Grazing with Greengaged

My lunch today!

Please click on any of the images for a better view.

Last week I got to live out a little fantasy and play Nigella (without any gratuitous fluttering of the mascara) with some new friends, a gathering of like-minded horticulturalists. I intended to share some off-the-beaten-track type of edibles, and decided that the Nigella method would be a good way to add context to what might otherwise have been an unappetizing parade of greens and weeds. Taking inspiration from my tame chef, I grabbed a huge plate, knocked the snow from the borage flowers, pulled a few edible weeds, and in a completely random and opportunistic manner, came up with this salad. (Arranged, as is my wont, in plant family groups).

First I attempted a stumbling outline of my thoughts on the food we were to eat, which I'll try and make more succinct here.

Diversity is key. Without access to your own plot it can be difficult to find and afford to eat a wide variety of foods. Here, we walk out the back door and gather up to 20 different green things, from herbs to salad greens in the back wilderness. Much of it is self sown, some of it is what is often called 'weeds'. I am no nutritionist, but it seems to make sense to me that eating a wide variety of foods, as fresh as possible, is the best way to nourish our bodies.

Environment is one of our other big motivators. We enjoy breathing, so we want to take care of our planet. Every little thing we harvest means a little less fossil fuel, a little less packaging and a little less time in the supermarket neon, being tempted to buy more stuff we don't need.

Reducing waste. If you waste less you save money and work, and lessen your load on the environment. And you can find some taste sensations along the way! Just look at the weeds and bolting plants below.

French sorrel

POLYGONACEAE:  

Red dock. I mostly use this because it is stunning to look at. It is slightly astringent, but young leaves are tender and mildly flavoured. See the picture at the top of the page, it's the leaf with the rather fetching maroon veins.

French sorrel. Spring is the time to enjoy this zingy green. The newly shot, tangy leaves are wonderful straight from the garden. Later in the season they can become a little intense and are delicious cooked into a tasty, but mildly ugly, khaki coloured sauce or soup.

BRASSICACEAE: I used 3 edible weeds from the cabbage family, and some, often discarded, buds and flowers from bolting rocket and mustard greens, and a most noble representative of the family, wasabi leaves.

Shepherd's purse

Shepherd's purse. The young leaves of this plant were described by another new friend as 'agreeably hairy'. The leaves have a robust flavour, but are not challenging like some of their cousins.

Landcress. If shepherd's purse is mild, this treasure occupies the other end of the scale. It is earthy, pungent and hot. But young leaves are crisp and juicy with a pleasant kick. One of the salad eaters there suggested leaving pungent leaves to soak in cool water to leach out some of the kick. Something to try for the next salad!

Flickweed, Cardamine sp.

Flickweed. The bane of the nurseryman and the tidy gardener's life, this little weed has the ability to launch its tiny seeds great distances with its little, spring-loaded seed capsules. But when it is young and lush, the tips of flowering stems and unripe seed pods are pretty on the plate, and pleasant to eat. But don't plant any on purpose, you'll regret it!

Wasabi. As well as the famous paste made from the grated rhizome of the plant, wasabi leaves and stems are delicious. Juicy and with a wonderful whisper of wasabi kick. More wasabi talk here!

 

Rocket buds and flowers

 




Rocket and mustard flowers and buds. Often when crops are bolting we yank them out. But this shortens our harvest, and we miss out on the pleasure of a floral feast! Right now, before aphids strike, they are a delight to nibble on, as you wander about in the garden deciding which job to tackle next. Rocket flowers are faintly rockety and sweet, and have more texture than you'd imagine. Very nice!

CHENOPODIACEAE:

Orach seedlings

Purple orach sprouts: Many plants have naturalised in my garden, and one I really get good use from is the purple orach. It is self sown from seedlings planted a few years ago. It germinates in early Spring and is tasty right from its very tiny beginning. Our salad tonight included the thinnings from my patch, normally discarded, but if gathered carefully, it is easy to pinch off dirty roots and rinse and eat the whole, tiny, pretty plant. As it grows, young leaves and tips can be enjoyed raw, older leaves can be briefly cooked, and flower buds are great quickly blanched, or wilted in garlicy, herby butter.  












