Brunswick Communities for Nature

This campaign is a great way to promote the community group I am active in – Brunswick Communities for Nature.

We exist to help private householders plant more indigenous plants in their nature strip, garden or other green space.

2021 will be a big year for us, as we take advantage of the new Nature Plan to boost our efforts.

We sell plants we grow, or buy wholesale from VINC , at cost price. However, over the last few years we have succeeded in building up some reserves to allow us to:

• supply free plants to groups of locals who want to plant out a common area
• produce information materials on best using indigenous plants

Not all plants are created equal when it comes to urban cooling. There has been somewhat of a trend away from preferring indigenous plants to those with more canopy. However, indigenous plants provide habitat for indigenous insects and our remnant indigenous wildlife.

It’s an uphill battle. The main barriers we face are:

• weeds
• widespread lack of knowledge about indigenous plants
• resistance to green open space that looks wild or unkempt, in preference to a mowed lawn

Council’s policies are supportive of all our goals.

However, the widespread and ongoing misapplication of contracted maintenance works to poisoning and slashing is both a waste of resources and counter-productive.

We would like to see an overhaul of the maintenance regime to one that includes regular site preparation planting and weeding. Community tree planting (which usually involves understorey planting), shows that Council and the community can partner together to improve the beauty, biodiversity, drought tolerance and low-allergy nature of our under-utilised green open space.

We have proposed doing more targeted trials along our original corridor from Moonee Ponds to Merri Creek to address some of the barriers we’ve faced in achieving more widespread adoption of indigenous nature strips.