Marty Roberts knows a thing or two
about the plants in the Macedon Ranges,
which lie about an hour north-west of Melbourne.
As bushland manager for the area, he takes care of them all.
Marty, tell me about the reserves in the Macedon Ranges.
Well, they're really diverse.
We go to the top of Mount Macedon, 1,008 metres,
and we're an alpine vegetation.
You come right down to the valleys below
and, you know, we've got some really good grassland remnants
as well around here.
And we've got these spectacular woodlands as well.
Woodlands are pretty rare and depleted across the landscape.
And why are they so depleted?
Well, generally, they fall on more fertile ground,
so they were the first to be grazed and the first to be cleared,
and that's one of the main reasons why they come into conflict
with those other uses.
Today were at Bald Hill Reserve
which, at 96 hectares, is the biggest in the shire
and it's one of the most precious.
Marty, you reckon this is a particularly special spot.
I think it is.
Grassy woodlands have got this fantastic diversity on the ground.
They've also usually got these amazing trees as well.
But on the ground is where it happens.
We've got sticky everlastings just starting to pop up here
and then they get thicker as you go down into the valley.
We've got tricoryne.
This little plant here, that's a lily.
It looks like a bit like a grass.
This really nice wiry display of yellow flowers
that comes up and they'll die back for the year.
So this seasonality is constantly here
and the site is constantly changing.
But today I'm interested in one family in particular,
the native peas.
We're not the only ones out here today.
Volunteers are scouring the hills
to locate and identify some special species.
Ecologist Karl Just is coordinating the project
and he's passionate about peas.
Well, they're a pretty amazing group of plants,
I think, you know, very... in terms of diversity,
they're one of the most diverse families in the world.
There's a lot of peas around,
very common in our native ecosystems.
Actually the third largest plant family in the world,
and obviously very important for humans
in terms of our agriculture and food production.
And when you go into the bush,
you'll see a lot of different species around.
There's, you know, very high diversity
and really important for a lot of different plants and animals
to have the peas in the ecosystem.
I think reason for their success is their ability to fix nitrogen.
So what they can actually do is they've got these roots
which have these nodules.
And in the nodules are these bacteria
which can actually fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.
So most of our nitrogen in the earth is actually in the atmosphere,
and these bacteria have the ability to pull that nitrogen
from the atmosphere
and fix it into a form that's able to be used by plants.
You're looking for a really special little pea here.
Yeah, so the one we're looking for is called the clover glycine,
and it's a nationally threatened species.
And there's not many populations in central Victoria.
And at this reserve, Bald Hill,
we have really quite a healthy population.
Had the friends group out here doing a bit of a search for the species
to try and map as many of the plants as we can find.
Nice ones here!
And we found nearly 500 plants
so it's quite a significant population here.
The hero of the day is the Glycine latrobeana,
which we've...happen to have some here on the edge of the path.
Oh, wow!
Once you get your eye in on this,
you suddenly look up and then you go, "Oh, there's one.
"There's one. There's one."
Comes through October through to late November, December.
This is the one that we're all sort of excited about.
So it's that classic pea-shaped flower.
Yeah.
Is it going to get any bigger? No, it won't get any bigger.
This is as big as it gets.
Where a lot of these small plants and natives in general
have their impact is on the numbers.
So it's the abundance that's really important.
And that's because they don't have others to breed with,
to swap pollen with,
and also, I guess, to bring the pollinators in.
If you're one little lonely plant that needs a pollinator...
Yeah. ..how are they going to find you?
Exactly, so the fact that we've got such a good population here
is really exciting.
So you can see the other day that we came through here
and mapped some plants when they were up,
but since we've been up, there's been quite a lot.
I think the plants are really starting to flower now.
So we mapped quite a few plants through here,
but now we've got probably almost twice as many.
So what we'll do is we'll walk through here
and where we've marked with the flags
and we'll do another count of the plants
and we'll map them using the app.
So we just write down clover glycine times six.
Carolyn is president of the Friends of Bald Hill Reserve
and she's also passionate about the place.
Found one!
The role of the friends group, I guess currently,
is to work in partnership with the shire.
I guess our vision is to preserve, protect the significant biodiversity
in this area.
And there's actually national and Victorian
significant flora and fauna here.
It was a member of the friends who discovered the clover glycine.
It sure was. And that was right back in about 1996.
And that was the turning point for the shire
not to sell the reserve, because it was up for tender.
It's a really good news story,
and, I mean, involving so many people,
it is worth it all looking for this little plant?
Yeah, yeah, you don't have to go to the ends of the earth
to find threatened species.
We're lucky that this is something that exists here,
that special little plant.
It's unique, it adds to that diversity
that we're seeing decline in the landscape.
And we're really trying to arrest that.
We've got a pretty narrow window to do that,
and I think we're up for it.