Finding Balance: From Don’s Legacy to Sourdough and the Garden
Seeing the passion fruit flowers in bloom brings back memories of our dear mentor, Don Ellison, and the wisdom he shared with us about running a plant business, the beauty of exotic plants from around the world and the diverse range of plants in our Australian wildlife. When we lost Don in 2020, we missed him dearly. He had become such a huge part of our lives.
He had a passion for passiflora flowers and a passion and zest for life, and even though he was in his mid-eighties when we met him, he had more energy than we did at half his age. He told us about his amazing life and guided us in starting a plant-seed business.
Don loved working on the passionfruit vines and experimenting with producing a cold-climate passiflora that could withstand frost. It was a much sought-after plant that would have been a great contribution to the passiflora enthusiast had he been able to achieve it. He told me I had to be the Passiflora lady and tried to teach me all about all the different types of Passionfruit that grew all around the world. I joined the Passiflora society in the UK and even contributed to a few of their articles for Don.
Unfortunately, we could only grow a few varieties on our small suburban block, and I just didn’t have the time or dedication that Don had. I was a busy mum of two, homeschooling one of my children, caring for an ailing mother, running a household, building a seed list and website, and carving out any spare time to write. My husband, Brad, went full steam ahead with learning as much as he could from Don until he was finally ready to be a full-time seed man and could quit his full-time job.
Brad learnt to harvest and clean a range of different seeds, and it was Brad who learnt how to propagate the passiflora that Don was so enthusiastic about. As a long-term health enthusiast, I was more interested in the health benefits of the research articles I read on passionfruit.
This is where Don and I also found common ground. He was always interested in the medicinal benefits of plants and had, in fact, spent many months with a research doctor at the back of the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, researching various plants in the hope of finding cures for common diseases.
Don was a horticulturist first and foremost all his life, but he had an affinity with helping humanity and easing suffering, initially studying to be a doctor when he was younger. With the direction he took in the horticultural world, he found a way to bridge his beliefs and his desire to help, and he considered himself an ethnobotanist. Don explained this was the study of how humans interact with plants. He loved learning from indigenous people and how they used plants to cure people in their tribes.
When he needed new business cards, he asked me to design them with the title “ethnobotanist” above “horticulturist”. Don explained that he often donated plants for medical research and had, in fact, helped doctors find cures by providing the right samples they needed, thanks to his keen eye for plant identification.
I was a mother and wife first, and my true passion was writing. Brad took to the garden world like a duck to water and had a history with gardening with his father and grandfather. For me, gardening was a hard day of pulling weeds, digging, planting, watering, and mulching, but when we had children, I would be constantly interrupted by looking after them and housework, so my enthusiasm didn’t have the drive it needed to see any project through.
Now, though, as the children have grown, I find more time to devote to learning how to garden from Brad and bridging my own gap in healthy eating and growing our own organic food. Although we sell many seeds in our plant seed business, only a handful produce edible fruits. So a food garden is a separate passion from our plant seed business.
Like Don, I love learning from the wisdom of our First Nations people and how they used so many of our plants for multiple purposes, whether it’s finding out you can eat certain roots, seeds, leaves or tubers if treated correctly for health and nutrition or using them to treat wounds and other ailments. A highlight of the last Byron writers’ festival for me was getting a signed copy of Mindy Woods cookbook after being inspired by her talk about bringing our own native plants into the kitchen. Although we sell seeds of some of these plants, we can’t really advertise them as edible or medicinal due to the risk of litigation.
We always advocate thorough research before ingesting or using anything as medicine or bush food, but it is a skill worth learning, and we are still learning each year. I find myself increasingly eager to learn from the wisdom our elders passed on to us about living in harmony with the land.
I have always been interested in learning new skills in the kitchen, too, but it was Brad who took the time to learn from a neighbour how to perfect sourdough bread. He received some starter from him and watched him make it. He tried and failed, some ended up in the bin, and he was regularly critiqued by our neighbour. It was funny how determined he was to get a good grade from our neighbour, but he got there in the end. He has continued to improve and now truly mastered the technique. I have made it only once. Brad, though, is more disciplined, gets up early to start it, and stays up late to mix it.
Like Don, Brad’s determination to succeed is enviable. I find myself busy doing other things. It was Brad who finally dried batches of bananas in the dehydrator and who learned to make pickles. I had long dreamt of learning these skills, which were also on my growing list of things to do. He just does things and doesn’t let anything stop him.
Maybe I’ll never learn to make jam and preserves; maybe I will. Everyone has their strengths. I’m good at starting things and coming up with ideas, well, let’s just say I’m a dreamer. I’m more determined to get top scores for making my two websites run smoothly, burning the candle at both ends to fix things, improve, upgrade and beautify. Editing articles, poems and books until my eyes are bloodshot and my head nods to my chest too many times to count. I have to be kind to myself and remember that we all work differently. Brad likes to keep the lawn trimmed, and I like to have the floors clean and toilets scrubbed. It’s a good balance.
I realise how important it is to find balance in my life away from writing. As a secretary, housewife, and mother, I have been looking for more opportunities to spend time outdoors. Brad and our son Toby, who now works full-time for us, are always outside, whether they are harvesting seed, de-seeding it, or cleaning it. Apart from the time they spend packing orders, they are outside. This comes with challenges with intense heat, cold or wet weather, but they are in the elements regardless. That is one driving force behind my desire to create and share more on my channel, to showcase the beauty of nature and our need to be at one with it.
As I reflect on those early lessons from Don, I find so much joy in the present moments of our daily life, whether it’s the simple satisfaction of a fresh sourdough bake or the quiet focus of decluttering our home. These are the moments of balance I share with you today.
I invite you to join our growing creative community at Woolcottage Bloom. Click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel, Angela Woolcott, and stay connected with my poetry and nature walks.