APIACEAE:

Mitsuba, or Japanese parsley. This is a lovely, mild, slightly astringent herb. Apparently used in Japan in savoury custards (which I've found is a great way to get to know the flavours of any new herb) and mild broths, cooked very briefly. Choose young, shiny leaves for your salad and throw them in whole.


PORTULACACEAE:
 

Miners lettuce

Miners lettuce. My kids and I love it, chooks can eat, it will put on a wonderful show of teensy edible, white flowers, encircled by a leaf to bring some glamour to the Spring barbecue table, and it comes up in Winter to feed us salad hungry gardeners. It's also reputed to have saved Californian gold miners from scurvy. Nutritious, delightfully pretty, juicy and refreshing, what more could you ask?  









ASTERACEAE  

Shungiku. This one I grew for the first time last Summer, and it has obligingly self seeded and given me a few lovely plants that have stood all Winter. The leaves have a savoury, almost meaty flavour and a feathery appearance. It's on the top left of my lunch plate, at the top of the page. Yum!  

CARYOPHYLLACEAE  

Chickweed. This one, I must admit, has been relished by the chooks, but ignored by me until I was influenced by the worlds very best restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen, and a team of local chefs at Garagistes http://www.garagistes.com.au/ in Hobart who are putting all manner of wonderful, edible plants on their plates. I hope Food Tourist don't mind me linking to their inspiring site! It's the one with the tiny white flowers on the right of my salad plate.

I scattered our plate of greens with flowers, pineapple sage and borage, and the tips of young pea plants, to transform a salad into a celebration of Spring! And the dressing. I used the magic trick of adding freshly ground pepperberries to an acid, in this case Meyer lemon juice and apple cider vinegar, and watching it turn pink! We shook this up in a jar with some salt and olive oil and bruised leaves of lemon-scented savoury, and drizzled it all over my big pile of weeds.

Pepper berries and lemon juice

I'll be at the Australian Plant Society's show at the City Hall, celebrating 'the joy of native plants' this weekend, from the 8th to the 10th of October, and then at Tas Farm Gate on Sunday the 24th of October with lots of the tasty things above, as cut greens for the table, and plants for your patch, so come on down for a chat about your garden.


Please let us know your thoughts, your favourite greens, or some you'd like to try, and we'll see what we can do for you. It's great to hear from you! And there is a post on local Hobart plants on the way......lots of them are sprouting up in the hothouse, ready to green our urban spaces!

Wasabi!!

Pretty and edible wasabi flowers and buds.

Down at the Tas Farm Gate market nothing inspires conversation at our stall more than the wasabi plants. It is always exciting to find a flavouring we are used to seeing in a processed form, in its raw, living state. Here are my thoughts on its cultivation and uses.

Potted wasabi, note the chook nibbled leaf on the right. Everyone likes wasabi!

Cultivation: Wasabi needs a cool, moist shady spot to thrive. It can be grown successfully in both containers and the garden. For containers, get the best potting mix you can. I've grown it in a 40cm diameter pot with a water reservoir in the bottom and it does really well. You then have the option to move it into the shade at different times of year. In the ground, a well composted, reasonably drained garden soil is great. A South facing garden is best. Don't keep it overly wet, still water will suffocate the roots, but give it some extra water when a hot day is forecast, and even an extra sprinkle in the hottest part of the day to cool it down. Full shade is important, even a glimmer of direct sun on a warm day can make wasabi leaves wilt.

