frogs, developers and cartoons

Growling Grass Frog (Wikipedia)

How to get the balance right?

In Melbourne one current issue is Frogs versus Developers. On one side is an endangered frog species, supported by the conservation lobby. On the other side are developers, keen to convert green spaces into more housing for the city's growing population.  The urban area sprawls and sprawls, and frogs and other wildlife find themselves in an ecosystem inhospitable for their survival.

Is a compromise possible between the frog supporters and the developers? Or is it a zero sum game? Do the developers even understand why the growling grass frog matters?  Is it a conflict of basic values?

There's a lot of money at stake.  The state government supports the developers. They argue that 1. the frog isn't really endangered and 2. if the present policy is rejected, it will cause land prices to rise.

The fierce lobbying and debate continue ...  go, frogs.

Balance? by Julio Carrion Cueva, from Peru

Thirsty Earth, by Miguel Villalba Sanchez (Elchicotriste)
from Spain 

Both of these cartoonists are part of  cartoonmovement.com - a global network of political cartoonists who believe in and illustrate that ...  

There is more than one truth.

slow garden tool for slow gardener

I was running late. It was nearly 9am. But I hadn't once been in the garden all day. Then I noticed there were some veggie peelings in the compost bin in the kitchen...

Walking along the path to the compost heap I noticed a weed. Not just any weed, but the supremely efficient and clever oxalis with its multiple bulbs and bulblets loosely attached to the roots, just hoping you'll pull on the leaves aboveground so they can drop off and start new lives separate from their parent plant.

I didn't really have time to walk to the shed and get the tool I usually use to carefully prise the earth away so weeds can be lifted holus bolus. I looked around and saw lots of mulch consisting of partially decomposed leaves and twigs.


That was my ah-ha moment when I became a garden tool forager, no longer mindlessly dependent on the commercial garden tool industry!


I picked up a stick and used it as a digging stick, just as countless Australian Aborigines and other people in the world have done for centuries.  And it worked. That particular specimen was removed successfully, with none of its smartypants bulblets left to continue the battle for survival of their species.

painted digging stick...

 bought on a visit to Finke Aboriginal Community in the Northern Territory. 

Finke Aboriginal Community is also known as Atapula.

one of my digging sticks

posts I won't write

Since I started the blog I've been collecting information to use in posts. The collection grows but there always seems to be something more urgent and immediate to write about.  And the scraps of paper and notes on my computer nag at me, demanding recognition.

In an attempt to stop their nagging, I will list some of them in this post and then dispose of them - mentally (hopefully), physically (probably) and emotionally (possibly).

1.  Vertical gardens
2.  The story of Elspeth Thompson, gardener and garden writer who committed suicide in 2010.
3.  Roof gardens
4.  The story of the garden of Alnwick Castle and the Duchess of Northumberland
5.  Music inspired by gardens, e.g. Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Greensleeves, Debussy's Gardens in the Rain and Delius' The Walk to Paradise Garden
6.  Myths about the venomousness of Australian spiders
7.  Attracting Australian native birds by planting native bird attracting plants
8.  Microbats in Melbourne
9.  Bats and the Hendra virus
10. David Worrall and the Archive of Natural and Everyday Australian Sounds (ANEAS)
11. Endangered species
12. Breeding and eating snails (snailfarming.net)
13. Light pollution and the International Dark Sky Association
14. Using coffee grounds in the compost (groundtoground.org)
15. Edible weeds and flowers

garden bloggers bloom day november 2011

Lots of rain, perfect weather for growing ...

a thryptomene bush for a stick insect to visit

penstemon 'blackbird'

verbena rigida 'polaris'

valerian 

artichoke

forget me not

heliotrope

lavender stoechas

smoke bush 'Grace'

nutmeg geranium

opium poppy 

kniphofia 'shining sceptre'

santolina

agapanthus

lycoris radiata

Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting this meme.

mushroom power

We make up stories to help us understand the world around us.

