Category Archives: Ecology

Birds of Newtown

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I am fond of this photograph, because of its poor quality.

I find it difficult to take good photos of the birds that frequent the garden. They move fast, they move often, without regard for garden fences, and I don’t own a telephoto lens. But a family of noisy miner birds moved into the back yard during autumn, with a demanding fledgling, and I was determined to take their picture. Several times a day, whenever I heard them being especially chatty, I’d go out with my camera. But they were always too high and too fast for me.

One day I saw a docile pigeon on my neighbour’s TV antenna. Pigeons aren’t exciting, and it was too far away to get a good shot, but here, I thought, photographically speaking, was a sitting duck. I took three images of the distant pigeon surrounded by too much blue sky. As I pushed the shutter button for the middle image, I heard a whooshing noise, but only when I enlarged the photo did I realise that the noisy miners had photobombed me. There they were, tiny figures about to depart the top right corner of my shot. To show their disdain, they had glided past, not even bothering to flap. Continue reading Birds of Newtown

A gardening state of mind

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Gardeners often talk of their state of mind. Gardening relaxes them. It changes their mood or perspective. It makes them feel differently about their lives. Although we often imagine that moods and states of mind are attributes of an individual, these experiences of gardening suggest that states of mind are a matter of ecology or sociology rather than individual psychology.  The changed state of mind befalls the gardener; it emerges from their relation with the garden.

Indeed, just to take this thought a step further, maybe this is what is important about gardens. They are special places where people learn that what is innermost is also outside them. This is how they learn how they fit in a broader world that includes them but doesn’t belong to them. Continue reading A gardening state of mind

The fungal underground

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By Stu's Images, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17599821
Honey fungus. (Picture: Stu’s Images, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17599821)Th

 Honey fungus is a popular culinary mushroom, praised by Antonio Carluccio.  And one particular honey fungus, found in Oregon, is said to be the world’s largest organism, covering 890 hectares and measuring 3.8 kilometres across. At 2400 years, it is also one of the oldest living organisms. The mushrooms that Carluccio eats with spaghetti are the fruit of an underground behemoth, which is made up of vast networks of mycelial cords or rhizomorphs.

I love the idea of these secret organisms, and it delights me to know that some thrive, just below the surface, in my own garden. That is why I’ve had so many fungi sprouting recently. In fact, the stinkhorn that I wrote about last week was the fruit of the rhizomorphic network pictured in the photo that leads this post. And an intriguing form of life it is. Continue reading The fungal underground

A riverine environment

 

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28th May, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we decided to have a stream built in the backyard,  the landscape gardener asked two questions. What sound did we want from the small waterfall? Did we want moss on the rocks? He returned with metres of pvc pipe, rolls of pool liner, and truckloads of bare bushrock  and river pebble. He was finished in three days, and at first his stream looked as artificial as a water feature in a shopping centre.

‘Now you wait’, he said.

And we did.

Continue reading A riverine environment

Camellias

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26th May, 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In our garden there are seven plantation pink sasanqua camellias along the back fence, five dark pink hiryu camellias down the side fences, and there is one prostrate hiryu which will eventually reach across the pond. We planted most of the plantation pinks over 25 years ago, telling ourselves that we’d prune them every year. These trees are now up to ten metres high, taller than the peppercorn tree, the Chinese pistache and the jacaranda which complete the canopy. Each has a trunk circumference of 60 centimetres. Continue reading Camellias

The Australian bush fly

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To learn to take photographs is to relearn how to see. Whereas the selfie and tourist snapshot are confirming, the viewfinder and focus dial on a camera force you to reconsider what you are really seeing and how you are framing the world. They probe both the world and your unconscious preconceptions.

The focus dial, in particular, tests out relations of scale. Working as both microscope and telescope, it allows you to see things that are too small or too large or too distant or too close for you to normally see. As you test its possibilities, you glide between macrocosm and microcosm, part and whole. What is your focus? What is your detail detail of? What are you really seeing when you look at this or that? What are its wider implications? Dare you acknowledge a scale that you would usually brush aside?

Continue reading The Australian bush fly

Charismatic Mammals

24th May 2016
24th May 2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something’s been thumping on our roof at night. It could have been the neighbourhood cats.

Something’s been eating the succulents on the balcony, even after protective wire was put around them. It could have been a rat, perhaps.

At night, something rowdy has been ransacking the camellia flowers and shaking loose the palm nuts from high up the neighbour’s tree. It could have been the flying foxes.

When I have woken in the earliest hours of the morning, and looked myopically through the bedroom window, isn’t that a silhouetted animal I’ve seen, scrambling down the long branches of the ash tree? Continue reading Charismatic Mammals

Fungi

23rd May, 2016
23rd May 2016 Stinkhorns

One of the delights of our garden is the wild and sudden appearance of fungi. Of course there are always fungal cords, moulds, mildews and lichen on barks and leaves and leaf litter, but in the last four months, more than a dozen types of conspicuous fungi have emerged. Having done most of their growing underground, they pop up overnight, in unexpected places, and, if not eaten first by snails, slugs and caterpillars, have often died away within a few days. Continue reading Fungi

Borrowed landscape

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This magnificent jacaranda tree is in our neighbour’s yard, but it overshadows ours, just as its roots must underlie the gardens of the neighbours further south and west. After a couple of weeks of taking photos of my garden, I realised that I had been treating it as off-limits. Unconsciously, I thought that I’d be cheating on the terms of the project if I included it. Continue reading Borrowed landscape

Fences and bridges

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Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall is based on a tension between two attitudes to fences. The narrator, noting how his stone wall needs continuous repair, is struck by the intuition ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’. When he puts this suggestion to his neighbour, pointing out that the neighbour’s pine trees are not endangered by his apple trees, the neighbour rebuffs him: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ Continue reading Fences and bridges