An ambitious local urban gardening project has been recognised as a world-leading initiative, with its South Melbourne-based founder recently invited to give a keynote speech at the opening of an Urban Futures conference in Europe.
Emma Cutting, the founder of community street gardening group Heartscapes, is still high from her trip to Ljubljana for the Urban Future “Better Cities” conference.
With about 1800 attendees, the event in Slovenia in late March was an “incredible” one, run by lovely people in “an extremely beautiful country” she said.
Wildflowers were emerging, red squirrels and hardy bumblebees were out and about in 11-degree temperatures and there was fresh snow on the Alps.
The conference – attended by “urban planners, architects and council representatives” – left Emma in little doubt that while Australia is behind Europe in terms of biodiversity in cities, the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor (MPC) she is working on is a project “that is leading the world”.
The initiative aims to connect eight kilometres of public land between the two “large but isolated green patches” of Westgate Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens with indigenous flora planted in “barren, under-utilised pieces of land”.
Designed over two years with the input of more than 30 specialists and scientists, the project has so far seen 53 of an envisaged 200 street gardens created, with impressive numbers of insects attracted.
There are currently 70 volunteers involved.
Emma, who was initially converted to street gardening by its healing capacity after suffering a long period of chronic fatigue syndrome, is proud that the corridor is estimated to “connect 300,000 people to nature every year”.
The transformation of disused land is helping to address several crises, she says: mental health as well as climate change and biodiversity.
In Australia there is “a lot of groundwork” to be done just to establish “the importance of biodiversity for our wildlife in urban areas,” Emma says.
In Europe, by contrast, “people just get it, and on a government level, they get it.
“So, for instance, Berlin has put in 100 gardens for pollinators.”
Another Berlin program which captured Emma’s attention was a citizen-led initiative to plant hundreds of thousands of trees in the German capital by 2040.
While the City of Melbourne was active and leading the way on biodiversity, including with the recent publication of an insect guide that Heartscapes co-authored, it was one of only a very few councils to have employed biodiversity officers, Emma said.
In Southbank, if the avid street gardener has her way, a long strip of unused land on Sturt St opposite ACCA will be transformed with native bluebells, sticky everlastings and native grasses.
So far, owner VicTrack hasn’t been responsive to the idea, but Emma is still hopeful of incorporating it into the corridor.
“Right where the tunnel starts – it’s actually a really public space but at the moment it’s just half-dead dietes for 100 metres in a really long planter box,” she said.
Meanwhile “there’s a lot that people can do on their balconies”.
“I mean, Southbank’s so very dense residentially, but there is scope for change in there,”
People just need to visit their local Indigenous nursery, which would be Bili Nursery, and buy some tubes, get a few pots and get those going.
Despite Australia being overall slow on the issues, Emma’s experience with Heartscapes has left her with insights to offer an engaged audience.
And in Ljubljana her talk had a resoundingly human, as well as botanical and zoological focus.
“I was talking about care and the power of care and how leading from care … is actually so incredibly powerful,” she said. •