Not so simple Spring

6th September 2021

Spring is the simple season. It says ‘Grow’. It says: breakout, bud and flower, push to the light that lengthens each day, go to the warmth. Don’t mind the reversals to cold weather, keep going. Grow! That frisky feeling, that’s Spring – make the most of it!

Our times are not so simple. We are locked in, so don’t go out, don’t stretch your fingers toward others. And with the warm weather starting so soon in the year, beware of summer, advancing in increments, bearing we do not know what fate. In this particular rotation around the sun, we have learned that what we thought was normal is set about with assumptions we had not noticed until they were upended.

Blackwood in bloom

Still, it’s Spring, and I am amazed. The acacia dealbata is already on the wane, but here beside it is a fine-leafed acacia whose name I don’t know about to burst into flower, golden yellow licking up the plant like a new fire in dry kindling. In the Blackwoods, the big buds of flower are out, a restrained yellow you could say except that the whole of the plant is bursting, every branch, from top to bottom, an excitation of flowers. The Blackwood is an unobtrusive tree of modest stature, but it sure knows how to flower.

This morning, I went looking for Ovens Valley wattle I had seen yesterday in Barrm Birrm. Along one of the lateral tracks then up, here, just here, through this band of Prickly Moses, here they are, wending their way from the damp country above the cemetery, spreading steadily along the slope. Cascades of pale yellow, but, my deep apologies living plant, you are not from here. I must bid you adieu with the short sharp pruning saw that sits on my hip.

A small Ovens Valley Wattle

Deceased Ovens Valley Wattle, and check that monster in the distance behind it

 A few months ago, our Landcare group looked at our term deposit and decided there were better things it could be doing than earning almost no interest. We engaged contractors to poison the exotic wattles in Barrm Birrm, and in a sweep from the northern end, they made it almost to the cemetery. I’m out mopping up the stragglers.

After that, we will hold that line, year by year, each not so simple Spring, walking gently through the bush, eyes alert for the flare of yellow that shows the young seedlings, ready to discourage them …. with a firm tug that bares the roots.  

Easy to pull out when they are small

 Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

 

Signing up for another decade

21 August, 2021

I’ve just clocked my 69th birthday, and it’s got me thinking about what’s changing as I get older. I can do all the outside work I always have done, but I work more slowly. I walk down hillsides carefully. I take more breaks.

I pay more attention to what I’m doing. 

I’m out preparing the vegetable patch for spring planting, and I pace myself. The early afternoon sunshine hits the side of my face. The valley is full of birdsong, the wind is just the particular way it is today, lifting gently along the valley.

I think I’ve got more persistence as I get older. In Landcare meetings, the grey heads sometimes look at each other and lament: ‘Where are the young people? Who is going to carry on this work?’ Well, a few have shown up, but being old doesn’t worry me, because persistence outweighs the physical limitations of aging.

Looking after a patch of land takes a long time. It’s a matter of decades, not months. What matters is getting organised to keep at it. What matters is making the effort itself, not just the result. When I was younger, I didn’t think in terms of decades. I rushed at things, wanting a quick result. The land works to a long timeframe, and I feel mine stretching out as I get older.

I understand as well a little more of the way the world works. The reason a place like Barrm Birrm either slowly degrades or slowly recovers is partly a matter of what we do in Riddells Creek Landcare, but it’s also up to the walkers from town, and the trail bike rides, and the Shire. That gorgeous hillside of grasses and trees lies at the edge of a growing town and a growing city. More people use the place, but maybe attitudes are changing towards care for land. It all affects this place. What we do fits in alongside those other influences.

The recent IPCC report shocked me, as it was designed to do. I have committed to clearing the newly sprouting gorse in a gully in Barrm Birrm near my house. I spend an hour there every couple of days. It’s out of the wind in the gully, and sweet to be amongst the grasses and bursaria and fallen timber. This is not something that will stop the ravages coming, but the gully appreciates it.

I have to dig deep to get the roots out—there, got another one. It’s slow work, but I’m going to get this gully clear of gorse sometime in the next couple of years. There will be more after that, but I reckon I’m good for another decade.

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare ross.colliver@bigpond.com

What's good for the world

16 July 2021

The young stag is looking hard at me from the cover of the Victorian Landcare magazine.  I got half way through, and put it aside, in despair. Do you know the South African weed orchid, which landed in WA, spread to SA, and appeared near Bacchus March in 1991? It’s a small plant that looks a bit like a native orchid. Each plant releases 2.5 million seeds a year (!!), which can be blown kilometres or spread easily by machinery, vehicles and on footwear.

Add this to panic veldt grass, gorse, serrated tussock, blackberry, wheel cactus, tree dahlia, pittosporum, and to foxes, cats, deer ….. What are we doing? 

Sweet Pittosporum getting ready to meet its maker

My heavy heart wasn’t helped by Tim Flannery, the Science Show RN with ‘Solutions here now for the climate disaster’.  Despite the upbeat title, the future is terrifying. Next on the same show came an update on the fire season in North America. Terrifying. As we swing toward summer, I no longer imagine balmy heat, but the radio tuned to bushfires, and the smell of smoke.

At Riddell, we are cool and damp and a long way from the rising ocean, and have catastrophe-free time to keep weaning our politicians off coal and gas, shifting to renewables, and building strong connections locally, so that when the crises do come, we will have a web of friendship and support.  The deepest personal challenge is our own assumptions. Wendell Berry said it plainly enough:

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” 

A very good way to get know that world is to weed it. Get to know the weed trees in Barrm Birrm—Sallow Wattle, Cootamundra Wattle, Ovens Valley Wattle, Sweet Pittosporum, plus a happy little opportunist called Bluebell Creeper. All beautiful plants, that have migrated from the gardens of residential Riddells Creek. They shade out and destroy the grasses and mosses that run under the open forest on these slopes. So out, out, out they go! With the big ones gone, we can pull the seedlings by hand, as we stroll.

Join RCL members 5, 12, 19 September, 10-12, at 288 Gap Road to walk through the flowering natives of Barrm Birrm and do some recreational weeding. Or join Greening of Riddell first Saturday of the month, 9.30, at the car park beside Wybejong Park.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare, ross.colliver@bigpond.com

 

The weedy season

20 January 2021

I'm down in my bit of Sandy Creek, doing what has to be done with the summer weeds.

I've been able to avoid it till January, because of the wet weather. With all that dampness, and coolness, the thistles are late to flower, and I've put it off and put it off, until .... oh bugger it, if I don't get those thistles before they seed, I'll lose the ground I've been gaining on them over the last few years.

So here I am with my mattock, to lift out the thistle roots with the narrow end, and secateurs and chicken feed bag to stash the thistle heads that are too far advanced to risk leaving them in the open air. The carcasses I stack to be hauled away to the burning pile. 

There's blackberry too, growing briskly after all that rain, gorse of course, re-sprouting, and something I haven't noticed before that looks decidedly non-native, a kissing cousin I'm sure to the water-loving weed I've been targeting around the house this summer. Some serious attention from the mattock and I've cleaned out two clumps.

There are fewer weeds than last year, and fewer than five years ago. Dean Platt, the ecologist who first inspected my place and put me into the Melbourne Water Stream Frontage program, said at the time: 

"We just have to tip the balance in favour of the natives, and they will take over the territory."

The first three years of spaying changed a creek covered in blackberry to this sunlight gully of bracken and the sweet bursaria in bloom now on the northern side of the creek. 

All the creek asks of me now is this annual sweep to discourage the bad guys. 

Then it stays here, from summer into winter and rolling back to summer, living out its life. Any season and any time of the day, I can walk down to another world.

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare