A Garden of Useful Plants: Seasons in the Gippsland Hills

By Meredith Freeman

People have lived for many thousands of years in what is now South Gippsland, Australia. In the 1880s a young Englishman, unaware of the area's long human history, set about clearing forest in the Strzelecki Ranges to establish a farm. Over a century later, Meredith and Gil Freeman came to live on nine acres of what had become productive grazing country.

This book is about what is happening on this nine acres thirty years on, against a background of changing seasons—not familiar northern-hemisphere seasons, but seasons people experienced before Europeans arrived and the forest was cleared. This is fertile country, and many useful plants will grow here. You will find in this book ideas about Australian native food plants and practical tips about growing familiar fruit and vegetables as well as less familiar perennial food plants introduced from elsewhere.

But Meredith also invites you to explore with her some of the history of this area going back into Deep Time, and to think about other creatures that live here now: wallabies and wombats, parrots and honeyeaters, ladybirds and leaf-curling spiders, tiger snakes and treefrogs. She asks herself many questions, not all of which have easy answers. Does a snail have a heart? Are there any species, plant or animal, that I should try to eradicate? In these times of global crisis, what are my responsibilities as privileged manager of this piece of land? How should I plan for the future?

This book offers a different view of what it means to move to the country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Mar 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228864875

Meredith Freeman

For thirty years, Meredith Freeman worked in education, developing curriculum and teaching in secondary schools and at La Trobe University in Melbourne. She has always had a vegetable garden and kept chooks, and shares with her family and friends a deep concern for social justice, the environment, and the future of the planet.Since 1996 she and Gil have lived, farmed and gardened on the nine acres in South Gippsland, which is the subject of this book. Together they founded a community not-for-profit committed to supporting organic growers and the distribution of local food to local people. Their three sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren all now have a strong connection to South Gippsland.Meredith has a PhD in education and a Diploma of Permaculture. With her son Rhys she has authored a book on growing Australian native food plants in South Gippsland based on their own experiences on the land.

Book preview

A Garden of Useful Plants

Seasons in the Gippsland Hills

Meredith Freeman

Illustrators: Gil Freeman, Stella Freeman

A Garden of Useful Plants

Copyright © 2022 by Meredith Freeman

Illustrators: Gil Freeman, Stella Freeman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6488-2 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-6486-8 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6487-5 (eBook)

For Joni, Alana, Stella and Aaron, who for their whole lives have shared the land with us and carry our hopes for the future.

Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over.

— Piet Hein

What she taught me was that you’re part of this place, not a visitor.

— My Octopus Teacher

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement of Country

Introduction

1 December 22 to February 15

Seasons

Hot north wind and fish trap season, then and now

About place names. New Year’s Day. Climbing beans. Cabbage white caterpillars. Hazels. Time to eat a peach. Two butterflies and a moth. Wild. Common. A vegie garden encounter. Carrots. Spiders.

2 February 16 to March 15

Big History

Eel harvest and inter-clan business season, then and now

Inter-clan business nowadays. Fish. Frogs. Vegie garden rules. Agapanthus and other exotic intruders. Eagles. Eastern spinebills. Unfurling. King parrots. Blue-tongue lizard. Garlic chives. Cat. Rainforest. Dried beans. Stretching and sprawling.

3 March 16 to April 12

Forest

Thunderstorm and rug-sewing season, then and now

Wattle. Mice. European wasps and honeybees. Mountain pepper. Raspberries. Pawpaws. Magpie. Brushtail possums. LBJs. Ferns. Ladybirds. April colour. Have a heart.

4 April 13 to May 10

Birds

Morning mist and burning-off season, then and now

Bodies of water. Cauliflory. Caterpillars, nymphs and instars. Daddy-long-legs. Parsnips. Lettuce. Cockatoos. Roadside. Parsley. Witchetty grubs. A sad and thought-provoking ending.