It is irresistible to aphids, slugs and caterpillars. I use a couple of drops of detergent in a spray bottle of water to deter aphids, you can steep a little garlic in the water first which may make it more effective. The other major pest in the late Spring and Summer is the caterpillar of the white cabbage moth. You can keep an eye out and squish them by hand or use Dipel, an organically acceptable bacteria that paralyses the caterpillar but doesn't affect other creatures.

Uses: All parts of the plant are edible. The leaves are lovely shredded in a salad, the stems are delicious raw and can also be pickled in a light vinegar, I'm yet to try this but it's a traditional use in Japan. The flowers are a pretty addition to a salad. Don't over harvest leaves though as this can slow down the formation of the rhizome or 'root'.

In a year to 18 months the rhizome will be ready to harvest. Just scrape a little soil away from the base of the plant and check out the size, it should be about 15-30mm wide. Lift the whole plant and look for the little plantlets that have formed around the crown of the plant. Replant these and keep them moist.

Grate the fresh rhizome and use it fresh with sashimi or sushi. It's supposed to be best grated on a sharkskin grater. I would love one of these, but in its absence I make do with a fine microplane. This paste is best consumed soon after grating. It is gentler, sweeter and more complex in flavour, and paler in colour than the fake, bright green stuff you get in a tube, the two substances are really not alike at all.
It will keep in a ziplock bag in the fridge for a couple of weeks, and can be peeled and grated a little at a time.

Please get in touch if you'd like me to put a plant aside for you, they are a bit scarce here at the moment, but there are more getting established in their little pots as I write.

It must be love!

Check this fella out! The first, best Spring day of his holidays and he's done this. Double depth topsoil salvaged from excavating the nursery area, mushroom compost, generous handfuls of certified organic fertiliser (boy does it smell organic!) and a strong pair of arms spending a day on the rotary hoe. You can't imagine how exciting this is for us. After 6 years gardening with only buckets to move water, possums and pademelons helping themselves just before things are ready for harvest, and very little soil to work with, this possum-proof, deep-soiled, hose-serviced area is better than a years worth of Christmas, birthdays and Easter eggs all rolled together!

And while he's been doing this Elsie and I have sown loads of Cucurbits. Water and rockmelons, cornichons, zucchinis, cucumbers and Winter and Summer squash, in many different heirloom guises, all in their little pots ready to wake up, grow like crazy and fill our bellies with their flowers, flesh and seeds. And we've potted up 2 varieties of purple-tinged globe artichokes that will be ready for late Spring planting. What a great day! And tomorrow we'll start planting with those rainbow seed potatoes that are beginning to sprout in the shed.

I'll be at the Tas Farm Gate market, this Sunday the 12th of September, with my slowly expanding range of herbs and Tasmanian plants for sale, along with some Spring greens and herbs for your kitchen, and again on Sunday the 26th of September. Hope to see you there!

Beginnings

Borage

When does something like this begin? With the first inkling of an idea? The first hour of work to set things in motion? Registering the business name, or lodging a BAS? The first seedling to germinate? The sinking of the spade to turn the first sod, first order, first sale?

I'm going to go with now.

It begins now.

Snow dusted Betts Hill,
the view from my potting bench. Lucky me!

The hothouse is built, the possums are hopefully fenced out (not laughing at my efforts from the nearby forest!) and I've committed to a proper grown-up site at the farmers market for Spring. I've got a great job lined up with the Geilston Bay Landcare group, and have met some fantastic chefs, including my own wonderful live-in-chef, who have inspired me to grow lots of beautiful, interesting, unusual and healthy food plants. And I've got a swag of local native seed ready to sow for those of you who live in West Hobart, the Glebe or Sandy Bay and want to bring the local wildlife into your gardens. So here's some pics of what's happened here so far. Please pop on your optimistic, potential-seeing, rose tinted glasses and have a squiz at the soon to be fleshed bones of Provenance Growers!

Please click on any of the images for a bettter view! (especially the borage flower!)

