9. Reafforestation

Contrary to popular belief, not all Australians before 1950 disliked native trees. They planted them on their farms and along their roads and in their gardens. Local examples are the gum trees dug up from the bush during the interwar years by May Keeley's brother. He planted them on their farm. In the same era, the children of Oakleigh East State School planted an avenue of flowering gums to commemorate the dead of World War 1. A Young Farmers Club was based at Notting Hill School from 1927. They were educated in a landscape planted with a cypress hedge and mahogany gums. ^[56]

The efforts of Edna Walling are generally regarded as pioneering, in that she incorporated some native trees and shrubs into her plantings, but throughout the period of white settlement, native trees were not at all uncommon in the gardens of Oakleigh and Clayton.

Interwar tree plantings in gardens and streets and small holdings can perhaps best be described as eclectic. In Oakleigh, palm trees and flowering gums, prunus and oriental planes all appeared as street plantings. If flower beds were the fashion in gardens, many shade and feature trees were planted too, reaching a mature size that was generally hard to envisage at the time of planting.

In rural Mulgrave, conifers dominated new plantings. This was because once the native trees were removed for firewood, something was needed for protection from the wind. Rows running northwest/southeast would have provided good protection from the prevailing cold southwesterlies. But north/south and east/west property boundaries, field boundaries and roads constrained the planting along the same lines.

As to the species, winter shelter belts make no sense unless they are evergreen. Landholders could, and did, plant gums and other natives, for instance the mahogany gums at both the Notting Hill school and the Talbot Epileptic Colony. However, they found that various varieties of pine and cypress grew well and provided more dense foliage against the wind (but not necessarily more effective reduction in wind speed). The final factor was that pines and cypress were readily available from nurseries. Meanwhile, natives survived in strips along many of the Shire of Mulgrave's roads until the 1960s.

After World War 2, attitudes to trees began to change, and this may have had a lot to do with the suburbs. Until the 1950s, few Victorians would have worried about the loss of trees. Indeed, many had spent their lives clearing regrowth and stumps from the forests originally cleared by their fathers' and grandfathers' generations. The trees had to be cleared before farming was possible. Then they planted shelter belts and avenues along the drives to houses and shade trees in the gardens.

The eastward suburban explosion, which may be envisaged as spraying out from Melbourne along the rail lines, including the Glen Waverley and Dandenong lines, levelled trees as it went. The orchards of Syndal and Mount Waverley, for instance, were felled by suburbia. But the main impact of suburban expansion was to fill the already deforested paddocks with houses. Once green or brown and regarded as 'nature' or even 'natural', the spaces between the roads became concrete and brick and clearly not 'nature' at all. People began to complain.

Partly the problem, as Tony Dingle has pointed out, was one of positional goods. One house with a view of Scotchman's Creek was highly desirable. Once surrounded by 200 houses with a view of Scotchman's Creek, some of the gloss was gone. ^[57] Robin Boyd was a particularly articulate and influential grumbler about the 'arboriphobia' that seemed to him to accompany suburban development. It is possible that some, or even most, developers really did want to level trees, but even if they didn't, it was hard to avoid. It is in fact very difficult for a diverse group of workmen from the one who drives the machine to level the house site to the painter who puts the finishing touch to the front door to build a house on an average suburban block without damaging trees. Parking trucks on narrow roads, maneuvering vehicles and machinery, moving timber and bricks around all take their toll. If the area wasn't cleared to start with, it was by the end, even if all the builders were tree lovers.

Arboriphobia is not required to explain the most common net result. New houses = lost trees. Of course, if the area was heavily timbered before work began, trees might survive in the back yards. In Waverley this was seldom the case. Houses replaced paddocks or market gardens where there were few native trees left, or orchards with their regimented rows of apple and pear trees.

Complaints about the absence of trees following building are not hard to find. The Housing Commission, for instance, was criticised over Jordanville.

'This criticism comes from members of the public in all walks of life and appears to be due not to the design of the houses nor the layout of the estate but to the absence of any vegetation on the whole of the area which can be seen from the Ashburton Hills.

In the opinion of the Panel this criticism is entirely justified and the planting of trees is an urgent need if the area is not to remain a barren waste of houses and paling fences.' ^[58]

In 1996 it was apparent that the area had been reafforested, both by individual residents in individual gardens and through street planting.

Private Planting

Gardens are very individual things. However much they may be swayed by fashion, they are just as much an expression of their owners' personality and public presentation of self as the inside of their homes, and indeed their clothes and cars. In particular, the complex of private individual dreams and aspirations tied up in home ownership lends itself to the planting of trees.

Tenants may plant annuals or grow plants in pots. Unless they are altruistic in the extreme, longer term gardening depends on longer term tenancies.

Owner occupation generally brings a longer time horizon and the notion of planting for the future. In addition, 'well kept' and 'beautiful' gardens increase house values if and when they are sold.

