I would like to think that most readers, having got this far into the book, would accept that there are five sound reasons for planting trees on farms. One, they provide shelter and shade for stock; two, they provide shelter for pastures and crops; three, if the trees can eventually be harvested as timber they will provide the farmer with a future source of income; four, they provide a habitat for birds, insects and various other animals; and, five, they generate fertility.
The last of these is more important than I think most people realise. I have long observed—without any specific research data to confirm the observation—that trees enrich the soil around them. The obvious explanation for this is that the trees are bringing up minerals and other nutrients from the deeper soil and that these minerals and nutrients are being recycled in the soil when leaves fall on the ground. It is also a fact that trees trap airborne nutrient particles, including particles held in suspension in mists, and these particles eventually make their way to the ground beneath the tree and re-enter the soil there. The bottom line is that provided you had enough trees on your farm for long enough, your farm would be more fertile and more productive.
Personally, I believe there is also a sixth reason that is just as important as the others: trees are good for the farm aesthetically; they improve the look of the place. I have said elsewhere that I do not consider the aesthetics of tree planting to be a minor matter. I certainly do not consider it to be mere window-dressing. On the contrary, it is of immense importance. If you like the look of where you live you will be happier living and working there. This applies to farmers as much as it does to those living in the city. More so, probably. Visually attractive landscapes can also attract visitors from the city, so there can be a spin-off in terms of tourist dollars. City people want the countryside to be pleasing to the eye, and perhaps the day is coming when they will start pressuring government authorities to ensure that the countryside does please the eye.
My own policy is to plant trees in such a way that the landscape ends up looking as much as possible like an Australian landscape. Now, many farmers in our corner of Victoria have planted Monterey cypresses in single rows or double rows along the fence lines. In my early days at Lanark, I did some planting of this kind myself. If you were to fly over the settled areas of Victoria’s southwest today, you would not think it looked like Australia. If anything, it looks rather like the Canterbury Plains when I first went to New Zealand in the 1950s, for farmers there had done a lot of single-row and double-row planting of cypress and pines along fence lines.
In the Australian landscape, trees typically grow at random in broad groupings, and in my view a farmer planting trees should make some attempt to simulate this. At the very least, farmers should have more than two rows of trees in each line or shelter belt. I prefer a minimum of five rows. There is a simple equation to consider here. If you plant five rows rather than two, you will more than double the number of trees you plant and thus more than double the benefit you get from those trees. But your fencing costs, far from doubling, will rise by a trifling amount. After all, the cost of fencing along the length of the shelter belt will be the same. It’s only the width of the shelter belt that changes—from, say, eight metres to sixteen. So for an extra sixteen metres of fencing (eight at each end) you more than double the number of trees. In light of this, I have never been able to understand why anyone would plant only one or two rows in a line of trees when five rows would cost little more. The extra trees will ultimately be worth far more than the bit of land that they are planted on.
I have already spoken of Jim Sinatra several times in this book. Let me describe how we came to meet. I was at a football match in Melbourne in 1981 when my friend Graeme Gunn, then dean of the faculty of Architecture and Design at RMIT in Melbourne, introduced me to an American academic, Sinatra, whom he had just brought to Australia to work in the faculty. Sinatra’s job was to headstart a new landscape architecture course at RMIT. He was eager to do a trip out of Melbourne as soon as possible to have a look at the Australian countryside, so I invited him to visit us at Lanark and not long after that he spent a few days with us. It was the first of many visits that Jim has made to Lanark over the years; often he has brought groups of students with him.
At the University of Pennsylvania Jim had studied for his masters degree under Ian McHarg, the renowned Scottish-born landscape architect, who was one of the first to promote the idea that the environment should be a fundamental concern in all planning. McHarg died in 2001 at the age of 80. About ten years before that he visited Australia and made a trip to Hamilton, where I met him at dinner at the home of my cousin, Richard Walter. He, too, had studied under McHarg at Philadelphia. It was quite an experience for me, because I had long been an admirer of McHarg and his theories, especially the notion that planning should conform to nature. I bought his famous book, Design with Nature, when it first came out in 1969 and was strongly influenced by it.
So it was not surprising that Jim Sinatra and I should share many of the same views on farm design. Jim had taught for fifteen years at a university in Iowa, traditionally a rural state, so he was naturally attuned to the special requirements of broad-acre design. In 1983 he set up a new program to bring his students into close contact both with rural Australia and with far-flung Aboriginal communities. As part of this program, called RMIT Outreach Australia, Jim would bring groups of students to Lanark at least once a year to inspect the tree-planting projects I had undertaken. The students who did these field studies were drawn from various years of the RMIT course, but they did have one thing in common: a special interest in broad-acre design.
