By Tyler Wright
Friends of Kalorama Park (FOKP) are encouraging the community to get their hands dirty and join them in a planting session on Sunday 19 June as the group fights for the survival of their local park.
“We have Lyrebirds and Bowerbirds, lovely animals, that are just under constant pressure from feral cats and deer.”
The bush is fragmenting a lot, because so many trees have fallen down… where those splits are basically just turns into weeds and eventually there’s no bush there anymore at all.”
To combat this, FOKP is planting native trees such as Australian blackwood and understory ferns.
“We started [planting sessions] last November… we had to put a deer-proof fence in to protect the planting, because otherwise there’s no point putting them in,” FOKP President Alex Grunwald said.
“There’s big holes in the canopy now, from all the trees that have come down. So it’s basically just allowed all the weeds to really take over.”
Along with Sycamore Maple, both English Ivy and Honeysuckle are common weeds within the Yarra Ranges. It’s weeds such as these that invade the space of native plants and deprive indigenous wildlife of food sources and habitat.
“We’ve got an ecologist who works with us, and she helps with all that sort of stuff. So ‘these are the species you can choose from and like this is what I recommend for this spot’.” Alex said.
The planting sessions take place on a Sunday every two months as part of last year’s storm recovery after the damage inflicted on Kalorama Park, with a large focus on social interaction and morning tea supplied during the planting break.
“The one good thing to come out of [the storm] is the community has really come together. And it’s been very healing for people, as well as the bushland, to be able to do this planting work, and [it] helps with their recovery.”
The volunteers work closely with Parks Victoria to keep the park thriving, but Alex said resources are spread thin and they are in desperate need of new members.
“If we’re doing weeding or cutting back…we’ll get [Parks Victoria] to organize trailers, so that they can take it away, so it saves them from doing the actual weeding,” he said.
“If we need tools they’ll organise it for us, but they don’t have the labor to do a lot of the actual work that we do.”
“The bushland’s really suffering over this side because there’s just not the people to look after it and maintain it.”
