ABSTRACT
This chapter presents information about aspects of what may conventionally be referred to as Marovo "ethnoscience": the vegetation zones and useful plant species growing in the forests and gardens, and the Marovo people's land use, cultivation practices and soils. The narrow forested seashore is an important zone not just of physical confluence, but also of material exchange and symbolic reciprocity. Root crop cultivation is thus conceptually interdependent with arboriculture in many ways, and the environmental signs of sea, forest and weather interact to weave a dense dynamics of rather predictable agricultural seasons. At the present day, apart from fragrant and colourful plants, protection against magic and the attainment of a state of mana is fundamentally sought by performing the prescribed Christian rituals. In Dermic Loni's reflections on the making of gardens, the variability of soil quality throughout the Marovo area was tersely noted.
