Wildflowerwalker

Nature Wisdom for a World at War

The smiling delight of coastal tea tree in bloom always fills my heart.  For years, I’ve sporadically walked the coastal bush track in Brunswick Heads that is lined with tea trees of different varieties.  Though blossoms may begin earlier, their full blossoming glory peaks at Spring Equinox in this environment.  They have become for me a local indicator in the landscape for this moment of balance between the light and dark halves of the year.   By chance or not, just this week I learned from local indigenous people that Spring Equinox is indigenous new year. 

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched the tea tree blossoms begin much earlier.  Without knowing the intricacies and interlinkings of all the relationships they have with the world around them, I can’t tell you why.  Global warming, maybe; large amounts of rain, maybe, or it could be a premonition of harder times ahead.  My witnessing only goes back 20 years – not even a drop in time to the knowledge bases that used to be held by the local people, who once would have been able to notice the shift in patterns, note its various causes and interact accordingly to bring things back into balance if required. 

One evening last year in August, the bushes are in full bloom all the way along the trail.  Almost a month early.  I’m saddened beyond measure to see that someone has methodically come along and brutally chopped all of these beautiful blooming tea trees back to their trunks, leaving short stumps.  The branches laden with blossoms and nectar – food for honeyeaters, spinebills, bees, several species of butterfly, ants, moths, hoverflies and beetles to name a few, not to mention wallabies who feed on the leaves – lie on the ground.  Any nature worker with even an ounce of connection knows not to prune a plant until its blooming is complete.  Don’t they?
Cut off in their prime and peak. 
The devastation is terrible. 

The irony is that it may well have been “landcare”.  This tea tree species (leptospermum laevigatum) was widely planted locally after the devastation of sand mining in the 50’s, due to its ability to grow and spread in these sandy coastal damaged areas.  Its ‘natural distribution’ is said to begin a couple of hours south of here at Nambucca Heads and spread south from there.  Try telling all the species who feed off its rich, abundant nectar that!!  Let’s hope they can find sufficient alternate sources in the ever increasing havoc and damage that population growth, homelessness and irresponsible dog owners are bringing to the dwindling natural spaces along the coast. 

By the freshness of the flowers, the brutality must have happened that very day.  Somehow life had brought me here to witness. 
I’m saddened and sickened. 
I can’t let them go to waste. 
I gather up three large bundles of blossom laden branches, as much as can be carried back into town – nothing compared to the amount left to dry up and die in the sun. 

Thus began a deeper journey with tea tree.  A gathering was called to make tea tree medicine and see what it had to share with us.  From death, new life would come.  I was determined to not let their sacrifice be for nothing.

A brief background

Leptospermum Laevigatum or Coast Tea Tree, has been very recently (2023) reclassified Gaudium laevigatum.  It’s a plant that has been widely planted around the world in coastal areas to stabilise sand erosion and has naturalised itself in various locations around the world (e.g the coast of California where it’s called Australian Tea Tree, New Zealand, South Africa and Hawaii.)

It became known as tea tree as early settlers used the leaves to make a tea alternative.  Some say it was Captain Cook who witnessed the aborigines making tea from it and so began doing so too.

Tea tree plant spirit connections

So we gather and sit in circle stripping the leaves and flowers from the stems.  Having spent a significant amount of time sitting in plant circle with these particular women, it is noticeably quiet.  In fact, I realise, I’ve never heard these women be this quiet before!  Tea tree.  Slow, quiet, soft, feminine, dreamy.  Inner stillness.  Presence, care, reflection.  Taking time and care.  A diffuse awareness, a dreamy quality. 

There is also an impenetrability present, mirrored in the salt resistant leaves.  They are strong, dry.  Yet there is a sense of softness under the impenetrable exterior.  A protective cocoon. 

Gently, slowly, some early themes emerge:

• Underground water (hidden, impenetrable)
• Magnetic quality.  Not outward.  Draws to it.  Invites inwardness. 
• Mirrors, reflection, dreaming.  (Numerous overlaps with Mugwort – who share a watery quality)
• How our dreaming is subconsciously forming our life.  A plant that is dreaming the world into being.  One leaf at a time.  That dreaming is one way in through impenetrability.
• Simply being with tea tree felt important in order for it to slowly open up and reveal its inner core.  The impenetrability at the outer requires time to simply be and build trust with.  Then things open up – very feminine in this sense – can’t be rushed, can’t force things. 
• Joints – pain, stiffness.  In between places.  Tea tree helps keep these places clear, to maintain flow and ease in connective points.  Softening and flexibility.  Where two come together, joins, joints, in between.  Softens and helps the joining flow.

