News

On November 10th we were delighted to welcome a great team from Woodside. Conservation Volunteers Australia organised the day but one of our CCA project sites benefitted enormously from their contribution.

Sunday October 14th was the 12th Annual Beach clean up organised by Tangaroa Blue. A big thanks to Helen for liaising with Tangaroa and for her big efforts to bring us all together for a beach clean and marine creatures I.D session.

Our Green Army team spent another week with us in July and gave us a finishing boost with their enthusiasm and hard work. At Dutch Inn  five year old Thomas Cooper and his mother Karin joined in to help with the weeding.

Whoopee! Planting is finished for 2016. It has been a very busy patch getting 4000 local provenance seedlings in the ground over 7 weeks. This past week we had an excellent Green Army team – a team of young people sign up for a 6 month period to work and to learn all sorts of skills at the same time.

On May 11th 2016 Town of Cottesloe held the annual ‘Volunteers Sundowner’at the War Memorial Hall. The event was scheduled during National Volunteer Week. The Town of Cottesloe Mayor, Jo Dawkins, said the Sundowner is a thank you to community volunteers. She mentioned that there are more than 6 million Australians who volunteer!

This year we have 4000 seedlings all grown from local provenance seed (which was collected and cleaned by our volunteers). Two nurseries have grown the plants for us and Town of Cottesloe have paid for the plants.

By spending many hours in the marquees selling catalogues, Cottesloe Coastcarers are part of the dozens of volunteers from all over Perth who contribute to the annual open-air sculpture exhibition of local, national and international artists.

Today was a beautiful Sunday and a fantastic team of 17 people gathered to water plants and collect seed at Cottesloe Native Garden. A monoculture of weedy Victorian teatree had been cleared from the site a year ago.

“Volunteers don’t get paid for what they do, not because they are worthless but because they are priceless.” In 1995 a small group of locals banded together to form the South Cottesloe Coastcare  Association to to achieve a more robust and diverse ecosystem for the Cottesloe foreshore. In 2001 it became Cottesloe Coastcare and extended its range along the 4 kilometres of the Cottesloe coast.

Malte and Leander from a rural area in Northern Germany concentrated on spotting and removing some very invasive Euphorbia species from our Dutch Inn site.

During October 2006 I did a plant survey at Cottesloe Native Garden with the naturalist Robert Powell. We found only one silky scaevola (Scaevola anchusifolia) whereas several plants had been recorded approximately 15 years earlier.

After two weeks of intensive planting in May and June we now have 3,500 new plants in our natural areas. We had some terrific help from Conservation Volunteers Australia, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Rio Tinto and for the first time the Green Army. The extra hands meant we could achieve so much more.