We recently completed the second year of our fabulous Habitat Heroes project on Merri Creek in Fawkner. Eight community events were held including a community planting with 78 attendees, regular bird surveys, a threatened species talk at the Fawkner Library, and field excursions with students from Pascoe Vale Girls Secondary College and Fawkner’s Darul Ulum Girls' School. All of this great work was supported by a grant the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust. 

MCMC has cracked some of the Plains Yam Daisy’s ‘lifecycle code’, expanded its Merri Creek populations and prepared the way for others to follow.
We learnt that on the Merri Creek:
•    plants go dormant during late summer dry periods and regrow rapidly following fires and autumn rains;
•    flowers and seed are mainly produced in autumn with a second flowering peak in early summer;
•    plants are generally short lived in cultivation but appear to have an indefinite lifespan in the wild; and
•    seedlings germinate rapidly following autumn rains when they are vulnerable to slugs and trampling by kangaroos but that copper tape barriers and chicken wire cages are an effective protection.

Download the full details here.

MCMC has produced a new leaflet on responsible dog ownership as part of a bushland restoration project based in Preston and Thornbury - funded by Melbourne Water Community Grants. The leaflet outlines how dogs can be managed along the Merri Creek in ways that support local wildlife and ensure that volunteers and park workers can avoid the ‘yuk’ factor.

Top Ten plants for a local indigenous garden

Are you keen to have indigenous plants in your garden and to contribute to local biodiversity of the Merri?  Here are our top ten plants.  We've chosen them because of their:

• attractive foliage, form and flower
• ease of cultivation
• adaptability to a wide range of conditions
• size - none are too large or wide for a small garden
• good value for attracting wildlife
• ready cultivation by seed, cutting or division

The story of the Plains Yam Daisy links us to thousands of years of this land’s traditional custodianship and to conservation challenges facing current and future generations. In May 2014, a community survey added another line to this story.

For thousands of years, the daisy’s sweet, fat roots were a staple food for local Aboriginal people. The abundance of Yam Daisy reported by early European explorers seems likely the result of the careful tending of the land to sustain important foodplants.

The introduction of sheep in 1835 broke this age-old relationship. On the grassy plains around Melbourne, the flocks ate the daisies and then dug up and ate the roots. Within a few years the daisy was decimated. Detailed knowledge around this plant disappeared along with the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their land, their language and their traditional way of life. 

The lost Aboriginal knowledge might have shed light on the botanical puzzle facing scientists in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 1800, different forms of yam daisy had been collected and named from different parts of the landscape in Australia and New Zealand. In the 1970s, when fresh collections of plants were made, it was discovered that a skinny-flowered kind once found across the basalt plains north and west of Melbourne was now extremely rare …and, it was getting rarer.

The Ecological Restoration Team

The Ecological Restoration Team manages and restores native vegetation along Merri Creek. Team members are native vegetation management practitioners who generally have qualifications in natural resource management or a related environmental field.

Key Tasks and the volunteering day

The focus of the teams' work is regeneration and restoration of indigenous vegetation, generally within public parklands. Works typically involve weed control (manual and chemical treatments) and planting (during autumn and winter), as well as other related activities such as litter removal, fencing, pruning and trail maintenance. On a day-to-day basis, the team usually works in groups of three to four staff, beginning the day at our works depot (2 Lee St Brunswick East). We start early and work all day in the field, usually quite strenuously.

The volunteer experience with the Ecological Restoration Team is most suited to students and graduates in a natural resource management related field. We also encourage those who would like to 'try out' their interest in this field of work, or those from other industries who would like to gain an insight into our work, or want to contribute to the Merri Creek's restoration. We try to be flexible to accommodate volunteers' needs; however flexibility and capacity to host volunteers may be limited at times because we have to meet our workplace commitments.

Below is an outline of the day-to-day operation of the team, what we provide and what volunteers need to bring along.