Walking around the block tonight, I was delighted to observe that we've been living here long enough now to have seeds from trees - felled when building the subdivision - sprouting vigorously in neighbours' yards. Peppermints, acacias, and various feral plant species once covered these former cow paddocks. Now they're back ... including some plants that look like the notorious acacia longifolia, aka Sydney wattle, and Taylorina/tallerina.
To the developer's credit, post-bulldozer, a variety of native peppermints were planted as street trees. Last year, in a big blow, a lovely weeping specimen across the road from us was snapped off near the ground. The sawn wood made its way into our woodpile after our son-in-law, helping with our flattened fence, put his chainsaw to good use and tidied things up. I’d hoped that the estate gardening contractors would leave the stump to see if it would sprout, but they ground the stump down to below ground level and that seemed to be the end of it.
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| The space across the road where the peppermint tree used to be. |
We've been watching for a while, since we saw the first sprouts emerging with this winter's rains, keeping a proprietary guard over them. Then, last week, we dug up six and replanted them onto one of our verges where struggling grass has gone the way of our dodgy reticulation system.
We didn't want to call attention to them, concerned some of the locals might think stakes and twine an invitation to exhume the seedlings. However, a neighbour's visitor parked their 4WD on top of number six the other night (it miraculously survived) and we're thinking some protection might be warranted.
Our peppermint trees are about six inches high. Watch this space.
