Doug Blythe must have been born with two green thumbs. He has such a love for plants, gardening and creating native environments for the community to enjoy for most of his life. Lilly Harmon sat down with Doug to learn more of his story.

I was born in the suburbia area of Melbourne, where I lived for the first 38 years of my life.

I went to school in Melbourne and after I finished school, I started landscaping and now I'm in my 51st year of landscape gardening. I had always been interested in nature. I would definitely have described myself as a nature boy from a young child. I’d always be out in the garden and in the forests near where I’d lived just pottering around. 

I always loved the country and wanted to live out in the country, but couldn't figure out a way of doing it when I had just left school, so I ended up doing landscape gardening. I did an apprenticeship with another company down in Melbourne, and then began just working for myself down there for many years. At that time I met my wife and settled down and had four kids. 

I worked by myself for about 15 years and then left Melbourne and went and lived up north in the Kimberleys (W.A.) for around 3 years in 1990. We relocated the family out that way which was definitely a big change for all of us having to move to the complete opposite side of the nation.

From there I did landscape gardening as well as farming and building, just a bit of everything. Then we all made the decision after a few years, to move to the Northern Rivers in Alstonville in 1993. It was my escape to the country that I had always dreamed of. We lived there until ultimately relocating 11 years ago to Goonellabah next to the Birdwing Butterfly Walking Track.

At first, I tried working and doing landscaping by myself for a couple of years. Ultimately it didn't work out as well as when I was back down in Melbourne. I ended up getting a job at a nursery in Alstonville called Alstonville Tree Farm. I worked there for what ended up being about seven years. The owner not only had the nursery, but a big landscaping company so I did a lot of little tiny bits of landscaping for him while mostly working out day to day in the nursery. 

However, a friend of mine was out working at a place called Alpine that had just moved up here from Sydney in 2005. They were immensely successful down there and bought land up in Alstonville with the hopes to expand up north.

They started building a fifty-acre nursery here and the person building it at the time wasn’t working out, and I knew they were searching for someone else to take up the role. My mate suggested it to me and I applied. After some chats with the owners, we agreed for me to continue the building. From there, we have had many expansions over the years and I’ve been here 18 years going strong.

(14-year-old rainforest at Alpine Nursery)

This is definitely the best nursery in Eastern Australia that I'd built for these people. It's currently a 65-acre nursery. Just looking at photos of it and of small areas truly doesn’t give it justice and the true feeling of what the place is like.

The whole project took around 11 years, starting in 2005 and after many small increments and little projects, we had pretty much finished the majority of it in 2016. We’d design up and quote each project and then allocate the money for it. 

In between projects, I’d do a lot of maintenance and fix things up and all sorts of stuff. Also part of all that, we have the whole rainforest trail along the creek that runs through the middle of the nursery and I built the whole 2-acre rainforest there. Currently, it’s about 14 years old. That wasn’t a part of any of my work at the nursery, it was completely out of my own time and energy.

It took about 4 years to complete working on it once a week, and I still do maintenance on it. The people who owned the nursery didn’t see any potential in the rainforest, as they couldn’t see themselves making any money from it. I knew how much potential it had so I took over the land voluntarily and made it into what it is today on my own.

This nursery actually changed hands about five years ago, and they ended up buying 50 acres next door. There are plans in the works right now to build another 50-acre nursery here for these people. One day somewhere down the track it will end up being a 100-acre nursery.

There are about 36 people that work here at the moment. But I just work on my own or they might give me one other person to work with me. That’s just because I don't actually have anything to do with growing the plants here in the nursery. I do building and rebuilding of things. At the moment, I'm pulling one section apart and then rebuilding it on the nursery. I end up doing a lot of things like that. 

After the major construction of the nursery ended, I ended up doing a few projects here and there. I worked with some of my kids who had bought houses wanting different things built and landscaping to be done. Then when I got all that out of the way, I thought okay, now it's time to do it on public land. 

One thing I’ve noted over the years of doing landscaping work for private people. You can go in and do a landscaping job for somebody and then a couple of years later they sell it up, and then new people come in and it all just gets bulldozed and all the trees get cut down to be redone. Everything sort of goes back to what it was like before you went in with all the hard work. 

I thought, now I'm sick of watching it all just get wrecked after a while. So I prefer to just do it on public land where it's going to stay there for a lot of years. That's when I really started working with the Goonellabah Tucki Landcare around 7 years ago. 

My wife and I moved to a different place in Goonellabah where the Butterfly Walking Track was, so I had great easy access and I could just work on the Landcare there. I joined that about seven and a half years ago. At the time, it was a lady and a couple of old guys that did it.

We met once a month for about an hour or something and I just said to them, this isn’t good enough. We were never going to change this place by doing that. We've really got to step it up and make a difference around here! 

I started working all day every Saturday on the trail.

Over in the nursery in Alstonville, they allowed me 500 square metres of space out there where I could grow trees for Landcare which is amazing. The people who own it, they're sort of on board with that and they sponsor our Landcare as well.

