Garth Dutton

How The Adelaide Ecosystem Works In The Present Day – Article #1

The “Greening of Adelaide” policy carried out for about 20 years in Adelaide was so successful it transformed the city and suburbs into an ecosystem.

I think Adelaide would be the home of more birds than any other city in the world. This is due to the sheer number of trees and the very sensible decision to keep easily repairable overhead wires. It is a city the is very bird friendly due to the large number of flowering street trees that provide plentiful nectar for honeyeaters.

A wide range of wildlife now co-exists with people here. Many suburbs have possums, and an increasing number have resident koalas. Blue tongue lizards now inhabit most gardens. Brown snakes are plentiful in many outer suburbs, a blessing for people who keep chooks, as the problem of rats and mice going after chook feed ceases to exist.

One year after marital separation, my ex-wife phoned me and said she had found a crushed eggshell in the cook house. She was very pleased the Permaculture System she lived in was now complete as it had it’s own resident predator, a brown snake.

A crushed eggshell was found about once very six weeks, and as she put it, “To survive there indefinitely, all it needed was access to a ‘ground dwelling bird’s egg’ to be available to tide it over when it temporarily reduced the supply of mice too far.”

In addition the ‘Greening of Adelaide’ has made Adelaide the most fire retardant piece of real estate in Australia.

Some years ago, my wife Lynette, my daughters Helena and Nicola, and I asked a question. “We see around us a vibrant beautiful living ecosystem. How does it all work here and now in the present day? “. I think we were the only family here who was even interested.

Everyone else was still studying how it all worked in 1836, and still are…

So I am going to write a series of articles about our observations and conclusions. I’ll start by saying that the Adelaide Ecosystem is a ‘miracle of adaptation’.

Few of the imported plants that have found a niche here play a role that bears even the remotest resemblance to the niche and roles they were in in their original environment.

Let’s finish the opening article by talking about soursobs.

Thanks to the soursobs, Adelaide would be the only city in the world that is full of seasonal wildflowers. They are in bloom at the moment and looking beautiful. Tourists love them, but sadly many Australian people regard them as wild flowers, and hate them as foreign because they weren’t here in 1836. I think the tourists are right.

The next article will discuss deciduous trees.

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