometres by sailing ship from the remote volcanic outcrop where they were planted by a man whose love of the exotic, topsy turvy plants of Australia was almost as great as his love for conquering countries.
While he delighted in the bright yellow, winter flowerings of the wattles, he considered his greatest horticultural triumph, on this remotest island in the world, to be that of the iridescent yellow blooms of the ‘Immortelles’, the Australian wildflowers we know as the Everlasting Daisies (Xerochrysum bracteatum).
Seeds of this wildflower had been carefully harvested from the gardens of Chateau Malmaison outside Paris by a British friend. The original seeds were planted by his wife’s gardeners when they were sent to her by explorer, cartographer and naturalist Nicolas Baudin following his mapping and collecting expedition to Australia in 1801.
These sparks of colour with their perfect rankings of rigid glowing bracts, were as tantalisingly exotic in their new home as in the gardens at Malmaison. It was there that our man in the straw coolie hat came to love the exotic harvest collected by the French naturalists on their voyages to Australia.
Nearby, another of his favourites twines its way around the branches of a young eucalypt. Its weirdly shaped red flowers add a counterpoint to the rich green surrounds. It is the Dusky Coral Pea (Kennedia rubicunda).
In time, the man in the coolie hat will plant many Australian species in the spacious grounds of his island home to add to the eucalypts growing on its boundary when he arrived. These trees had been grown from cuttings left by ships following the trading route from Australia to England.
Gardening was a task our gardener in the straw hat had learned to love but it was not one he had undertaken willingly.
He was 46 when he had been forced to take up residence on the small island, which was described by one traveller as “crusty and volcanic on the outside and lush and green on the inside”.
The isolation was the antithesis of the life he had lived for nearly three decades in the rich salons and palaces of the European nobility where he had been at the epicentre of events which had changed the civilised world.
In his new home, while his presence still drew a lot of attention, it was more the attention given to a great caged animal in a zoo.
His first year there was one of lassitude and inactivity, of hiding from the eyes of the curious. His health declined until one day his doctor prescribed exercise, and a lot of it.
And so, the man decided to create a garden in the acres of empty space around his new home.
The doctor no doubt had in mind a garden bed or two and perhaps a vegie patch.
But our man in the coolie hat was a man of large passions, large obsessions and an intellect to match.
One garden bed was dug … and then another … then paths were laid, flower beds, a grotto, a big fishpond, a cascade, hedges, a glade of wildflowers … a landscaped paradise into which all members of the large household were bade to play their part.
Two centuries after the six years of obsessive gardening, the grounds around that remote island home remain a visitor drawcard. The garden is not entirely as it was in its early years, some plantings have succumbed to the salt laden winds yet much remains of the original garden paradise.
And the two most treasured species, the Sydney Golden Wattle and the Everlasting Daisy have ‘gone native’ and can now be found across the whole island.
But who was our man in the coolie hat?
The year of our story is 1815, the man is Napoleon Bonaparte, the island is St Helena and the grounds in which he created a garden paradise are those of Longwood House, his home in exile.