5 May 11 to August 2

Animals

Cold west wind and artefact-making season, then and now

Fungi. Planting timetables. Wombats. First frost. Perennial onions. A surplus of mandarins. Hooray for broad beans. Planting lettuce. Weather. Carbon. Give peas a chance. Radishes. More weather. The house garden in July. Vegetables of the Incas. Fruits of the Incas. Roadside under control. Growing and eating leafy greens. Huntsman. What is a garden? In praise of citrus. More perennial vegetables.

6 August 3 to August 30

Very small things

Morning frost and bark harvest season, then and now

Market. Native to Australia. Brassica surprises. Snails and slugs. Pumpkins and friends. Chooks. Gnats. Beetroot and its family.

7 August 31 to October 25

People

Regeneration and women’s business season, then and now

Compost and mulch. Passionfruit. Geese. Grey shrike thrushes. Crows and ravens. Babacos. Rain. Tomato tips. White sapotes. Brilliant beans. Grasses. Seedling peaches and nectarines. Growing up. Late October snapshot.

8 October 26 to December 21

Food

Yam daisy harvest and men’s business season, then and now

Zoning. In the pantry. November in the garden. Murnong. Macadamias. Dynamic accumulators. Eggplants. A forest pool. Weeds. About water. Two November questions. Common garden skink. Perennial onions and onion relatives six months on. Snakes. Plants for fibre. When should I pick what? This year we grew our own Christmas tree.

Conclusion

A Garden Tour

Australian native food species

Exotic fruit and nut species, named varieties

Some birds we have seen here

Books—a shortlist

Permissions

Epigraphs

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement of Country

This book was written on the traditional lands of the Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation. The author acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land and pays respects to Indigenous Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty has never been ceded.

The author supports the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and gratefully accepts the invitation to walk together with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in a movement for a better future.

Introduction

This is how it is.

An early morning in July. I am leaning on the verandah railing eating breakfast. It is still, though the forecast is for strong winds later in the day, especially along the coast—which is thirty kilometres away behind me to the south, as the eagle flies.

To my right, sporadic cloud cover is letting mild, low sunlight through. I look left and southwest, across our boundary, the neighbour’s dam, and three more boundary fences (I can’t see them clearly, but I know they are there) to where friends live—their house, shedding and flourishing shelterbelts.

Around closer to the north stretches the Ruby Creek valley except that there’s no longer much of a creek, which has been dammed, but a reservoir, one of four that feed the town of Leongatha. Behind it is a Pinus radiata plantation which went in thirty-five or so years ago, presumably to preserve water quality and certainly with a view to harvesting for paper pulp. It slopes steeply to the north, the top of the next ridge, and the Arawata-Fairbank Road.

On our block, I can hear magpies and see a loose flock of currawongs. One yellow robin watches me closely from the top of a garden stake.

These nine acres stretch in a rough rectangle from the road to Ruby down to the Western Reservoir, but there’s a contiguous four acres which were our first point of contact in South Gippsland, running at a right-angle along the road.

A small cottage was already there when the six of us, young adults with a few small children, made our plans, but apart from four large cypresses on the bottom boundary, there were no trees. A hazelnut plantation, a good-sized dam and a long shelterbelt, heavily influenced by permaculture, went in during the first twelve months. A bushfood polyculture followed shortly after.

Gil and I brought our kids down from Melbourne on as many weekends as we could, staying in the cottage. During the week, I would sit in my office in St Kilda Road in Melbourne, staring at my coffee mug with its very poor picture generally suggestive of a farm, and long to be here at Kardella.

By road from the northern suburbs of Melbourne, it took under two hours. (Nowadays, increasing numbers of commuters who travel faster than we do and anyway may only go as far as the southeastern suburbs, make it in not much over an hour.)

This block came thirteen years later, after several years of haphazard exploration of Australian native food plants. The industry was in its infancy. It was then known as bush food around the traps; sometimes bush tucker, though the latter had more to do with witchetty grubs and a popular TV program than agriculture, let alone the agricultural practices of Aboriginal people.

Our kids had grown up. We would leave our city jobs and lifestyle, we decided, and plant a native Australian food forest.