Any brief drive around the City of Monash makes it clear that the investment of time and money and labour in the gardens is enormous. Over the life span of a house, investment in the garden may come to rival the initial investment of labour and materials in the house itself.

The advantage of gardens as spaces for self expression is that they are generally less expensive to renovate and redesign than houses. However, once a tree gets past a certain size, it becomes very expensive to remove. Shrubs and flower beds and lawns may give way to patios and swimming pools. Sand pits and cubby houses may replace vegetable gardens. But the established trees just keep getting bigger. Even when the fashion was mainly for flowers and lawn, large shrubs and trees were still planted, especially if they were fast growing, for privacy.

The initial planting decisions were seldom based on adequate information or planning. The impulse purchase of a six inch pot in a nursery sale might result in a 30 metre Grevillea robusta after 15 years. On a more modest scale, a liquidambar bought in a pot for autumn foliage was likely to be taller than the house ten years later.

Generally the fashion in the City of Monash was for a greater mix of European and deciduous species in the west and a progressive increase in the proportion of evergreens and natives as subdivision moved east.

As Tony Dingle has pointed out, 'eventually the suburban forest required pruning wherever it threatened power lines or house foundations.' ^[59] This stage was reached in the west of Monash at least by the 1980s. At the same time, there was greater nowledge among neighbours and nurseries and garden clubs of what went well where. In parts of Wheelers Hill, bigger blocks and a preference for natives meant that many houses almost disappeared from view from the road, overgrown clearings in their own little forests.

In February 1971, however, the reafforestation was still not obvious. Mrs. Cheree Blyth, secretary of the Waverley Garden Club, described her own garden to a reporter from the Waverley Progress. 'Like everyone else in a brand new house, they started literally from scratch... from clay and blackberries. Now, seven years later, the garden is full of interest, charm and privacy.' Besides roses, shrubs, potted cacti, flowers and a lily pond, Mrs Blyth had planted six large gums to bring back the birds.^[60]

The Waverley Garden Club was founded in 1961 and used to meet in the Syndal Progress Hall, Blackburn Road. The club's emblem was a rose, a plant that does particularly well in the local clay. The club offered spring and autumn awards for the Best Gardens in Waverley. There were prizes for lawns and committee members were associated with specialist societies for growing roses, camellias, dahlias, fuchsias and African violets. Competition for the Best Garden awards was tough.

'The standard was high as home owners were keen to improve their properties by planting shrubs, trees and roses around their well kept lawns, with annuals, perennials and liliums prominent.'[61]

This type of garden was particularly popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but from the mid 1960s an increasing emphasis on natives could be discerned. It began with concern for remnant vegetation, animals and birds. From 1968, for instance, locals were concerned to preserve the habitat of bell birds on the north west corner of High Street and Stephensons Roads. [62]

In 1965, the Waverley Gazette ran a story on a redgum on Springvale Road, near Fairhills Parade. The scar on the tree was reported as resulting from bark removal for an aboriginal canoe. The story received a lot of publicity, and a prize, and a refutation from Mr Russell Foster. He recalled playing under the tree as a child and said it was not a canoe tree. When Springvale Road was narrower, the tree was on the property of a Mrs Richardson. In 1855, she moved to Glen Waverley from Tasmania and brought three redgum saplings with her from Devonport. This was the only one to survive. [63]

Interest in native plants was on the increase and the Waverley Branch of the Society for Growing Australian Plants was formed in the mid - 1960s. They held annual shows at which visitors could buy plants as well as look at displays. Members of the Society also undertook a 'census' of indigenous native plants, quickly reaching a total of 300 species, including Prostanthera lasianthos (Victorian Christmas bush) and Correa reflexa. Both of these make attractive garden shrubs.

The members of the Society were also keen to preserve the less common local natives by growing them in their gardens. Rod Jackson propagated seedlings of Acacia subparosa, the Syndal wattle, and passed them to the Syndal South State School for planting. ^[64]

Knowledge of native plants increased enormously during the 1970s, partly as a result of work by academics and nurserymen and partly as a result of trial and error by thousands of individual gardeners. The work of the Austtalian Plant Study Group was important in this regard. Their focus was on growing natives in private gardens and the publication of Grow What Where in 1980 removed the necessity for much private trial and error. Besides soil and climatic conditions, plants were classified in Grow What Where by flowering time and colour, suitability for floral art, attraction for birds, butterflies and koalas and how well they mixed with exotics.

There was a widespread view in the 1970s that natives and exotics did not mix well visually. The result was often two camps - native gardens and their gardeners, who sometimes displayed proselytizing zeal, and exotic gardens and their gardeners. The pragmatic mixture of the two advocated by Edna Walling and gardeners like Cheree Blyth was temporarily unfashionable. However, in reality most home gardeners mixed natives and exotics, simply because they were not aware which was which. In this case, the 'natives' were as likely to be from Queensland or Western Australia as Victoria.

The 'purist' native gardeners increasingly favoured only 'local' natives. In this case, careful research was required and knowledge of the pre-white vegetation of Waverley increased accordingly. Gardens of this type tended to be characterised by an absence of lawn and denser planting.

