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Tony Scott, Bass Community Liaison Officer
TASMANIA’S bush is unveiling its annual pre-Christmas decoration, and one of its biggest fans reckons the display could be one of the best ever.
Forest industry legend Andy Padgett believes the good late winter and spring rain has been a tonic for the bush and has native waratah bursting with blooms.
“I’ve watched the waratah on Mount Barrow put on a fantastic show at this time since I first came here in 1946,” Mr Pagdgtt said.
Back then he used to gather up armfuls of the scarlet flowers to take home to his mother in Victoria.
“It used to be hard sometimes to get enough to make it worthwhile,” Mr Padgett said.
“But over the past 20 or so years it really seems to have taken off on the mountain.
Mr Padgett puts the recent proliferation of waratah down to its natural response to the type of forest harvesting techniques employed on Mount Barrow.
Much of the mountain’s commercial forest is managed on a sawlog retention model by Forestry Tasmania, where lower quality trees are harvested, leaving the thinned forest rich with potential sawlogs for the future.
“Waratah seems to like a bit of ground disturbance and really takes off with less competition,” he said.
The 86 year old forester is proud of his own and his family’s involvement with the mountain over three generations, despite the ever-present debris from former logging methods.
“Messy forests are healthy forests,” he said, agreeing with scientists who argue old rotting logs and stumps are habitat for invertebrates at the base of the bio-diversity chain.
The unofficial Laird of the Mountain hosted one of his regular bus tours on the Mount Barrow Forest Discovery Trail recently … 45 people were informed and shown how a harvested forest grows back healthier than what it was originally.
And the lectures all given by a man with sensitivity… sensitive enough to remember his mum with a bunch of waratah at Christmas.
The self-drive Mount Barrow Forest Discovery Trail is open from 9am till 5pm seven days a week and the waratah is at its best at the higher points of the 24 kilometre route.
The trail can be accessed from Bingham’s Road, turn-off the Tasman Highway at the Nunamara store.
Caption: Andy Padgett waxing lyrical on waratah with mountain visitors Colleen Orpwood, of Launceston, and Dorothee Williams, from Darwin.
