A Morning of Planting — and an Unexpected Discovery
Up2Us joins Mansfield Steiner School students for another round of roadside revegetation along Monkey Gully Road
Last week, Up2Us's Kim and Rhiannon spent a couple of hours alongside Mansfield Steiner School's Grade 4 and Grade 6 students — together with their parent helpers and teachers — continuing what has now become a tradition of care for a little strip of land.
Continuing the Work
The site is Monkey Gully Road, a roadside corridor near the Steiner school that also doubles as a running track for the kids. It's not a grand nature reserve or a protected park — just a slim sliver of roadside vegetation not far from Mansfield township. But what persists along this verge is remarkable, an amazing variety of remnant native grasses and groundcovers that have somehow held on through decades of surrounding change.
This year's session added over 100 indigenous tubestock to the corridor — a mix of shrubs and eucalypts carefully selected to suit the local conditions and complement the existing remnant ground cover vegetation. For many of these kids, it's not their first time out here, which makes the work feel less like a school activity and more like an ongoing relationship with a place they're coming to know well.
An Unexpected Find
But the real story of the day wasn't the planting — it was what Kim and Rhiannon spotted while they were doing it.
Among the grasses and groundcovers, a small, unassuming green shoot caught their eye. Easy to overlook — nothing flashy, nothing that would make most people pause. But something about it didn't quite fit. A photo was taken for identification back at the office, and a guard was carefully placed around it to make sure it didn't accidentally get trampled in the meantime.
Back at the office, the identification came through: a Sun orchid.
A follow-up trip to the site to look more carefully turned up at least 15 more within a small area, with last year's dried flower heads still visible among them — confirming this wasn't a one-off. There's a genuine little community of Sun orchids quietly doing their thing along this roadside, and they'd been there all along.
Why This Matters
Sun orchids are extraordinary plants, and not just because of how they look in flower. They are entirely dependent on a mycorrhizal relationship — a symbiotic connection with specific soil fungi — to obtain the nutrients they need to survive and grow. You can't simply move them, or recreate their habitat from scratch. The fungi they rely on have built up in the soil over a very long time, and disturbing that relationship can be fatal to the orchid.
What this means in practice is that the ground these orchids are growing in is irreplaceable. The fact that they're persisting here — in a roadside strip, no less — is a testament to just how intact this little patch of remnant vegetation really is. It's also a powerful reminder of why protecting it matters so much.
Because there are many species of Sun orchid across Victoria, we'll need to wait until spring, when they flower, to know exactly which species this is. In the meantime, the site will be monitored closely and the orchid community protected.
Watch This Space
For now, the Grade 4s and Grade 6s have planted their trees, and somewhere among the native grasses, a community of Sun orchids is quietly preparing to bloom.
Stay tuned — spring is going to be worth watching.
Below are the non descript emerging leaves and last years flower head of the Sun orchid found last Wednesday. The other images are of a variety of Sun Orchid species found within the Mansfield Shire.