We are part of nature. But if we are to keep our human identities we need to see ourselves as apart from nonhuman life.   In the case of werewolves, what is supposed to be separate - animal and human nature - becomes hybridized.  Animals, especially mammals, are sufficiently like us for this strange idea to be plausible. A human - plant hybrid is harder to imagine, weirder.

Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer is a highly recommended book if, like me,  you like sci fi / fantasy / horror genres.

Nature grows around us, upon us and within us in the form of microbes, bacteria and funghi. In this book, funghi are depicted as scary, malevolent and sinister.

A long time ago a city was razed to the ground and its people massacred. The city of Ambergris was built over the ruins. The survivors of the original city, the Gray Caps, were driven underground. Some people believe that they are in the process of reclaiming the city, using fungal spores and fruiting bodies to control the minds of the human inhabitants and forcing them to do their will. Others deny this as weird, crazy and impossible fantasy. 


Historian Duncan Shriek is driven to explore the underground territory of the Gray Caps.  In the process he is changed, transformed.


' The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements ... Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores ... Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him... trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off of him at every turn ... Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me ...  A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus... The smell of lichen and moss ...flesh penetrated by fungus ... every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated ... the flesh alive and prickly.'

In the real world, funghi are everywhere and scientists are learning more and more about them. I have often noticed a network of fine white threads growing on the roots of plants. They are mycorrhizae. They benefit plants by taking in water and minerals from the soil and sharing these nutrients with the plants on which they grow. These mycorrhizae networks can be vast, linking vast forests of trees of different species.

A scientist called Ren Sen Zeng at South China Agricultural College believes that the mycorrhizae also enable communication between plants, calling them the 'internet of plant communities'.  It's still a theory unproven outside the lab, but maybe the story of Ambergris is not as fanciful as it seems. Certainly after reading this book, getting a fungal infection will never be the same again.

This mycorrhiza includes a fungus in the genus Amanita (Wikipedia)

the fourth dimension

There usually seem to be gaps in the garden - holes or spaces in the overall four dimensional picture. Some of these gaps are positive, a transitional space. Other gaps are unwanted and unattractive, although probably necessary as learning experiences.  The way I tell the difference between the gaps is by feeling more than by seeing - a powerful visceral response. This feeling is what guides me: cut that back, get rid of this completely, move this there, move that here ...

It has only been 2 weeks since the open garden weekend. By the time one week had passed, I had already reclaimed the garden by making changes.  In the lead up to the public opening, well meaning friends and relatives advised me to stop cutting things, stop moving things, because the garden looked so nice. And it did, but it changes rapidly and by denying the effect of time, I fell into the trap of trying to preserve something that is inherently shifting and fluid. In other words, trying to do the impossible.

So ...  within the last 2 weeks, among other things,  I have ...

- cut the dead wood out of the Derwentia perfoliata shrubs, and shaped them a bit,

- dug up the two Grevillea Moonlight plants near the fence where the cubby was. This left the three Grevillea shiressii plants to grow to cover the fence and in time enclose the circular paving where the seat is. I moved one of them so they were all spaced evenly,

- dug up two artichoke plants to give to H who is making a new garden,

- moved the pink flowered Alyogyne - that was near the bare fence where the cubby was -  to the back near the other pink flowered Alyogyne in between the still smallish Eucalypts. When they grow together they'll form a background of grey and pink that I think humans and wildlife will appreciate,

- pulled out nearly all the self seeded crimson and white lychnis and put them in the compost. They'll be back ...

before

before 

after

- cut the three Adenanthos plants back very hard and moved the small one so the three are ranged evenly around the spot where the path widens into a circle.

before

after

- moved 3 Dianella 'Cassa Blue'  plants from where they were less needed to fill in spaces around the suddenly small Adenanthos,

I reluctantly decided to spray the Acanthus molli with glysophate but when I started, a small beetle and a spider moved from the back of a leaf and looked at me reproachfully. I stopped, and vow NEVER to use that poison again. I will cut A. mollis back, dig it up, control it as much as I can, but accept it is here to stay in the garden. And it's not all bad. It has great shaped leaves that the Romans used to decorate their Corinthian columns.

I feel and think that the overall effect of these changes are increased lightness, peace and harmony in the garden.