Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests

Our guest speaker at this year’s FOBIF Annual General Meeting will be Dr Cassia Read. Cassia is an ecologist, educator and garden designer, working at the intersection of biodiversity conservation and human wellbeing. She is Principal Ecologist and Co-Founder of the Castlemaine Institute and a FOBIF Committee member. She will be speaking on creating garden wildlife habitats.

Cassia in her Castlemaine garden

The urban garden in Box-Ironbark country: Can you have your roses and fairywrens too?

Whatever your gardening style you can nudge your garden in a wildlife friendly direction. By adding habitat elements and designing for alignment between your needs and the needs of wildlife, you can create a stunning landscape that supports the remarkable creatures of Box Ironbark Country. Whether you prefer formal or wild gardens, cottage gardens or bush-blocks, by realising the potential of your garden oases you can be part of creating neighbourhood networks that will support people and biodiversity in a changing climate. This talk will provide you with know-how and inspiration about creating wildlife habitat, whether you’re starting from scratch or adding to an existing garden.

There will be a short formal AGM at 7.30 followed by Cassia’s talk. Supper will be provided and everyone is welcome. If you wish to nominate for the FOBIF committee details can be found here. The meeting will be held in the Ray Bradfield Room,  Victory Park, Castlemaine, with access from the IGA carpark or Mostyn Street. 

A strong group rocked up for FOBIF’s September walk in the Fryers Ranges yesterday. The weather was ideal, and the Ridge put on a typically spectacular display of wattles, peas, heath and numerous other species—thirty plus species in flower, by some counts. Highlights were displays of massed Hakea in flower, Broad-Leafed Peppermints in abundant flower, and the rare Sporadic Wattle at the end of its flowering season. The Fryers Ridge has a good month of high quality flowering to go, so now’s the time to get out.

Christine Henderson led the group through a short and relaxed ramble which allowed Plenty of time for checking the details. It did, admittedly, end in an almost epic climb, but that’s the price you pay for wandering in the Fryers Forest, and all participants survived in more or less good shape.

Christine (right) amongst Sporadic Wattle. Photo Jenny Rolland

Our thanks to Christine for showing us a great corner of one of the region’s (and the world’s?) premier wildflower hotspots.

Photos below by Liz Martin.

Next month’s walk is also a wildflower loop in the Fryers Ranges led by Frances Cincotta. Check the website for details.

Are we being melodramatic? Maybe. Check this out:

That’s a patch of Hardenbergia, on the side of the maintenance track on the Coliban main channel, south of the Fryers-Taradale road. There’s quite a lot of Hardenbergia on that stretch: in fact, we chose to highlight it in our notes for walk 13 in our 20 Bushwalks guide. There’s also quite a bit of Trailing Shaggy Pea, and Grevillea, and Grey Everlasting, and Bush-Pea. Most of it now looks like this:

Someone with a key to the locked gate has gone along the race, spraying these quite harmless plants, for reasons unknown. We’ve enquired of Coliban Water what might be the rationale for the spraying. They’re looking into it.

This is what Trailing Shaggy-pea looks like when it’s alive:

It flowers from November. There are impressive carpets of it in the area of the Coliban channel…but not along the track, now. We’ll report on the reasons for the current bleak look of the maintenance track when and if we find out.

The Annual General Meeting of the Friends will be held on Monday October 9 at the Ray Bradfield Rooms, Castlemaine, at 7.30 pm. Committee elections will take place at the meeting.

All members are eligible for election to the committee, and we urge you to consider nominating. There’s no official form: all you need is to be a member,  get a member to nominate you, one to second the nomination, and your acceptance of the nomination. If necessary, we’ll come to your place to pick up the nomination!

The annual reports and elections will be followed by a  a creative and original presentation by Cassia Read on Australia’s most popular outdoors activity: gardening: The urban garden in Box Ironbark Country: Can you have your roses and fairywrens too?

More details to follow.