Eucs in the night
We wait until it gets dark. When the streets are finally quiet from the hustle bustle. Birds have roosted for the night. The only movement in the streets is the occasional silhouettes of flying foxes… its almost serene... except for the very noticeable fact that just 15 m away cars are flying down a six-lane highway. Its me and two other mates on the service road, just off the highway. We are heading out for some ‘guerrilla gardening’.
Guerrilla gardening is essentially just the unauthorised planting of trees/shrubs/any vegetation into unused, often neglected urban green spaces. An important detail I abide by, is that you only plant indigenous species. These are plant species that would have existed here prior to modern human settlement - before it was all cleared for human development and before all the roads, footpaths and houses.
So many urban gardens and gardeners are so disconnected with this concept, it makes me wonder if they have even had this thought before? Some people simply ignore the soils, the climate, and local site conditions. They get fertilisers, weed sprayers and mow lawns to the nth degree. They repeatedly try and try again to establish certain specific plants, and the whole garden is for purely ornamental values. These suburban ecosystems, whilst technically ‘existing’ are husks of the ecosystems of what would have once occurred here. So degraded and just functionally dead. Is it not easier to just work with nature?
Unfortunately uninformed people will then turn to hardy, tried and tested plants that can grow anywhere. Yet a devastating side effect is that some of these horticultural plants (that you can pick up at your local bunnings) are invasive weeds known to escape from gardens and cause havoc to native ecosystems. Meanwhile there are indigenous plant species, some possibly even endemic, that have evolved over millions of years, to thrive in the soils of your local area, and in the very soils where you intend to plant. Not just this, they are climate-resilient and evolved with the wildlife too. It seems so strange this isn’t the norm. Anyway rant over, back to the night...
I had us a Eucalyptus leucoxylon, known commonly as a Yellow Gum. In the trade Eucalyptus is also commonly shortened to just ‘Eucs’. This particular Euc however, had a long history. I had grown from seed, and had become somewhat attached too.
The full story starts three years earlier, July 2022. I was working on the Melbourne Airport Rail project, as an Ecologist on site. My main job was to be a fauna spotter relocating animals that got in the construction site. However this time, they had to cut down trees to enable access tracks to be built for the site compound. Here, three medium sized Eucs stood in their way and they starting chopping. The only good thing from this was that I collected the gumnuts from the canopy as the branches were loaded into the chipper. Inside each gumnut (the woody fruit of Eucs) contains 100s to 1000s of seeds.
To get the seed it’s a process. First you scatter all the gumnuts on a tarp and you dry them out. As the woody fruit desiccates the valves that were once closed open up, and reveal thousands upon thousands of tiny seeds. Best done outside, as your whole room becomes highly aromatic, and eucalyptus smelling (particularly if you got some leaves in there too) - but not that this has happened to me. It was actually quite nice at first, but then you get a bit queasy if you stay in the room too long. Finally, store the seeds in a paper bag in a cool dry place.
Two days before Christmas 2024, I sow these seeds, water, and before you know it you got your very own Euc. Fast-forward 9 months and suddenly its grown a lot and is getting pot-bound. I would plant it in the garden, but the problem was I already planted a Eucalyptus radiata, and there was just not enough space for both trees. So I felt like it became clear, there was only one real solution, and that was heading to the streets.
Now to the 24th of August, a Sunday night, me and the boys head out with this slightly pot-bound Euc, a shovel, and a 9L esky filled with water. Well first we stop and have a feed at KFC (it was across the highway and there’s gotta be some advantages to restoring urban ecosystems)
It’s funny all the things you think about when you’re deciding where to plant this tree. I’m walking up and down this service road, thinking, “okay, we need sufficient space”, imagining this tree 40 years from now fully grown. “I want it to get sunlight, but also little bit of shade too”, just to protect it from the harsh summer heatwaves ahead. I then imagine where the sun rises and sets across the sky, and also the shadows that would be casted by the other street trees (which low-key can be difficult at night). “I think we are going into La Niña or is it El Niño?” I keep forgetting which is which. “I definitely do not want to place it under a powerline”, I always hate seeing tree canopies cut in half. Then I found the spot.
The car had everything, and I park it nearby. Even as I go to dig for the first time, “Oh god, what if I hit an electric cable?”. The soil is sandy but compacted. Even the shovel starts bending as I am trying to leverage it out. The occasional rock (or concreted rubble?) comes out. Soon enough there is a perfect Eucalyptus leucoxylon shaped hole. I place my Euc, tickle the roots (due to being pot bound), and backfill all the dirt. I made it so there was a slight raised mound of soil encircling the plant, just so if there was any rainfall, it would not runoff. Final step was to water in the tree.
Done.
Thanks to my mates for carrying stuff from the car. It was a good night for us and a good night for the environment. I will try to give updates on this particular Eucalyptus leucoxylon in the future.