Newly sown Tomatoes

My new toy for making up my own brews of potting mix with organic fertilisers

The mother of my, soon to be, Nettle patch.

Awakening Horseradish

A muddy helper

A planting fairy, very handy to have in the garden!

 Hothouse!!

Tomatoes sown include:

Snow White
Black zebra
Thai pink egg
Black cherry
Red Fig
Yellow cherry
Stupice
Leicter Jones
Brandywine
Debaro
Soldaki
George, the only non climbing variety so far, from a Greek market gardener near here, fat, delicious, field type.
These should be available as seedlings from early October (or earlier if the season is kind!) and fresh tomatoes from mid December.

I'll be at the Tas Farm Gate market on Sunday the 29th of August, the 12th of September and the 25th of September.

Sorting vegie seeds

Today I had my favourite visit from the postman. It was this year's order from Phoenix Seeds. The joy of mail order, little presents arriving in the post! And then another truck rumbled up the driveway with two ENORMOUS hessian sacks of seed potatoes. Unpacking these two deliveries was like entering a wonderland. The seeds, oh my, did I get carried away? 68 packets, when I already have a seed cupboard (a dead fridge, a great, insulated seed storage unit, just add mouse proof ventilation) full of saved seed. But I always need more, there are many little treasures that I haven't tried yet, and some seeds it takes skill to save like my Cucurbits. I grow them in shared beds and they are a free loving bunch and if you don't use techniques to prevent cross pollination you end up with a mish-mash of progeny that may be nothing like their parents. So I cheat, and buy fresh seed each year so I know that my squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchinis and melons will all behave as they should. One day I'll pick some favourites, do the hard yards to ensure purity of pollination and save some seed.

Sapphire, Cranberry Red and Purple Congo potatoes 

Then the potatoes! I found a supplier of certified seed from the North of the state who grows a big range of new and heritage varieties. I ordered two purple fleshed varieties, Purple Congo and Sapphire, and a tasty, red skinned, pink fleshed variety called Cranberry Red, Kipflers, Pink Fir Apple (my favourite even if it is odd roasting something that looks so much like a little baby!), and a variety I'd never heard of that is supposed to taste fabulous, Banana. Keep an eye out for these on my stall at the Farm Gate market from late December onwards. I'll be planting these using low carbon emission equipment, ie my own hands, so supply will be limited but exciting!

A wonderful thing about seeds is learning of the plant's origins and uses. A new one for me this year is Camas Camassia quamash. It will be a couple of years at least before I can harvest any, and even then I've read that the traditional cooking method takes two days! It is a North American plant, and its story echoes that of  a South Eastern Australian plant, Murnong, Microceris scapigera. The Murnong was once a staple food for the indigenous population of Victoria, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Tasmania. The roasted tubers were sweet and were a valuable source of carbohydrate and, according to one report, a woman could gather enough to feed her family for a whole day in under an hour. But with the introduction of grazing animals, especially sheep and rabbits, the once abundant food source was disastrously reduced. The story of Camas is disturbingly similar with indigenous Americans also losing a once valuable food with the introduction of European agriculture. The seeds of Camas need to be chilled for a period to trick them  into thinking they have been through a hard Winter, so right now I have a little piece of North America in my fridge. But I am yet to find  source of seed for its southern equivalent the Murnong (from a Tassie provenance collection of course). But I will.....one day....

As for the other 67 new packets of seed, and the 60 odd other varieties I already had (not to mention my unwieldy collection of Tasmanian plants), the question arose as to how I would organise such a cornucopia! Alphabetically? And if so, do I use common or Latin names, both of which can be confusing? Pumpkin and squash are really the same thing, shiso is also called beefsteak plant or perilla, and Latin names are notorious for being constantly revised. Or should I organise them with the part of the plant that is used? But with beetroot the leaves are as important in the kitchen as the root, and there are others, like coriander, where the entire plant is used, foliage, root and seeds. In the end I have chosen the major plant families to organise the packets. This should work for me, because many plants from the same family groups have similar propagation and cultivation requirements.

