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noticed that when his mangoes ripen the flying foxes don’t attack them the way they do other people’s. The reason is that his blackbutts come into flower at the same time, and flying foxes prefer blackbutt blossom to ripe mangoes. More people should note that. In another aside, he says that bees don’t like mango flowers. He doesn’t know why. If he comes back to life in another form, he muses, maybe it will be as a bee. Then he’ll know.
    As he talks, he pulls weeds from pots holding palm seedlings, leaving a trail of intense green stalks on the black plastic weed-mat of his nursery. In different parts of the nursery (open weekends only) his wife and some of the six children are at work. Tom calls it the farm down there. The June sun burns through the shadecloth. Tom doesn’t seem like a high-speed weeder, but the work gets done quickly. Weeding is the root of this matter, the point of origin, the base ceremony of planting. If you won’t weed, you’re not a gardener.
    Tom Wyatt is a tall, lean, dusty-pale man with a direct, hyperactive manner. He is fifty years old, with alert observant eyes and thinning hair that was once red. He looks like an earthmoving contractor or a mining engineer—a man accustomed to altering the landscape. Watching him work, flicking aside nettles and nut grass, it’s emphatic that weeding is the first principle of horticulture and he’s back to first principles all the time.
    The everyday word for horticulture is gardening. Not a very grand word to some ears, but a good one in Tom Wyatt’s. In the towns along the north Queensland coast gardening was the job councils gave to workers who wereageing, burnt out. A lot of people thought of it as a pension. There might have been the vestige of an old idea, too, that only servants were gardeners. You weren’t fully yourself if you were a gardener. You were somebody else’s person. Well, Tom Wyatt has no problems with the word gardener. The thing is to change people’s view on words they don’t like.
    Nothing in gardening follows without the tiny action of selection, a finger and thumb clearing space for a forest. Tom Wyatt doesn’t use herbicides or chemical sprays on the farm. He gets down there and pulls the weeds himself. He believes it’s a mistake to try and create an environment convenient for human beings. There is no balance in that view, he says—banishing bugs, pushing everything away, creating pristine shelters without recognition of where we belong. ‘Organics is ecology in action.’ That’s his motto. He applies the rule to himself, his own body. Life isn’t something going on somewhere else. It happens inside individuals, and as far as personal health is concerned, ‘our antibodies need a boxing lesson’.
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    In the 1950s, as a boy in the Gulf Country, Tom Wyatt leaned from the saddle and looked at flowers and plants rather than following the other riders on the muster. His older brothers thought he was strange even then. They were all in the same world of rocks and dust and cattle, moving through the hot, open scrub from various agreed starting points, heading for the holding yards. When they gazed around, Tom was trying to add to the experience. He loved the life—throwing sticks on the campfire—boiling thebilly—watching the stars—saddling up at dawn in the dry smell of the grass clearings. In the full heat of day he knew nothing better than to follow a creek downstream, to where it came to a waterfall. And it was like a rule. There would come a break in the trees, sky ahead, a wheeling of birdlife, ducks, geese, pelicans, finches in the shadows, hawks above, fish, tortoises, freshwater crocs nosing through the shallows—the life of the north crowding in to water from the glare of the open plain. Near the drop, creekwater that seemed hardly to be moving was streaked on the surface with lines of force, eddies,