Bugs and the wilderness garden

Two good books which approach organic gardening from different directions came my way recently. They are far from new but they are still in print so they deserve a mention.

Jackie French’s The Wilderness Garden (Aird Books, 1992/2007) was welcomed enthusiastically after a quick look. The Introduction begins, Beware of the gardens of the righteous! Or, ‘How never to weed, feed or dig your garden again.’ How can anything bad follow that?

Tim Marshall’s Bug: the Ultimate Gardener’s Guide to Organic Pest Control (ABC Books, 2010) impressed me immediately, too, because his introduction to our small wildlife was so lucid and positive.

Bug: the Ultimate Gardener’s Guide to Organic Pest Control

cover of 'Bug'Tim Marshall has been a leader in Australia’s organic gardening movement for decades and has written a book for any organic (or want-to-be-organic) gardeners needing to know more about the bugs in their garden.

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William Gibson’s Jackpot

William Gibson burst onto the SF scene with Neuromancer in 1984 and never looked back. He now has a dozen novels and a nonfiction collection to his name.

book cover PeripheralHis visions of the future have always tended to be dark and edgy. Here I’m interested in his two latest novels, The Peripheral (2014) and its sequel Agency (2020), primarily for the ‘Jackpot’ which is pivotal to both. His earlier work falls into trilogies (see Wikipedia for details of the Sprawl, Bridge and Blue Ant trilogies) and a sequel to Agency may be on the way. He apparently intended to call it Jackpot so let’s call the two-and-a-promise ‘the Jackpot trilogy.’

The Peripheral is very good indeed although Agency juggles too many characters and timelines to be completely satisfactory. The recent TV series, by the way, is only loosely based on the first novel. Continue reading “William Gibson’s Jackpot”

Introducing mogoer munya

John Elliott led a group of native plants enthusiasts on a trip to Cape Cleveland last weekend. The excursion prompted me to write about his recent book, mogoer munya, because a rock shelter which we visited features in the book.

Poplar gums, magroves and mudflats
The view from the rock shelter

mogoer munya

mogoer munya – man from the clouds is an account of the life of James Morrill, an ordinary English seaman of the mid-nineteenth century who was shipwrecked off the Queensland coast in 1846. He was one of four who survived the raft journey to the coast and were rescued by the Birri-Gubba people of Cape Cleveland.

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A Naturalist’s Bookshelf 3: Insects

Balcombe Super Fly coverSuper Fly – the unexpected lives of the world’s most successful insects

Jonathan Balcombe

Penguin, 2021

Unashamedly a popular-science book, Super Fly begins with the author’s acknowledgement that flies are more widely disliked than any other group of animals except, perhaps, cockroaches. The rest of the book is basically a really good attempt to remedy that situation.

The flies we find annoying, yucky, or both are a tiny minority of an enormous and incredibly diverse family, as Balcombe says. Adult flies’ lifestyles range from parasitic and predatory to pollinatory, and their immature stages (yes, including maggots) are just as diverse.

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Lloyd Neilsen’s bird books

Birds of the Wet Tropics of Queensland & Great Barrier Reef & Where to Find Them

Lloyd Neilsen

Second edition, 2015. Self-published, it is available from your favourite local bookshop or Neilsen’s own site.

Birds of the Wet Tropics is a field guide to 451 birds found in our region, and its unique feature is that it is arranged primarily by observable features – black plumage, red eye, forked tail, etc – rather than family and genus.

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