Journal of the Australian Native Plants Society Canberra region (Inc)

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National Native Plants Conference a Great Success

By Stephen Saunders, Retiring President, ANPSCanberra - words and photos


Australian Native Plants Society Australia (ANPSA) Conference — Melbourne October 2024

As ANPS Canberra delegate, I attended the ANPSA Meetings, and subsequent ANPSA Biennial Conference, at The Round, Nunawading, in Melbourne.

The ANPSA Executive responsibilities now shift from NSW to Victoria, with SA tapped to organise Biennial 2026.

The sold-out 2024 Conference, Gardens for Life, offered 28 presentations over three days, with a choice of excursions on the other two days.

Congratulations to APS Victoria on a great show, for policy wonks, botany buffs and horticulturalists alike.

This event would have graced any major city. The community contributions of our native-flora experts and activists should be better known. Dr Greg Moore captivated the crowd with his Urban Forests presentation.

Tree-canopy and nature-reserve distribution is highly unequal across Melbourne. Improving this is an uphill battle, against hit-and-miss council and horticultural practices; poor knowledge of suitable native cultivars; changing climate; and urban sprawl.

Dr Mary Cole also made a vivid impression, with her Mycorrhizae and Soil Biota for Soil Health.

Her battle is trying to knock sense into Eurocentric agricultural (ploughing, fertilising) practices, which tend to be toxic for long-term soil/food values, with soil losses exceeding replacements.

Unless land-husbandry miraculously showed much more receptivity to uniquely Australian soil-webs and biota, our landscape could never be the mega carbon “sink” touted by government.

Main native-plants display, ANPSA 2024 Conference

Nadine Gaskell spearheads the Gardens for Wildlife concept, originating in eastern Melbourne’s City of Knox.

She took us through their personalised house-to-house approach to tailoring native garden “elements” and plantings that has made the project a Knox success, and now a statewide initiative.

Dr Megan Hirst and Russell Larke, also Matthew Henderson, gave absorbing presentations on Raising Rarity, another innovative native-gardening approach that might be adapted for Canberra.

Raising Rarity identifies rare but attractive Victorian plants for trial by botanic gardens, schools, local councils, and ultimately to be grown by commercial nurseries. As Matthew urges, “rare doesn’t mean hard to grow”.

Dr Annie Naimo of Birdlife Australia explained how to make backyard native gardens attractive to native birds. Spiky shrubs can deter “noisy miners” and favour smaller woodland birds.

Other presenters well worth checking out include Eureka Prize winner Dr Noushka Reiter (Saving our Rare Orchids), Adrian Marshall (Saving and Restoring our Remnant Grasslands), and our own Dr Lyndal Thorburn (Eremophila: a plant for all climates).

From the six bus excursions offered, I chose the far east and far west of Melbourne. At all venues, thanks to local guides who showed us around.

The Dandenong Ranges trip embraced three contrasting locales.

First, wet mountain-ash forest at Grants Picnic Ground. The Hardy Gully Walk being closed by rain damage, we made do with a shorter out-and-back.

With exceptions like sassafras and zieria, the native-plant species found here broadly resemble those of Canberra’s wetter Tidbinbilla forests.

Showy purple hovea shrub, at Karwarra Botanic Gardens

Karwarra Native Botanic Gardens derives from the 1960s enthusiasms and labours of Mt Dandenong Horticultural Society members.

The local council, which now owns and operates this tourism-friendly facility, had offered these volunteers 2 ha of weed-heaven to work on.

The present facility takes in 1,400 native species that have been found over the years to work well, in an elevated cool climate with good soils.

Highlights are Plant Trust collections of waratahs and boronia; a walkway of other aromatic shrubs in the Rutaceae; selections from Lasiopetalum, Epacris, Thomasia; some interesting pea-flowers; and a bolwarra (Eupomatia).

After lunch, we visited the new Chelsea Australian Garden at Olinda.

With $6m in federal-state funding, and a top-up from People & Parks foundation, Phillip Johnson has rewritten large, his winning (UK) Chelsea Flower Show installation from 2013.

Phillip (who also gave the Conference’s AJ Swaby Address) was on location, to explain the hard-yards, and outreach philosophy, behind this new garden.

There are 15,000 plants from 400 variegated Australian species. The rare and endangered plants include “rock stars” such as Wollemi Pine, also gems like Tumut Grevillea, which ANPSC helped to rescue from oblivion.

The garden promotes sustainable and water-wise design, with a bushfire protection system, solar panels, recycled materials, and web cam.

The showy central billabong features a waterfall and a steel waratah-sculpture.

Billabong at Chelsea Australian Garden, Olinda
WA octopus mallee (E. sinuosa) at Melton BG

In the drier west of Melbourne, flanked by an unprepossessing housing development and an industrial avenue, Melton Botanic Garden couldn’t be more different.

Alongside thematic plantings of indigenous and exotic species, it holds a remarkable eucalypt (mallee) collection from southern WA mainly, also SA.

It’s a rare east-coast park where you can really appreciate these mallee variations. Quirked by (dryland) evolution, with weird and colourful fruits (gumnuts) little resembling most other plant species on earth.

Like Karwarra, Melton hosts a native-plant nursery. Time enough to spec an (unfamiliar) grey-leaved WA Eremophila for our Canberra front garden, where they cope surprisingly well.

Instead of decamping via Melton Railway Station, inertia left me on the return-bus back east.

Mistake — I’d forgotten the 25km of Situation Normal. The afternoon M8/M1 tortoise-crawl, both sides of the CBD.

This ordeal brought on unbidden thoughts. The elite and governmental consensus is that Melbourne must be inflated, from its already-hefty 5m to a “vibrant” 8m and more.

For all the ingenuity of Melbourne’s native-plant and native-garden innovators, the city’s overall proportions of tree canopy and green amenity can only go backwards.

(Go to hyperlinks, for extra info)


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