We planted kangaroo paws in our garden towards the end of winter.

Don’t freak out now — kangaroo paw is a type of native Australian flower. We did not leave any muscular marsupials hopping around our hinterlands without hands!!

They’re a funny little plant. Uniquely shaped, beautifully coloured, and pollinated by birds. Some species can grow to about my height, though that’s not saying much! In our early years of living in Australia, I’d find them unnerving, mostly because of their fuzzy petals and otherworldly shape that looks like it’s on the verge of biting you. Maybe I was a bug in a past life, eaten by a predator that looks just like this flower.

The more I learn about Australian native plants, the more I realise how intricately evolved our ecosystem is — how every ecosystem in the world is. I don’t think the introduction of exotic/non-native species into a place is such a bad thing in itself, but the speed and carelessness with which such introductions take place can cause so much damage still felt centuries and decades later.

When I look into my future, I see many negotiations with persistent South African Plumbago and invasive North American Robinia and a multitude of waxy nuts dropped from a Chinese Tallow Tree onto a wriggling bed of Portuguese millipedes and Argentine brown ants. And there’s me, a Southeast Asian transplant naturalised in this sunburnt country just like the Roselle hibiscus.

One day I would like to write stories involving gardens. I’ve had a few sprout up in my mind over the years, but it’s never felt right to note them down. I’m afraid, I think, of writing something set in Australia but filling it with plants from other places while the plants from this country are still waiting to tell me their stories.

So for now, I water my colourful kangaroo paw on warm days and just listen. Listen to the Freo Doctor blowing through the trees, to red wattlebirds feeding among the blooms, and to my current WIP calling to me from afar.

Writing update

Currently cleaning up some key chapters in The Guy from the Wedding. I think the hardest part about this manuscript has been getting the tone right. While writing the first version of the first draft it sounded like women's fiction, but the second version of the first draft was starting to sound like romantic suspense. This revised draft, however, is sounding more like how I'm hoping it'll turn out: an introspective contemporary romance.