The scrub country then—sometimes called the Great Forest of South Gippsland—started within a few miles of the east coast of Westernport, and extended eastward for some sixty or seventy miles, with a varying width of thirty to forty miles; covering an area of roughly two thousand square miles of rangy fertile country, with the exception of a few small patches of sandy messmate country in the south.¹

Here is a description of the area where we now live when it was pegged out for clearing in 1882.

I shall never forget my first impressions of this great forest as we went on that day. The trees towered up till their tops seemed lost in space. The dense jungle of scrub underneath, and here and there fern gullies of exquisite beauty, and over it all there reigned a strange and oppressive stillness, broken only by the notes of the lyre bird or grunt of the monkey-bear… Never in any part of the world have I seen a forest of such magnificent proportions—tier after tier of growth from tangle of wiregrass and swordgrass to fern-tree and scrub, and on to towering gumtree, giving a perpetual twilight by day and black darkness at night.²

We have a black and white aerial photo taken a century later, in 1983, of the part of this larger farm that eventually became our place—an upside-down L- shape. It had been a dairy farm. On the long arm of the L, the only trees are very young: a shelterbelt planted along a fence line and a trio fenced off from the stock in a corner of the paddock. On the short side, there is the small cottage and hayshed with a couple of cypresses nearby, once part of a hedge. The property slopes up on both sides to the corner of the L. On the boundary at the bottom of the short side are the four tall, old cypress trees.

When we bought the property, we lamented the loss of the forest all those years ago but were prepared to concede that we may have seen it as ripe for clearing had we come from England in the 1880s. The process of clearing, the strenuous work, the privations suffered so the land could be farmed are vividly documented in The Land of the Lyrebird and pictorially in other publications. Cypresses, mainly, were planted as windbreaks, the area was established as dairy country, and small dairy farms held their own until deregulation of the dairy industry on 1 July 2000.

As far as I was concerned in 1983, lamentably, it was virgin forest that had been cleared, flourishing since time immemorial. The possibility of people having lived or managed land up here in the hills earlier than a hundred years previously had never entered my mind. Maybe Aboriginal people had lived on the coastal plains and come up here to collect food or materials for tools, but that was the extent of my imagining.

While in Melbourne we had ridden the wave of enthusiasm for Australian natives which had begun in the 50s and 60s, and had been experimenting with native Australian food plants for a decade. So, in 1994-5 we put up a basic dwelling at Kardella and with a lot of help from friends embarked on converting part of an ex-dairy farm into a multilayered plantation—a polyculture if you like—of native Australian food plants.

Not all would be locally indigenous, but we felt that, given the history of this place, a forest of Australian trees was a project with some integrity. There was sufficient experience, we believed, within the fledgling native food industry, to provide the basis for a commercial venture of this kind.

Seedling Tasmanian cider gum, Eucalyptus gunnii, were to be the overstorey in carefully designed blocks, separated by double rows of blackwood, Acacia melanoxylon. Tasmanian Aboriginal people, we understood, had tapped the sweet sap, and we hoped to do the same and come up with something akin to maple syrup.

Wirilda, Acacia retinodes, provided the understorey, planted for seed. (Wattleseed is remarkably versatile. Roasted and ground, it can be used in everything from hot drinks to ice cream.) Then right across the block Tasmannia lanceolata, mountain pepper, and a few Clematis aristata or Australian clematis to climb through the canopy, interspersed with other local indigenous plants such as Prostanthera lasianthos, Victorian Christmas bush, Coprosma quadrifida, prickly currant bush, Banksia spinulosa, hairpin banksia, Bursaria spinosa, sweet bursaria, and Correa lawrenceana, tree correa, to increase biodiversity and bring the birds.

Then in 2014, Dark Emu: Black Seeds by Bruce Pascoe was published, and we were confronted with the idea of active land management going back thousands of years, including management of forests using fire. Bill Gammage had documented this in greater detail.