Singing children and 'George' tomato seeds.

Solonaceae, is the potato, tomato and nightshade family. It also includes cape gooseberries, tomatillos and another of their kin the cossack pineapple along with the Capsicum group, capsicums and chillies. The ones I grow for food are all frost tender so need to be started off in a warm place and planted outside when frosts are mostly finished for the year. As the fruit is the desirable part of the plant a lower nitrogen level is important for these. You don't want huge, leafy plants at the expense of good fruit. This picture is of my saved seed. I let my finest tomato ripen until it's almost rotten, then rinse the pulp in a sieve and let it dry on newspaper that I fold up, label and store as is.

'Freckles' cos lettuce.

The daisy family, Asteraceae, includes chicory, globe and Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, salsify, radicchio, Calendula and sunflowers. Many species in this family have winged seeds that are designed to disperse in the wind and germinate where they fall. To germinate them successfully they are best only covered thinly after sowing as they seem to germinate better when exposed to light.

Scarlet runner, Borlotti, Roi de Caraboi snow pea,

and Aquadulche broad bean

Fabaceae is the bean and pea family. Members of this family are wonderful to have in the garden as they have a relationship with a bacteria that grows on their roots that can fix nitrogen, which is bread and butter for plants, from the air and make it available to your plants. I often pioneer a no dig bed with broad beans and cut the finished crop off at ground level leaving the roots covered in little white nodules of nitrogen in the soil to feed my next crop, usually some leafy greens that love the extra tucker.

Angelica

If I had to pick a favourite family, it might be Apiaceae. This family is distinguished by its fabulous umbelliferous flowers, yes I know, a big botanical word but it's a big, intricate, beautiful flower. This family includes carrots, dill, coriander, fennel, parsnip, angelica, sweet cicely, cumin, caraway, chervil, mitsuba, celery, celeriac and Mexican coriander.

Osaka giant purple-leaf mustard.

Brassicaceae is a really diverse and important family. Delicious, nutritious and ever so varied. The sweet, crisp swollen stems of kohl rabi, the meaty, satisfying greens of the kales. Piquant rocket, and its punchy cousin wild rocket, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and wasabi. Broccoli in all its colourful manifestations, birthday-balloon-bright radishes, and the textural divinity of Asian greens.

Pineapple sage

It's almost impossible to imagine cooking without the aromatic gifts of Lamiaceae. This family is rich in aromatic oils that provide us with so many distinctive flavours. Mints, thyme, rosemary, sage, shiso, oregano, marjoram, basil in all its forms, savoury, and many, many others. Some species such as shiso and chia have large amounts of omega 3 fatty acids in their seeds, others like thyme have great antibacterial properties and make a wonderful tea to help heal a sore throat.

Purple orach

Chenopodiaceae is a family of plants that we should see more of. I have a self sustaining patch of purple orach in my garden. Like others of its kin, my orach is a drought tolerant, nutritious green (or purple!). Many plants in this family have the ability to store water in their leaves and the young tips of my first harvest of orach each year sparkle with cells full of water. This group of plants provides leaves and stems for salad and cooking, protein rich grains, and roots for food and a source of sugar. Quinoa, amaranth, beetroot, chard, huazontle, epazote and spinach. What a feast!

I've already touched on Cucurbitaceae.  Melons, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers. Little squash for eating in one bite, mammoth pumpkins that get sweeter as they're stored through the winter, another diverse and delicious group. This year I steamed the tips of pumpkin runners complete with tiny, baby pumpkins and curly tendrils. A pretty and tasty use for garden trimmings! I also saw, on a cooking show, people growing pumpkins with the aim of using the foliage as a vegetable. Another experiment coming up in our kitchen this Summer!