Public Planting

Oakleigh Council began planting street trees and parks the year it was born. Fashions in trees came and went, but again, the fashion for natives did not just date from the 1960s. However, widespread planting of natives such as paperbarks, for instance, was a postwar phenomenon. There was a street tree nursery on Guest Road and over the years thousands of saplings were grown there.^[65]

The Shire of Mulgrave does not seem to have concerned itself with planting in the same way. In a rural area, perhaps they saw no need. However, from 1961 the City of Waverley was clearly no longer rural. In 1965 the City completed planting. 3,500 street trees. Species included liquidambars and flowering plums, but there were also a great many natives. These included lilly pilly, flowering gums, hakeas, paperbarks, pyramid trees (Lagunaria) and willow myrtles (Agonis). The City council also planted 1,500 trees in its parks and reserves, including natives in Jell's Park.^[66] There was no attempt to plant local natives. At this stage it was sufficiently novel to plant species like Agonis flexuosa.

The 1960s was an important decade for changing attitudes to the bush. Victorians, many of then from suburban areas like Waverley, began to campaign to preserve native bushland. The row over plans to sell the Little Desert for farmland was important in this context. Powell has argued that the debate helped crystalise environmentalism as a political force.^[67]

At about the same time, in the context of Melbourne's environment, the campaigns against planned freeways were also important. When the MMBW produced their 1970s round of plans for Greater Melbourne, the focus had shifted from freeways to parks. Five major green wedges were proposed - along the Yarra, Maribyrnong and Dandenong water courses, plus the western bayshore at Point Cook and parts of the Carrum and Edithvale swamps at Braeside.^[68]

In April 1976, an expanded Jell's Park of 127 hectares was opened as the first stage of the Dandenong Valley Metropolitan Park. Over the next twenty years, the MMBW's work in the green wedges, including Jell's Park, was increasingly informed by the views of botanists and biologists on the requirements of the 'local' native flora and fauna. The concept of a skeleton of native vegetation, including large, old, dead trees, as habitat for birds and butterflies and animals was developed. Pockets of remnant vegetation were not sufficient for the survival of native fauna. They needed linking pathways of native flora to other, larger areas of native vegetation.

Park development was no longer a simple matter of changing fashions in aesthetic appearance, or local residents' changing preferences for bandstands or swimming pools or golf courses, such as had influenced the history of parkland along the Scotchman's Creek from the 1890s to the 1970s. Now the requirements of people for walking trails and bike tracks and kite flying were to be balanced with the requirements of local plants and animals.

A very clear illustration of this trend was the work of the Parks department of the City of Monash in the 1990s. Creeks that were put underground through pipes in association with the process of subdivision were painstakingly reconstructed with earth moving machinery. The man made creeks were then carefully planted with local native plants in a well researched reconstruction of the creeks of the 1840s.

Trees as Social Indicators

It can be argued that far from being tree haters, the residents of the City of Monash have devoted much time and money to planting as many trees as they could. However, they were limited by the size of their blocks. Generally smaller blocks and smaller houses were associated with fewer trees. In those areas, for instance parts of Oakleigh and Clayton, where backyard space was in short supply, street planting was consequently more important.

The difference in the kind of trees that can be grown where there is ample space and the kind of trees that can be grown where there is hardly room to park the car was particularly obvious near the golf courses. Riversdale Golf Course, looking across Huntingdale Road to Jordanville and the Metropolitan and Huntingdale Golf Courses in South Oakleigh all present a spectacle of fine, mature trees in close proximity to residents struggling to find sufficient room to grow a decent olive or lemon tree.

Both the Metropolitan Golf Course and Huntingdale have vestiges of boundary plantings of pines and cypress, towering over the surrounding narrow roads. However, a striking feature of both courses is the large number of well grown native trees.

The Riversdale Golf Course has more extensive boundary plantings of pines and cypress and although there are natives between the fairways, the dominant impression is of specimen exotics, both evergreen and deciduous, grouped in the rolling landscape like some antipodean version of a nineteenth century English gentleman's park. The impression is probably not accidental, the prestige and influence of Lancelot Brown having a wide reach in time and space.

Trees are also important in highlighting differences within the industrial areas of Clayton and Mulgrave. The factories along Centre Road in the old City of Oakleigh, for instance, front directly onto the road. In contrast, the greater setbacks along Wellington and Springvale Roads have been used in places for quite dense, mainly native, planting. Differences in planning regulations were important, but as with private gardens and parks, ideas on factory design were influenced by the environmental movement.

In 1996, a trend away from reafforestation could be seen in some residential areas. Both in the southeast corner of the city, where large houses almost covered their blocks, and in the areas of medium density development where groups of units almost covered their blocks, there was little room for trees.

In the industrial areas, bushlandscaping and even environmentally friendly factory design were still fashionable. Overall, ideas connected with the environmental movement have had a considerable impact on the landscape of the City of Monash.

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