Rowe Morrow has been a permaculture teacher for several years and is well known for her work in Vietnam and Cambodia. She taught me all about cold climate permaculture in the Blue Mountains (near Sydney, Australia) and I’ve been hooked ever since. A powerhouse of positive energy, I also knew her in earlier times as a bush regenerator. Her passion for all things environmental is clear.
Rowe is also the author of excellant books such as – The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture and The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture Teacher’s Notes. She even has time to maintain gardens, with the help of colleague Rob Allsop.
High Altitude Living
From living in Katoomba in the ’80′s I know the extreme climatic conditions one can experience in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney,. Being over 1000m in altitude gives it a real alpine feel. Hot and bushfire prone in summer and literally freezing in winter, cruel winds often blow up from the Snowy Mountains in the south. Winter often comes out of season and there can be freak snow even in summer! I’ts a strange sight to see local rainforest plants in sheltered gullies being snowed under.
The Blue Mountains community consists of a number of villages threaded around the Great Western Highway as it crosses the top of the Great Dividing Range. This is set in a sea of fairly unspoilt wilderness National Parks, with spectacular scenery and diverse forest eco-systems. Magic scenery and crisp air have lured day trippers and summer holiday makers for a long time. Most of the mountain homes are built for summer habitation only.
Local Environmental Impacts
The European mindset is strongly evident in the ‘Blueys’, especially in the glorious gardens that are such a feature, the village of Leura in particular. Usually not a native plant in sight, of course. As there is very little remnant bush in places like Leura, to native animals this presents a serious barrier to movement, as much as the freeway corridor is a barrier (and killing field).
The unfortunate consequence of having ‘feral’ gardens above and upstream of wilderness areas is that inevitably plant material makes its way down to the valleys below and begins to infest the forest with life forms that have no checks and balances to stop them going rampant and displacing native life.
In my time in the Blueys I was active in helping form the Friends of the Blue Mountains organisation and, as education officer, I often gave talks to groups and schools about the importance of reducing such environmental impacts in this delicate urban/wilderness interface zone. Hopefully the kids then went and told parents to stop dumping their garden waste over cliffs and into the valleys.
Gigantic weeds
One of the most ubiquitous plant pests of the Blue Mountains is the pine tree – Pinus radiata, known as Monterey pine, with groves of massive specimens towering over the old holiday bungalows everywhere. Huge, gloomy beasties, not only a bad fire hazard, but hostile to most native life. They dry out and shade soils and little will grow beneath them, bar a few blackberries, rhododendrons and toadstools.
But to the magnificent black and gang gang cockatoos they are a favourite food source and the cones are eagerly sought out and torn up for the seeds within. Because of this pines have spread far into the National Parks below the towns. The cockatoos originally relied on the seeds of banksias and casurinas, which they much prefer, but these are uncommon now. Rowe has sometimes seen up to a half a dozen of these huge birds perched in one small Banksia.
A Challenge and a Resource
Rowe Morrow moved to her property in Katoomba four years ago, being a one and a half acre block that nestles into the top of a gently sloping gully that is oriented to the north. But ruining the excellant feng shui of the site were rows of giant pine trees that had been planted around boundaries to the north and north-west, cutting off sunshine and bringing a melancholic mood. It was miserable in winter, when the sun was blocked by them after 12 noon, but almost bearable in summer. Rowe’s permaculture vision was clear and bright. However, the heart of the bush regenerator dropped somewhat at the challenge of removing 30 pines that towered at between 90′ – 100′ high.
I visited Rowe in April last year and was impressed to see rows of tree stumps along the boundaries. She had turned around the problem. After getting a quote for $20,000 to remove them, a tree feller friend and miller were brought in to fell the beasts and slice them up (at about one third the cost of the first quote). The ground shook awesomely when they fell!
Rowe had the enormous task of removing all the branches before milling. A mulcher and extra helpers used a hired wood chipper to make mulch for gardens. Now there are huge heaps of firewood, mountains of mulch and sawdust for poultry that range around orchard areas.
She also had to stack the pinewood slabs, that are neatly piled around the garden. These are roofed over with sheets of tin while they dry out, after which time a shed is to be built from them. “People here normally will spend the same amount of money that I did to remove pines, but they just truck them all to the tip as landfill – a total waste” Rowe said.
” I had to save up for 3 years to have the job done and worked like a Trojan, handling all the wood and waste. But what a difference it has made! The neighbours are cheering too. And of course there’s been something of a restoration of the valley shape and the sense of place here” she enthused.
Removal of the giant weed trees has transformed the property. The ground where they had stood was soon sprouting the local eucalypts. Rowe planted 100 native trees for timber and another 400 understorey bush species. These really took of with the giant competitors removed, dispelling the idea that the pines may have poisoned the ground with root-extrudant chemicals or by inducing high soil acidity -they had merely been moisture hogs and cast dense shade. So gradually the native animals are moving in to the restored habitat.
Follow up
Good bush regenerators do follow up weeding for years and maintain eternal vigilance! Rowe has pulled out heaps of blackberyy, honeysuckle, gorse and broom – just concentrating on taking out plants that are in flower. She is often out checking the nearby roadsides also for any pest plants and is planting them out as bush corridors. Anyone that comes by with a herbicide spray backpack is quickly intercepted. The local council actually has a register of organically managed properties so that roadside spraying can be avoided around them.
House design
Rowe’s house is a long rectangle placed along the contour, its long axis facing north. “The house design really suits the climate.” Rowe said of her converted poultry shed. With living quarters down one end and a big teaching room at the other, it fits her needs well too. “I had to do lots of space rationalising when it came to heating the place. Insulation went into the roof and under the floor and all windows were made to fit snugly, doors seal tight. A paved terrace for outdoor living was made on the north side of second hand bricks, and these are good ar retaining heat for winter warming.
An important addition to her new home was a hothouse that’s attached to the bathroom. Here it receives hot air that is radiated out from the wood stove chimney and it also sends back solar heat into the house. With an unusually wet summer in ’99-’00, sometimes seeing 200mm rain in a week , the controlled environment of the hothouse has been protecting food plants from getting fungal problems,and tomatoes have been most abundant, Rowe updated me recently. Vegetable gardens on the terrace close to the front of the house were fairly washed out by rain and most of the fruit in the orchard was ruined,
“I’m going to keep the intensive hothouse garden a priority, because we’re on tankwater here and I don’t use hoses. I like to bucket water to gardens- it’s good arm exercise and you don’t waste any water” Rowe said. The hothouse gets bathwater and in the gardens there are lots of bucket filling points – 200lt plastic drums having been placed next to sheds and other rain catchments.
Rowe’s integrated house and garden design is simple and convenient, as it harnesses the energy of a permaculture dynamo. She is a great example of the beneficial environmental impact just one determined person can make.
© Alanna Moore. First published in Green Connections #29 (Australia), 2000.