How much grass and how little undergrowth there was in 1788 manifests persistent and purposeful burning. The spread of scrub since is among Australia’s most visible but least recognised landscape changes.³

I knew that Angus McMillan’s disastrous progress through the east, combined with the devastation brought by a combination of disease and white sealers, had led to the dispossession of First Nations people in South Gippsland several decades before the forest was cleared; and I was aware of no documentation of the Strzelecki Ranges themselves before The Land of the Lyrebird was published in 1920. Was it possible that this piece of land, which we believed now to be ours, or at least our responsibility, had in part been open forest and managed as such for thousands of years, and that the Great Forest of South Gippsland experienced by those who cleared it of its massive eucalypts and ‘dense jungle of scrub underneath’ was the result of forty years of neglect?

I went back to T.J. Coverdale’s account and found that he had begun to ask such questions, and, along with very many others, I had overlooked them.

In the big sapling country the big timber was all down, and had been so for many years when the settlers first came… And although gum saplings run up to a great height very rapidly, it takes years for them to thin out so as to allow the survivors to develop in girth. When they grow very thickly together it will often take them thirty years to attain a diameter of eighteen inches. So that any country having saplings of a diameter of two to three feet when the settlers came must have been burnt long before Black Thursday.⁴ Probably the scrub was never all burnt at one time, but some portions in one fire, and others in another many years later…

The blacks were no doubt the originators of the fires, whether accidentally or otherwise.⁵

This book sets out to tell two stories, though neither has a proper beginning or end. Both have involved looking beyond familiar ways of thinking about any piece of land and horticulture, including gardening: whiting out some of the definite dark lines that have been created by using the only language I speak fluently, which is English—or rather, constantly reminding myself that what appear to be bold, narrow lines defining meaning, are really wider belts of vaguer grey, sites for exploration and emergence of new ways of seeing.

As time has gone on and I have grown older, these stories have gathered speed and urgency but moved further and further away from any conclusion. Of course, they overlap and interact. One is about Homo sapiens living off the land here, in South Gippsland, and what little I, a member of the species, have learnt about it. The other is about how, in my late seventies and having studied no meaningful history at school, I have found myself trying to piece together a kind of chronology of my world, ‘starting’ with the big bang but focussing on this piece of land as it is now and the plant and animal communities, including the human community, that I find myself part of.

Both stories are framed by a twelve-month cycle on these nine acres plus four (which is a dodgy measurement as the land is hilly, so there’s more land surface than if it was flat, and most of it is now treed again and houses birds and insects and bats and, hopefully, sugar gliders, as well as wallabies and brushtail and ringtail possums. And perhaps we have antechinus as well as bush rats which burrow—we certainly have those—not to mention the spiders and worms and other burrowing things and the bacteria and fungi and nematodes and so on below the soil surface. So the measurement should really be three-dimensional).

The short pieces that make up most of the book were not written in chronological order, though—it’s not a matter of this or that having happened in January of a particular year, for example, and the next thing a couple of weeks later. The earliest entry was written in about 2015 and I jump backwards and forwards a bit in time. However, everything I write about is grounded in a season at a particular time of the year.

Many good books are structured according to the European seasons, but that didn’t seem an appropriate way to think about the year’s progress in a place where Europeans, as well as European plants and animals, have lived for a mere 250 years. So, the book is organised according to an account of Aboriginal seasons which applies closely across the whole Kulin tribal federation of Central Victoria, including the Boonwurrung language group in South Gippsland and Westernport.⁶

There is a section for each of eight Kulin seasons, and after the conclusion, a schematic tour of the garden and a list of books. These have combined with places we’ve visited during the last twenty-five years, including the occasional museum and art gallery but mainly just places, and people we’ve met, to tell for me part of one story or the other.

The lines that are blurred? In particular, there is the line between humans and other animals. The darkness of this line fades off in both directions—we can tend to assume that though we may be animals we are the most intelligent because we have bigger brains and have a responsibility, even right, to manage, to control ecosystems rather than integrate ourselves into them. But on the other hand, it’s too easy to comfort ourselves with the belief that animal behaviour is not our behaviour—animals have evolved to behave in a certain way, but we can make intelligent decisions to go in different, preferable directions. Too easy to assume that any decision is right simply because we made it. There’s such a big grey area to be examined here.

