Ethics of sending native seeds overseas

[Bluetongue]

Hi roughbarked, and welcome to the forum. Appreciate your input here.

Provenance is a great word to add fat to the fire I reckon I remember some very heated debates about whether it was important to source seed for revegetation from the 'right' place.

[eataust]

Heh. See, to me - a foodie - provenance means "traceability" (ie "able to trace to the source, and every step along the way to me"), rather than pure "sourcing" ...

[roughbarked]

Thousands of times I have caused Eucalypts to come up like a lawn. Literally thousands

You probably have never walked in the bush after rain .. if you can say it does not occur.

The question is how many of those seedlings survive the natural biological controls to maturity to form a dense thicket.

With a Gorse seedling lawn the majority of seedlings survive to maturity and the lawn becomes an impenetrable thicket, such that it is physically impossible to walk among them.

Even under the best conditions with a high Eucalypt seedling survival rate, such as at Bundoora Park on Plenty Road with its River Red Gums, it is still a very easy matter to walk among the resulting Eucalypt saplings. And even here it is unlikely that all the current sapplings will survive long term. After all there are no River Red Gum jungles any where our continent.

I have been quoted as saying.. "they come up like grass after rain but many are dead on the first hot day.. By the end of the first year unless it continues to rain regularly(it sometimes happens), more than 60% will be dead. By the end of the second year.. halve that again or more.."
Yes I agree that Australia is a tough place for plants. However they do try..

[boylesg]

Thousands of times I have caused Eucalypts to come up like a lawn. Literally thousands

You probably have never walked in the bush after rain .. if you can say it does not occur.

The question is how many of those seedlings survive the natural biological controls to maturity to form a dense thicket.

With a Gorse seedling lawn the majority of seedlings survive to maturity and the lawn becomes an impenetrable thicket, such that it is physically impossible to walk among them.

Even under the best conditions with a high Eucalypt seedling survival rate, such as at Bundoora Park on Plenty Road with its River Red Gums, it is still a very easy matter to walk among the resulting Eucalypt saplings. And even here it is unlikely that all the current sapplings will survive long term. After all there are no River Red Gum jungles any where our continent.

I have been quoted as saying.. "they come up like grass after rain but many are dead on the first hot day.. By the end of the first year unless it continues to rain regularly(it sometimes happens), more than 60% will be dead. By the end of the second year.. halve that again or more.."
Yes I agree that Australia is a tough place for plants. However they do try..

Then I take it you agree that the Eucalypt seedling lawn in the UK, with its milder climate and with its lack of critters that feed on or infect Eucalypts, is an omenous sign and worthy of extreme caution.

[roughbarked]

only ominous if there is not something done to stop them.

The Eucalyptus globulus that was grown in Kew gardens way back when they first found Eucalyptus globulus.. broke all the records by reaching 125 feet in five years.

[boylesg]

only ominous if there is not something done to stop them.

The Eucalyptus globulus that was grown in Kew gardens way back when they first found Eucalyptus globulus.. broke all the records by reaching 125 feet in five years.

I was reading in Wikipedia and a couple of other sites about the problems that California has with bushfire being due, to a significant extent, to Australian Eucalypts that have gone feral in the arid hills.

[roughbarked]

Yep Eucalypts in California and Melaleuca in the Everglades

[boylesg]

Yep Eucalypts in California and Melaleuca in the Everglades

And the worrying thing is that the yanks are almost universally hostile to the environmental weed message.

Unlike the more humble Poms who far willing to learn from the mistakes made in Australia.