(Trees and plants growing at the Alpine Nursery area dedicated to the Goonellabah Tucki Landcare.)

Since I've got the space out here to grow the trees and what we do, our style of Landcare is totally different than probably any other Landcare group in Australia. I also think it comes about because of my landscape gardening background which changes our approach. 

I like to grow trees to a really good size before we plant them out in the bush. Most Landcare groups will plant little tiny seedlings and little trees around 200 millimetres in what we call tubes. We don't plant anything in tubes at all at the park. We bring them here to where I work at Alpine and then we repot them into bigger pots and grow them much bigger.

So we're trying to plant trees that are already a metre high. That probably takes 12 months to grow them from tubes at the nursery to be able to transfer them into the ground. We’re sitting at about 99% success rate with all our plants, so you can definitely say our approach is successful. 

That means that when we do little projects in Goonellabah, the people actually notice and it really makes a difference pretty quickly.

After I joined, the president ended up stepping down and then I took the role. I've been the president for probably about five or so years now. We’ve had a couple of guys join me since then and it’s been great, and they're pretty keen about it too. I've been teaching them a lot about how to care for the area, and different forms of labour. 

(12-month-old planting Bretmark Court, Goonellabah, adjacent to Tucki Creek)

One guy in particular is my Secretary Treasurer, Shaen Springall. He works full-time as a nurse at the hospital. He saw me and another guy walking on the track one day talking about trees and he said something about the trees and the area, just asking how to be more involved. We said, well we're the Landcare group. He ended up wanting to join and in the four years since I've been teaching him a lot of stuff. He has been the fastest-learning person I've ever worked with in my life.

There's a walking track that runs for about two kilometres along the creek, towards Holland Road. When I started working there, it was just a very weedy kind of area and a totally neglected wasteland that the council had put a bitumen walking track along. There was the occasional bridge across the creek but nothing else.

I've been trying to teach these guys about getting rid of all these exotic weeds and trying to put this area back to the original forest that was here with all the Australian plants. We've killed hundreds and hundreds of canopy trees and maybe 50 pine trees. I have no idea what the number of weeds overall that we’ve killed and in some ways, we've got ourselves in a fair bit of trouble doing that. 

A lot of people freak out when they start seeing big trees dying. People that don't understand this stuff and don't understand our need to get rid of these plants to replace them with native ones that won’t impact the natural environment. Some people who do have some sort of understanding of what we're trying to do are just totally amazed by the amount of work that we've done there.

Since I started seven years ago, we’ve probably had about 35,000 trees and plants go into the ground in that area. 

Just this year, Shaen and I were the joint winners for the environment award this year at the Australia Day Ceremony for our work with Landcare. A few different people nominated us for those awards after noticing our work in Goonellabah. It was an absolute honour for both of us, also having been nominated for the Services in the Community Individual Award. 

Shaen is just putting an absolute amazing effort in regard to this. He puts in way more time these days. We both work full time but I’m pretty wrecked after work and can’t do much. He's 15 years younger than me, so he seems to have a lot more energy. 

He's turned his whole backyard into a nursery where he just works on that religiously, maybe around 20 hours a week. It’s great because then we’re able to use that here in the park for Landcare because it’s basically a propagation nursery.

(Shaen's Goonellabah Tucki Landcare propagation nursery in Goonellabah)

A couple of weeks back he did a count of plants in his backyard and he had 12,000 plants in his backyard. Also, out in the nursery where I work where we've got space allocated to grow bigger trees, we have probably got about 8000 plants sitting out there at the moment. They’re all getting planted out in this financial year. So we’re pretty set up for the time being.

We've just recently created a second Landcare group. It was like a sort of subgroup of us because they've got their name and group of people, but they come under us and we're still supplying all the plants to them. They are in Just Street, which is just below Oliver Avenue.

They did a couple of projects there last year and we've set up three major projects for them this year. We also did a couple of projects there for ourselves last year in what's called Brettmark Court, which just runs off Just Street near there. 

We've got a lot of plans for this coming year with planting. We also have a great program set up with The Living School. They come in to help us out with planting and gardening during school time.

We set up a planting area for them and Shaen will go and dig all the holes for them and they just put the plants in the ground. I can't be involved in those kinds of things because I'm at work at Alpine. I did do a couple of them last year though because usually when I take holidays from work I just work on Landcare. 

This year, we're planning to do holidays in May, where Shaen and I will just work every day and try and get a lot of trees in the ground. 

That's the sort of stuff I do both at the nursery and with Landcare. I’m immensely grateful for where I’m at and the land I’m able to work with.

In the short span of 7 years, I feel like I’ve been able to give so much to the community who use the walking track. But also I’m so proud of how the nursery also turned out, being one of the best in the nation here in Alstonville.

In reality, the park has got to get to sort of 10 years or more before it really starts to show up or make a difference from the work we’ve done. A lot of people have already noticed a lot of changes happening there and that's absolutely amazing.