What Does Successful Landscape Restoration Look Like?
Posted on 20 May, 2013 by Connecting Country
“What does successful landscape restoration look like?” was the question posed on a recent Landscape Restoration Bus Tour run by Connecting Country.
Participants in the tour were given a rare opportunity to ‘jump the fence’ into well-established landscape restoration projects on private land to hear the property owners talk about what they had done, why they did it, and how successful they considered the project to be. The tour was led by Geoff Park from the North Central Catchment Management Authority who did a great job of helping participants to interpret what we were seeing and hearing.
Peter Skilbeck adressing the group.
The first site visited was a revegetated ridgeline on a grazing property at Joyces Creek (south-west of Newstead) owned by Peter Skilbeck and his family.
Peter told the group that he began his restoration work because he wanted to grow some trees and shrubs on his property and the site he chose (on a stony ridge) was the “hungriest bit of country” he had. The area, which included some large old Yellow Gum and Grey Box trees, was fenced off and sown with indigenous trees and shrubs using direct seeding about 12 years ago. Peter considered that the project had been quite successful because the plants were growing well and there has been some natural regeneration of native herbs, shrubs and trees in between the planted rows. He considered the most successful area of direct seeding to be where germination had been least successful -leaving more room between plants for natural regeneration.
The second property visited on the tour was a grazing property in Yandoit owned by Paul Righetti and his family. Paul told us that the farm was begun by his great grandfather, one of the original Swiss-Italians who settled in the Yandoit area. Like many other farms in Australia, it had been almost completely cleared of trees in late nineteenth century under a government condition that stipulated land had to be cleared within 2 years of purchase, or else handed back to the government.
At first glance you might not have noticed anything unusual about the paddock Paul took the group too, except that there was an unusually good cover of native grass. As it turned out the native grasses in the paddock were there because Paul is trying to move into a farming system based on perennial pastures and rotational grazing that is quite different from most methods of sheep grazing in the region. As a result, the paddock has a very high diversity of species, including orchids, mosses, liverworts and a mix of perennial native and non-native grasses. Paul is undertaking this method of grazing because he believes it is a more sustainable way of farming and will be good for his wool and fat lamb business. He also happens to be creating some of the most diverse grasslands in our region.
The take-home message from the day might be that how successful a landscape restoration project is depends on the objectives the land owner had when they began the work, and what they value on their property. Successful landscape restoration on one property might look very different to another – even if it’s just down the road.
If you would like more information on landscape restoration, there are some very good resources on theory and practice that have been created specifically for our region and can be accessed on the Connecting Country website from the following links:
Landscape Design Tips (1.3MB) – http://connectingcountry.org.au/resources/landscape-design-tips.pdf
Restoring Landscape Resilience (1.4MB) – http://connectingcountry.org.au/press/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Restoring-Landscape-Resilience.pdf
Landscape Restoration: Checklists and Resources – http://connectingcountry.org.au/press/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Landscape-Restoration-–-checklist-and-resources.pdf
iIam so pleased to hear there are different people all around who are taking care of the land in different ways – congratulations to them.
This sounds great. If there is any opportunity to visit Paul Righetti’s property again I would be very interested. Thanks for the post.