I am sometimes asked how and when the idea of planting trees on a large scale at Lanark first entered my head. People assume there must have been a moment of conversion when I saw the light—when I was suddenly transformed into a farmer with an environmental conscience. But there was no such moment. The idea of large-scale tree planting came to me bit by bit in response to a variety of influences. For instance, Cicely believes that when I started planting trees at Lanark I was really reacting to the bleakness of the landscape. After all, I had not grown up on the property. If I had, the look of the place would probably not have bothered me. Instead, I spent my formative years living in a comfortable family home in Hamilton, surrounded by a large, leafy garden, so when I did go to live at Lanark I found the bleakness of the place hard to accept.
Cicely may well be right about this, but looking back now I can see that even as a young farmer I did have a concern for the environment, even if I was not conscious of it at the time. In 1959, for instance, I attended a meeting called to establish a Hamilton branch of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. I became a founding member of the branch, served on one of the committees and periodically went on field trips with other members, so I did have a particular interest in the natural world. Certainly, very few other farmers of my age belonged to organisations devoted to the welfare of the environment.
Around the middle of 1956 my good friend Graeme Gunn, who as well as playing football in Melbourne was studying to become an architect, came to spend a weekend with me at Lanark. The main house on the property was still occupied then by Lanark’s manager, Keith Fort, so Graeme and I camped in The Hut, which at that time had neither electricity nor running water. It would have been a fairly spartan weekend at the best of times, but it happened that this weekend was also unbearably hot. There were no trees in the vicinity to speak of, so The Hut was the only place we could find shade. But it was so hot inside under the iron roof that we might just as well have stayed out in the sun. We were also short of water. Even if The Hut had been equipped with running water, there would not have been enough water for us to have a shower. Graeme said to me, ‘What a bastard of a place! You’ve got to do something, Fenton. You’ve got to get some water. The bloody stuff falls out of the sky. Why don’t you catch some of it? And why don’t you plant some trees and cool the place off a bit?’ Graeme’s complaint registered with me. It was not long after this that I began planting the shade-and-shelter trees around the house that I mentioned earlier.
Another incident sticks in my mind. Soon after Cicely returned from England in August 1958, her father drove down in a ute from his property near Balmoral, which is between Hamilton and Horsham, about 80 kilometres away. It was to be his first look at Lanark, which was soon to become his daughter’s home. Cicely came with him. I was waiting at Lanark to greet them, and when the ute pulled up I stepped forward, opened the door on the driver’s side, where Mr Gaussen was sitting, and said, ‘Welcome to Lanark, sir.’ In those days I often called him ‘sir’. He stepped out, looked around slowly with a frown and said to me, ‘John, if you’re intending to bring my daughter to this godforsaken place to live, you’d better plant some trees.’
When it came to planting trees, Paddy Gaussen knew what he was talking about. Unlike most other Australian farmers at that time, he believed in planting and nurturing trees for their own sake. He had done this at his own property, Vasey Farm. He had made a special effort to foster the growth of river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), the finest of all eucalypts in that part of Victoria, by fencing off areas where they could survive and flourish. As a result, Vasey Farm today has some of the best stands of red gums in the district.
By now, my mind had been opened to the potential benefit of planting farm trees, even if I still did not have the motivation to start doing it. In September 1958, not long after this visit, something I heard on the radio gave me the motivation I needed. It was a talk on the subject of farm trees by someone from the NRCL (Natural Resources Conservation League of Victoria), which had grown out of the old Save the Forests Campaign to promote the revegetation of Victoria. I knew next to nothing about the NRCL then, but I was soon to learn that it was a splendid organisation staffed by dedicated people, one of whom was the man I heard on the radio, Lance Edgar, the manager of the NRCL’s nursery in Melbourne.
I was so impressed by the radio talk that day that I decided to go to Melbourne to speak to him personally. The NRCL was based at Springvale, a suburb of Melbourne, so I booked myself into a new motel at Oakleigh, which happened to be one of the first motels, if not the very first, to open in Victoria. I invited Cicely to come with me and stay at the motel, but as we were not married she would have none of it. She did come with me to Melbourne, but she stayed with her grandmother.
The next morning I went to the NRCL’s office. I arrived before opening time, feeling quite excited about being there, so much so that I took a photo of the front entrance, which I still have. I met Mr Edgar in the nursery. I bombarded him with questions about trees—which to plant and when, where and how to plant them. I came away believing that, where trees were concerned, Lance Edgar was the ultimate expert. He seemed to know everything about them. I felt he took a special interest in me, too. At that time, few farmers were planting trees, and I imagine he was pleased that a young farmer like me (I was 23 at the time) had driven all the way from Hamilton to speak to him about it.
I returned to Lanark not only with a lot of information about trees but with a resolve to start planting them. I also had about 50 native trees to plant, which I had bought at the league’s nursery. They were tube stock—that is, plants in tubes—although the tubes then were made not of plastic but of plywood, which is why they were known as ‘veneer tubes’. The 50 trees were meant to be a trial planting. The nurseryman had recommended 25 different types of wattles and gums that he thought might grow well at Lanark and supplied me with two trees of each species, the idea being that I would plant them all and compare how they grew.
