The Arboretum

7/8/14

Today was my first day working with my supervisor Adam Harrower. We first walked through the Enchanted Forest (Arboretum) and he gave me a background on the section and some trees. Adam began curating the arboretum four years ago. Back then, the arboretum was a thick jungle of trees with few paths. Any open area typically had grass with little openings for specimen trees, a typical system used in botanical gardens to display a subject without surrounding influences. Since then, Adam has focused a lot on thinning and creating more pathways so people can wander through and see more of the plants. A majority of the grass has been removed and replaced by plectranthus, clivias, ferns, forest cycads and more. Below is a picture of Adam. He is the gentle giant on the right. 

The first thing he showed me was one of the Centenary Barbejum stellatifolium trees. These wild almonds and brambles were originally planted by the Dutch 350 years ago as a border. Other large specimens still exist today and can be traced to identify the boundaries of the first Dutch settlements. These trees were used because of their fast growing nature, dense form, and provide the right screening to keep cattle in and the indigenous out. Shockingly, it is closely related to grevilleas in the Proteaceae family. After Adam cleared out the dead wood and water sprouts, the tree naturally became a playground for kids to climb on. Pretty cool tree. Right next to it was an Aloe barberae, tree aloe, with a swarm of bees living in the trunk. I have never seen an aloe this big. It stood over two stories high.

We then checked out the Boomslang, some signs of armillarea, more trees, and a couple of future projects. Inside the maze of paths, Adam showed me a couple of future projects of his. The log forest is an area filled with a bunch of dead trunks laying under the canopy. The plan is to carve bowls into the numerous trunks and plant them with epiphytic plants. Another interest of Adam’s is a moss garden. I believe he was influenced by a botanical garden in Japan or China, but it’s exactly what it sounds like. He has an area cleared out of all organic material and is now composed of clay and rocks. His workers have begun compacting the clay to create a hard inorganic surface which mosses prefer to grow on. Details are still being worked out, but I have seen his collection of mosses in his glasshouse. 

 After he showed me all that he has been working on, he introduced me to my project. When Adam first got the job, he intended on working from the outside in. He did the opposite. But he figured with all the attention the arboretum was receiving with the Boomslang and my support, it was an opportune moment to work on the perimeter. My job will be to create a cleaner, presentable border for the arboretum. First I need to remove all the opslag (weed trees) and weeds around the edges, then I will be propagating and planting succulents into the stone retaining wall.

I was able to clear out all the opslag in a couple of days, which was apparently really fast for the time Adam had predicted. While tending to this part of my assignment, I had the help of my two new friends and arboretum workers, Lucas and Moonwabisis. The job was nothing special, but it provided me the opportunity to check out some cool insect action and I was able to use a new tool. This is the tree popper.

The tree popper is a South African made landscape tool that is specifically designed to yank out invasive trees. This thing works miracles too. I pulled a fat taproot which must’ve been 2 ½ feet deep. Super effective, but a few of the larger trees you have to cut the roots because they are anchored so well. Only a few trees we came across required the typical cut and spray method to prevent the tree from sprouting back up. In case you don’t know, the cut and spray method is where you take a saw and trim the trunk all the way down to the base. Then, you have to paint/spray the exposed vascular tissue with a strong concentration of herbicide, or in our situation we used a combination of gasoline and herbicide. But this was only for trees that had a trunk diameter of 6+ inches, or nuzzled into a dense thicket of good plant material.

After we yanked out the bad material, Moonwabisis and I piled material on a stretcher to relocate the weeds to an accessible spot for a compost/dump pick up. Below are some pictures of the work I have already started. My next step is going through to identify the type of succulents I need to transplant and prepare for wall insertion. The majority of the wall plants will be Crassula, Plectranthus, and Senecio species.

 My friend Corona

 My friend and co-worker Moonwabisi with the stretcher.

And here are a few photos of some critters I found!

Wiley the Wasp

 A swarm of caterpillars on a branch.

 George the Lizard

 A colony of ants farming scales for honeydew.

 Orobanche, a parasitic plant. I also have seen quite a bit of Dodder out in the wild but I don't have a picture of that yet.