Then down the scale a bit there are the lines between people who were living in Australia at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788,⁷ and those who arrived on one of those eleven ships or after; between the months of the year, or the seasons; between Australian native plants and animals, and those that evolved elsewhere; between organic and conventional agriculture. There are so many opinions on each side of every line, so many things to think about, so much discussion to have—although the stronger the opinion, often, the less free-wheeling discussion seems possible.

There’s a lot about gardening here, particularly vegetable gardening, because I’ve grown vegetables all my adult life, and growing food has come to be a bit of an obsession, but it’s not a gardening book per se. I’m not confident enough to offer definite advice, and anyway, I have found that such advice is not always accurate or helpful. However, I can speak readily about my own experience in this place.

I’ve been thinking about this book for ages, but most of it has been written over the two years of Covid-19. We have been fortunate to be locked down here in Kardella, escaping most of the miseries of the rest of the world and with extra time to reflect. While it is underpinned by a sense of enormous regret for what was lost two and a half centuries ago after the arrival of the First Fleet, and then again forty years later when this forest was cleared, it’s more about trying to understand that loss and place what is happening here, now, in that context than trying to reimagine any part of what was here once.

The underlying questions are questions like these: how important are trees and what should I do about them? How did this come to be here, this plant, this spider, this bird or insect, and, of course, this human being? How can it all fit together now, and what should I do about it? Given the dramatic changes to this landscape over the last 150 years, what plants should be encouraged to grow here now, to the benefit of both human beings and the environment as a whole?

Over the years, out of these questions, something new has been building on these nine acres and in this community, this locality. Some of it at least is good.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free.

- Aldo Leopold, ‘Foreword’,

A Sand County Almanac

1

December 22 to February 15

Seasons

The seasons changing, the sowing and the growing,

And the harvest brings an explanation from the earth.

- Elizabeth Jolley, Diary of a Weekend Farmer⁸

Sometimes the seasons shuffle themselves around. The weather’s put on hold: a trans-seasonal in-between time, suspended.

- Paula Green, Seasons by the Sea⁹

The Kulin seasons belong to an ancient, oral culture though they have been defined for and therefore limited by written English during the last few decades. There can be no single definitive account. I first found the account of the seasons I have used by accident, organised for the medium of print, in a book. Not that there isn’t system or order involved in thinking about seasons in this way—there’s plenty—but it’s the order of human life lived close to the earth, of sun and moon, plants and animals, food and shelter, rather than regular annual patterns of the northern hemisphere enshrined in the familiar Roman calendar.

These Kulin seasons allow for changes from one year to the next. They are most often represented in a circle and aren’t all the same length. Every year, the beginning and end of each season are understood to depend on lunar months and natural phenomena rather than arbitrarily, as in the modern Roman calendar, on the first day of those months that include the equinoxes and solstices (March, June, September, December). Most importantly, the Kulin seasons force me to think about the natural world I belong to less in terms of pre-set, definite expectations and more in terms of my own observations and attempts to better integrate myself into it. (In fact, the original Roman calendar, which had only ten months plus an undefined winter period, was thought to be ‘observational’. Its lunar months began with the first signs of the new crescent moon. To work out what day it was, if it was important, people must have had to go out and look, not at their mobile phones but at the sky.)

The first visual representation of Aboriginal seasons I encountered many years ago, in Darwin in the Northern Territory, was a calendar of seasons in the Gulumoerrgin language of the Larrakia people—pictorial, circular, standing strong outside like a sundial. Since then, there have been several more visual representations, all different because they all belong to a different part of Australia. But all, including the Kulin calendar I’ve been able to use here, are circular and grounded in and nourished by human lives lived as part of a complex, organic annual cycle. Although severe weather events—windstorms, floods, heat waves—are on the increase across the globe, seasonal changes themselves are rarely dramatic here in Gippsland and don’t arrive on a particular calendar date. People whose history here spans thousands of years developed patterns of behaviour that are appropriate to less definite transitions, signalled by how plants or other animals are behaving. So, the introduction to each season must deal mainly with what people do and how they know when it’s time.

However, events over the last one hundred and fifty years here