As far as I can remember, only three of those 25 tree species were indigenous to my own part of Victoria. At that time, selecting trees indigenous to the area where you wanted to grow them was an idea that had not taken hold. Even then, though, I did have an interest in the concept. Not long after this I visited the National Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne and asked for a list of trees that grew naturally around Branxholme. (As I later discovered, the list I was given was not entirely accurate. There were two or three trees on the list—sallow wattle [Acacia longifolia] was one of them, I remember—that ought not to have been there.)
It was not until 20 years after this, in the late 1970s, that I really became wedded to the idea of planting indigenous trees by preference. An obvious reason for doing so is that an area’s indigenous trees will naturally provide a better habitat for wildlife indigenous to the same area. The trees themselves do better, too, partly because they are compatible with local soil fungi. It has been found that most Australian trees have a symbiotic relationship with local soil fungi. The trees supply the fungi with carbon, and the fungi supply the trees’ roots with nutrients and water, thus promoting the trees’ growth and ensuring their health. On the other hand, a tree planted in an area where there is no compatible fungi is likely to struggle. Just the other day I read of eucalypts planted in China that did badly until the cause of the problem was identified: the trees did not have the right soil fungi.
As suggested, I planted my 50 trees in two rows not far from the house, making a careful note of which species were planted where. The idea was to see which trees did well and which did not. In fact, about two-thirds of them did badly, from which I concluded they were the wrong species for our locality. In fact, as I now know, there may have been other reasons for their failure to thrive. For one thing, I did not do enough to control weeds. Nowadays, I start preparing the ground two years before planting. The key thing is to eliminate competition: you need to make sure there are no live plants near the trees you are planting. Today, we spray the planting area beforehand with a herbicide at least twice to make sure the trees that we are planting have it all to themselves. As I have said elsewhere, successful tree planting depends on three essentials: species selection, preparation and protection.
I also made a mistake by planting those 50 trees in autumn. In those days, my corner of Victoria used to have wet winters quite regularly, which meant that any small trees you planted in autumn would probably have to sit in damp clay for five months or more. They would also have to survive numerous frosts. As a result, many trees did not survive. Some years later we abandoned the idea of autumn planting and instead began planting in spring. Late September to early October is the preferred planting time for present conditions at Lanark.
About a third of the 50 trees did grow pretty well, however. Manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis) was one of them, and drooping she-oak was another. So I now had some idea which trees to plant if I ever got around to planting them. I also made a start on trying to improve the property environmentally. The first project I undertook was the rehabilitation of a swamp at the back of the house, known as the Racecourse Swamp because, in the days when the area was part of Bassett Estate, racehorses were trained there. I fenced off an area beside the swamp and planted around 60 willow trees (Salix spp) at intervals of 20 metres. It was my first attempt at a multiple planting of trees away from the house and it proved a dismal failure: the swamp was not permanent. It filled every three years or so but dried out completely between times. It was certainly too dry for the willows, which died one by one until none was left.
Lest anyone reading this should visit Lanark one day and go looking for the Racecourse Swamp, I should explain that its name was changed later to the Other Side Swamp. This is how the change of name occurred. At that time there was a small dam in front of the house which, for safety reasons, was strictly out of bounds for our children. They were not allowed to go near the dam, much less swim in it. Instead, we swam in a pool in the Racecourse Swamp, which was on the other side of the house dam. We would pack the children in the car—we never walked there, even though it was only 400 metres or so away—and tell them we were going to the ‘other side’ to swim. Soon, ‘other side’ became the name of our destination, and not long after that Other Side was adopted as the name of the swamp, too.
My visit to the NRCL nursery in Melbourne proved to be a watershed event for me, for it triggered a keen, active interest in planting trees. The interest continued to develop. In April of the following year, 1959, I drove to Wail, a hamlet in the Wimmera district, about nine kilometres from Dimboola, to buy more plants from a nursery there. At the time I went there, the nursery was growing a lot of trees for roadside planting in the Wimmera, one of the main cropping areas of Victoria, which had been largely cleared of trees many years earlier. While the absence of trees may have made cropping easier, it created a depressingly bare landscape. The Wimmera is extremely flat, so you could look in every direction and hardly see a single tree breaking the horizon. This was bad for the land and, I suspect, bad for the farmers who lived there. A pleasant landscape may not earn farmers any extra money, but it does improve the quality of their lives.
According to my farm journal, I bought a ‘mixed box of native plants’, plus 125 pine seedlings from the Wail nursery that day. I also had a long yarn about trees with a forester there, Trevor Arthur. He spoke to me about the many benefits of planting trees on farms and offered practical advice on how to go about it. His basic message was that trees provided stock with shelter and shade, both of which were essential for their welfare. As best as I can recall, he said nothing that day about trees being good for the environment, although that would probably have been taken for granted. After all, he was speaking not to someone from the city but to a young farmer who had to make a living from the land, so he would naturally have pointed out the financial advantages of growing trees rather than the environmental ones.
What he had to say went down well with me. To some extent he was preaching to the converted—or to the half-converted, anyway. I was now convinced, if I had not been convinced before, that planting trees on a large scale at Lanark would be good both for the farm and for the environment. I returned from my visit to the nursery at Wail full of big ideas about where and how to plant the thousands of trees that I had already made up my mind to plant. For the time being, though, the big ideas had to wait. There was just too much else going on—too many other things to worry about. Making a living from the farm was one of them.