Sugar baby watermelon, Thelma Sanders sweet potato Winter squash, Parisian pickling cucumber and Kakai pumpkin, a variety grown for its hull-less seeds.

There are a lot more seeds in my collection that have been piled in a random box as there are only one or two representatives of their family in my collection, like sweetcorn, miners lettuce, borage and purslane. This Spring and Summer many of these seed grown delights  will be available for you at the Tas Farm Gate market, either as plants for you to grow your own treats, or as produce to have fun with in your kitchen.  I'll also have many others, plants that are produced from cuttings or division and some locally collected Hobart native plants to bring the bush into your garden, but that's a story for another day!




I'll be at Tas Farm Gate this Sunday the 1st of August and the 15th of August from 9am till 1pm. Please come and have a chat about your kitchen or garden!

East

In 1952 a pregnant, cosmopolitan, young woman from Amsterdam sailed with her husband and 3 children to Australia to live as a lighthouse keeper's wife at Cape Schanck on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. There she and her family were introduced to a new life of isolation, wood stoves, copper baths, self sufficiency and correspondence schooling. They stayed there for a few months, and then moved with their new baby, my father Marc, to Eddystone Point on Tasmania's North East Coast. My Oma told us a tale of the fright she felt watching a blue tongue marching through the hallway of her cottage. Imagine being a sophisticated young woman from a very modern city, and finding yourself with your family in the midst of gales, snakes, chooks and firewood splitting. She grew to love the life, but couldn't bear sending her children to boarding school, and so moved from that place of kelp and granite. l doubt that a father spending his first 3 years of life somewhere can make it seep into the blood of the next generation, but the East coast of Tasmania has a special pull for me. I am most content when floating, surrounded by waving, slippery bull kelp, gazing on the world below, or wandering for hours looking in rock pools, losing entire afternoons marvelling at the multitude of textures and colours in the Granite sands, examining flotsam and jetsam. And then there's the botanising......

Much of the East Coast is home to Granite in Tasmania. Granite derived soils host a variety of plants not seen in the rest of Tasmania. Many of the plants here reflect those of the Granite lands in Victoria, a wonderful reminder of our State's past union. Then there are rare gems found only in small, isolated populations here, and nowhere else in the world. In my meanders there I have also seen strange forms of otherwise common plants. Blackwoods with giant 'leaves'. Trigger Plants and Pratias with white flowers. Wonderful, unique things that are worthy of conservation in their own right.

For indigenous Tasmanians this is a land of plenty, and for those of us who have come later it has proved to be the same. Every Summer my mother would miraculously squeeze 2 weeks worth of food, clothes and entertainment into our Kingswood, and off we would go. Cosy Corner in the Bay of Fires was our prime destination. Snorkelling for abalone, armed with a screwdriver and wearing a woolly jumper in the absence of a wetsuit, or walking the shores of the lagoons seeking additions for my macabre skull collection while my parents fished. I remember my first encounter with a Kangaroo Apple, Solanum laciniatum, there, being enticed by its tomato-like features, but discouraged by wary adults who didn't know how to deal with such a fruit safely. I have since learned the fruits can be buried in the sand and allowed to ripen until softened and a deep orange colour, well away from ravenous wildlife and then safely eaten, but are toxic until fully ripe.

  

Hibbertia riparia, Guinnea flower and Solanum laciniatum Kangaroo Apple.