When later she softens her edges and allows me in closer, I discover her essence is very deep inside a thick inner casing of protection.  Inside it is blue light, waters, like being in the depths of the womb or a cocoon – it feels deeply safe with thick outer barriers of protection. 

Slowly she shows me how this deep inner self is what expands far into the surrounding ethers in a diffuse awareness that dreams our world into being. 

Being is the Dreaming. 

I feel how far and wide her field expands, it reaches outwards to collect and magnetise moisture from the air.  Like so many Australian plants – it has a vast energy field, augmenting the dreamy quality that walking through the Australian bush is so unique for.  Passing through the vast energetic fields of so many plants is what creates this dreamy feeling.  It is hard to put this into words effectively, if you’ve had the experience, you’ll know exactly what I mean, otherwise, its something to go out and attune to. 

I realise later I’d received a very similar teaching several years earlier from Manuka myrtle (Honey Mytrle), and remembered that it too is a Leptospermum. 

Leptospermum scoparium famous for providing Manuka honey, is widely naturalised in New Zealand who brought it its wide acclaim, though is actually indigenous to Australia. 

An excerpt from the teachings of Manuka myrtle (2017)

She teaches about the power of quietness, of not needing to stand out. She shows me that most Australian plants are like this, they have a more diffuse awareness, a more subtle flowering beauty. Opposite to the showy, pushy, ‘out there’ displays of foreign flowers. There is more of a sense that they are just doing what they do, no need to stand out, have adapted in this way for survival. And she shows me how this is mirrored in Australian culture – don’t stand out, tall poppy syndrome, that the landscape evokes that culture somehow. If you were to expend all your energy on being seen, there would be no resources left to survive in this country.

Into deeper waters…

Six weeks later, tea tree guided us out onto the land for some deeper listening.
We sat by a 6000 year old tea tree lake. 
The tea tree lakes are unique to this area and have deep red waters coloured by Melaleuca leaves leaching into them (hence tea).  Melaleucas are large and beautiful paperbark trees that grow on the edges of water or waterlogged land and are also known as Tea Trees. 

The natural habitat of the Melaleuca is in quite a small area – the northern NSW district as far west as Tenterfield and a little over the border into QLD. 

It is from the melaleuca (melaleuca alternifolia) that tea tree oil is extracted – renowned worldwide for its antiseptic qualities.

Many tea tree lakes exist in the area, anciently sacred as women’s country – indigenous birthing sites.  There are ancient natural tea tree lakes, as well as more recent ones once again created by sand mining.  Sand mining and tea trees seem to have several overlaps as this is not the last time they will be mentioned together!

I spent my summers swimming in the soft waters of the tea tree lakes locally and there is nothing quite like their soft, warm, feminine, silky, dark quality after the salty pummelling of the ocean. 

Now as I tune in, I am visited by an indigenous woman who uses a tea tree branch to sweep and clear the space, and then to dig into the ground.  I take the opportunity to ask her for some clarification on tea tree in their world – is it Leptospermum or Melaleuca?

 “We are a tea tree collective.” 

While they were the only words, there is a transmission of knowledge that comes with them.  They are a group collective that share a collective mission/function. 

To soften, clear and cleanse.  Softening hard edges.  I innerstand that all water plants work in a way as a collective – on uniting in some way or other.  Bending the edges.

The tea tree collective softens edges so two can come together. Clan meetings, marriages, finding middle ground, softening, gathering, creating bonds.  Joining of peoples, finding common ground.  This is tea tree collective (obvious overlap with Yarrow in some of this).  This is why Tea tree works on joints and the in between spaces.

There’s great significance to Tea tree being local to this region – an area where the indigenous people came together for large gatherings, where no single group had custodianship – rather it was a collective custodianship (from my humble understandings anyway). Known as the land of the First Light, the first people of old times, the first knowledge, yet even today, it is locally palpable how what happens here translates into the collective field a few years later. I’ve watched this time and again over the years. What starts here as alternative, hippie, out there beginnings, several years later shows up in the mainstream as normal. By then, what’s happening around here is vastly different. It’s a birthing ground after all. And the Tea tree lakes provide not only a literal physical space for birthing, but the innermost knowing that emanates out far and beyond just as the Tea tree spirit describes.

Imagine my surprise to later look up the different tea tree species and discover that there is what is known as the Leptospermum Alliance. 

Bascially a group of plants in the Myrtaceae family, that includes Leptospermum (Tea trees), Callistemon (Bottlebrushes) and Melaleucas (paperbarks).

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first article on some preliminary insights with Tea tree.  In the next article: The Tea Tree Lovers, I share a local indigenous legend of tea tree, which took me three months trying to gather together at the behest of the indigenous spirit woman that is guiding this deepening work with the land that the tea tree collective has spurred on! You can read it here:

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