Despite an academic shift from dualistic to hybrid frameworks of culture/nature relations, separationist paradigms of environmental management have great resilience and vernacular appeal. The conditions under which they are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need more detailed attention because of the urgent environmental challenges of a humanly transformed earth. We draw on research in 265 Australian backyard gardens, focusing on two themes where conceptual and material bounding practices intertwine; spatial boundary-making and native plants. We trace the resilience of separationist approaches in the Australian context to the overlay of indigeneity/ non-indigeneity atop other dualisms, and their rupture to situations of close everyday engagement between people, plants, water and birds. Our ethnographic methods show that gardens are places where both attitudes and practices can change in the process of such engagements. In a world where questions of sustainability are increasingly driven by cities and their residents, these chains of agency help identify areas of hope and transformative potential as well as concern Keywords Australia, garden, boundaries, ethnography, urban ecology, suburbs Despite an academic shift from dualistic to hybrid frameworks of culture/nature relations, separationist paradigms of environmental management have great resilience and vernacular appeal. The conditions under which they are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need more detailed attention because of the urgent environmental challenges of a humanly transformed earth. We draw on research in 265 Australian backyard gardens, focusing on two themes where conceptual and material bounding practices intertwine; spatial boundary-making and native plants. We trace the resilience of separationist approaches in the Australian context to the overlay of indigeneity/ non-indigeneity atop other dualisms, and their rupture to situations of close everyday engagement between people, plants, water and birds. Our ethnographic methods show that gardens are places where both attitudes and practices can change in the process of such engagements. In a world where questions of sustainability are increasingly driven by cities and their residents, these chains of agency help identify areas of hope and transformative potential as well as concern.key words Australia garden boundaries ethnography urban ecology suburbs

The nature and date of the human colonization of Australia remains a key issue in prehistory at the world scale, for a sufficiently early presence there indicates either Homo sapiens sapiens arriving precociously in a place remote from a supposed African origin, or a greater competence in sea-crossing than has been expected of archaic humans. Stratigraphic integrity, the new science of luminescent dating and the recognition of worked stone and of rock-engraving are immediate issues in this report from far northwestern Australia.

I Ghostly fl ora?It is several years now since Jones and Cloke noted that, while there had been considerable recent interest in animals and society within human geography and anthropology, 'fl ora … remains an even more ghost-like presence in contemporary theoretical approaches ' (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 4; see also Hitchings and Jones, 2004). In this second progress report on cultural ecology, we identify and trace emerging trends in human-plant geographies. Human-plant interactions have been the stuff of cultural ecology since the days of Julian Steward, and many aspects of that tradition are alive and well. Following a previous progress report (Head, 2007), we are not interested in assuming an ontological and unproblematic separation between 'cultures' and 'their [vegetative] environment' as the basis on which straightforward 'interactions' or 'adaptations' can be analysed (Blute, 2008). Rather we aim here to elucidate the contributions of relational geographies, sometimes referred to as more than human geographies, to the understanding of humanplant relations (eg, Whatmore, 2002, on soybeans, and Robbins, 2004, on invasive networks).The challenges of global environmental change provide good reasons why such geographies should be nurtured, and why the notion of a clear separation between culture and environment should be long gone. Even a cursory roll call of the pressing issues of the next few decades -food security, biofuels, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, quality of urban life -immediately involves messy and malleable confi gurations of plants and people. Plants are fundamental players in human lives, providing our food supply and contributing to the air we breathe, and vice versa -humans have transformed many aspects of plant lives. Physical biogeographers now recognize that the vegetation patterns they are studying refl ect both deep time evolutionary pathways and the 'muddy and indecipherable blur' of human infl uence (Mackey, 2008: 392).At one level it is puzzling then that humanplant geographies have been less commented on than human-animal geographies. We touch here on several reasons. First, animal geographies have been spurred on by questions of ethics. Between plants and humans, there is arguably a greater ethical distance, and the unit of ethical standing (individual, species,

. The conceptualization of alien invasive species conflates two axes of variability that have become unhelpfully blurred. The nativeness/alienness axis refers to the presumed belonging of a species in ecological or social space. Invasiveness refers to the behavior of the species in question, particularly in relation to other species. The overlay of nation introduces further variability. Teasing these axes apart is important for more effective environmental management. We examine these concepts using two influential forms of ecological knowledge: the biogeographical and ecological literature and the vernacular experiences of suburban backyarders. Three case studies, the invasive native Pittosporum undulatum and two invasive exotics, Lantana camara and Cinnamomum camphora, illustrate the complex and contingent nature of human interactions with such species and the potential for human interactions to increase and/or reduce the propagation of plant species.

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