I had the pleasure of a road trip with my little sister Belinda and her friend Trish, to Waterhouse on the North East corner of Tasmania, where we lay on a carpet of Pigface, Carpobrotus rossii, as Trish showed us how to pick the best fruits to eat and how to suck the inside pulp from the fruit. While we were enjoying the salty, sweet snacks she spoke of her great great grand father, Manalargenna sending smoke signals from Cape Barren to his family on the mainland of Tasmania. To hear such stories while in such a magical place brings a feeling of connection to the land, its bounty, history and language, that I think many of us are starving for. Next to our pigface picnic was another coastal edible, Coast Beard Heath, Leucopogon parviflorus. Here it was a full sized, well proportioned shrub, but was laying flat on the ground. The strong, salty winds had burnt off every shoot that attempted to grow upright, leaving this specimen and its neighbours looking very Dali-esque.
This species produces copious amounts of white acid/sweet fruits, with relatively large stones, through late Summer and early Autumn, but you have to be up before the seagulls to sample the best. For the horticulturally minded admirer to germinate these seeds we have to replicate the processes that they have evolved to undergo. Such a tasty fruit was designed to be eaten, and distributed by our feathered and furred friends, and to imitate the digestive tract we must ferment the fruits, then wash away the remaining flesh and soak in an alkaline solution, then sow the seed and await the following Spring to see it germinate. To have such a lovely plant in your garden is well worth the patience and effort involved. 

Further South, I recently had the good fortune to be asked to explore the flora of this area with some guides from a new East Coast resort. I couldn't believe my luck! To share the beauty of these plants with interested people within view of the majestic Hazards, all in the name of work! The garden and grounds of this development have been landscaped with native plants grown from seed and cuttings collected from natural vegetation on or near the site, by Tasmanian nurseries specialising in growing Tasmanian plants, like my training ground, Plants of Tasmania Nursery. These plants will have a great chance of thriving in the low nutrient, often dry soils there and tolerating desiccating, salt laden winds. Many of the plants in the resorts grounds are common throughout Tasmania. They include Tussock Grasses, Sagg, Kangaroo Apple, Native Cranberry, Pigface, Running Postman and a multitude of others. But these same species can also be found in the Central Highlands, on the West Coast and in the South. Would the same species collected elsewhere in the State have the same adaptations to climate, geology and other localised influences that prevail here? The benefits of choosing local genetics for gardening and revegetating areas of this site are many. The unique geology and climate of this part of Tasmania would favour plants that can make the most of the low nutrient, mostly well drained soils of the area, that will tolerate the salt laden winds blowing in from Oyster Bay and have evolved to have relationships with the other organisms in the area such as soil life, birds and insects.

The resort building is an intense piece of architecture and looks at though it is waiting to lift from the Earth and fly off into Oyster Bay. What better way to tether, or ground such a building, and allow it to nestle into the environment, than to wrap it with a blanket of Nature. The use of locally sourced native plants will soften the contrast of the man-made buildings, roads and paved surfaces with the surrounding environment. They will frame the stunning ocean and mountain views without jarring the gaze, and support the wildlife they have evolved with and existed alongside forever.

Calytrix tetragona, Fringe myrtle. Coles Bay.

The dominant tree on the site, the Black Peppermint, Eucalyptus amygdalina, grows naturally all over the State, but in a myriad of different sites that face differing climatic conditions, soils, herbivorous animals and insects. In the North West it can hybridise with nearby Eucalyptus nitida the Smithton Peppermint. In the Central Highlands it breeds with E. pauciflora, and on the Eastern shore it makes babies with the rare E. risdonii, the Risdon peppermint. On the site at Coles Bay it can hybridise with E. pulchella, the White peppermint. Would it be wise to mix up the genes from these differing populations? I would prefer to err on the side of caution and protect the unique characteristics of trees in healthy forests. After all, why are you deciding to plant local native plants in the first place? To support local ecologies and enhance natural values? To help your building settle into the landscape? I have recently heard whispers of someone doing a study on the effect of provenance on the germination rates of Eucalypts. Apparently some species will germinate faster or slower, depending on where the seed was collected. I can only guess at the reasons for this, but it's just another demonstration of the uniqueness of each part of our beautiful island.

If you would like some help to preserve the unique character of your land, while gardening or revegetating, please contact us, either on the email at the top of the page, or come and have a chat at the Tasmanian Farm Gate market on Sunday the 18th of July, and Sunday the1st of August, 9am - 1pm.