Two of the students went on to produce brilliantly researched papers on Lanark and its environment. One of them was Elizabeth Jacka, whose study of bird life at Lanark I referred to in an earlier chapter. Elizabeth focused on how bird life had been affected by European settlement over the past 160 years or so. She looked at how bird numbers would have fallen when the land was cleared and drained, and native woodland were replaced with treeless paddocks, and how they rose after we began large-scale tree planting, the restoration of the wetlands and the creation of habitat reserves. The other student, Rochelle Ruddock, wrote and published a superb, detailed study in book form of the farm forestry operation at Lanark. For both students these were final-year projects, and both received honours for them.
Rochelle’s paper (it was a project for her honours degree in landscape architecture) included a 100-year plan for Lanark— that is, a blueprint of how the property could be developed over the coming century. Now, some people may consider landscape design to be of little practical importance in urban areas. In the country, it is very important indeed. If a landscape design in the country has shortcomings, these will be magnified many times when the design becomes a reality. Moreover, whereas it may be relatively easy to correct a mistake in an urban landscape design, the scale of any mistake in the country is likely to be much too big to allow correction. Landscape design came into being as a separate discipline in the United States, and I was not at all surprised to learn that its original purpose was to improve the design of the rural landscape—that is, of farms— and to alleviate the soil and water problems that were starting to appear on rural land.
All in all, my association with RMIT University has been an enormously happy and productive one for me. It was particularly gratifying, therefore, when RMIT awarded me an honorary doctorate in landscape architecture in 1997. At the time I had no idea, but I now know that Dr Yaso Nadarajah, Senior Research Fellow at RMIT Globalism Research Centre, was the driving force behind this award.
Yaso had become closely connected with the work at Lanark, often visiting us with her group of research students. She is a wonderful organiser and managed to keep her plan a secret from me over the twelve months that the process took. Yaso approached Jim Sinatra, and together with Jim’s wife Curtis, a good friend of Cicely’s and also an excellent organiser, they became the triumvirate who hatched the plot. I had no idea this was in the pipeline and was totally shocked when I received a phone call from David Knight, secretary to the University Chancellery, asking me whether I would be happy to accept the honorary doctorate. No honour has pleased me more.
I have long believed that the skills of landscape architects have been underutilised in the country. I argued this as far back as 1984 when I was invited by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects to speak at the institute’s annual conference, which was held that year on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. I submitted in my paper that, by and large, landscape design and planning principles had not been applied to the vast areas of rural Australia, where, as I argued, they were badly needed. Reporting on the conference, the journal Landscape Australia was kind enough to say that my paper was ‘perhaps one of the most enjoyable yet thought-provoking’ papers presented, and it quoted me saying the following about the problems of rural land degradation: ‘The people who can help alleviate these problems—that is, landscape architects— are almost entirely living in urban areas and are therefore putting their efforts into resolving problems associated with an infinitesimal area of the Australian land mass.’ At that time, as I also pointed out during my talk, rural land— that is, land used for grazing or agriculture—amounted to 67 per cent of Australia’s land mass, yet across this vast area landscape architects had scarcely had any influence on design and planning.
Having said all this, let me make it clear that I am not suggesting for a moment that farmers need to hire a landscape architect to advise them on how to plan their farms. Farmers ought to be able to do the design work themselves, provided they have a reasonable sense of what sits well in their particular landscape, which basically means a good sense of proportion. Clearly, many farmers do not take design into account at all when they plant trees. Drive for ten minutes anywhere in the country and you are likely to come upon at least one planting eyesore—perhaps a couple of rows of inappropriate tree species running through a gully along a fence line, that are in conflict, visually, with everything else and appear to offer no environmental benefit.
Initial design work can be best done with the aid of an aerial photograph, one reason being that it allows you to view the place as a whole. Over the years I have used aerial photos of Lanark for this purpose. In fact, I still have some that were taken in 1944. It is not hard to obtain these aerial photos, by the way. The nearest office of the state lands department, or whatever the relevant department happens to be called, ought to be able to provide them. When you get the photo, throw a sheet of tracing paper over it and start playing around with ideas. A good design will emerge eventually through trial and error.
According to Jim Sinatra, designing a farm plan really amounts to fitting together all the various pieces. He wrote to me recently:
Doing a farm landscape is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Each piece has a corresponding fit. That is how a landscape should work in rural scenarios: the puzzle gets put together over time. But that means that there is a clear image that we all try to perfect. McHarg’s layered ecological approach to planning was tailored to see how the puzzle can fit together and is useful to planning farm properties. Farmers know their soils, wind, water and livestock movements: pieces of the puzzle. Together the puzzle can fit together including ecological and, most importantly, economic positive outcomes that are necessary for good farm management, otherwise you can’t afford your land improvements.