T

HEY call themselves “guerrilla gardeners”. In their day jobs they are lawyers, engineers, teachers, business owners and more, but for a couple of hours each Sunday they cast aside those identities, don their work clothes and gloves and bend their backs revegetating the Upfield railway line.

Their dream is an urban forest stretching from Jewell Station in the south to Fawkner Station in the north: 6.7km of greenery and vegetation, bringing back bird and insect life, providing shade for cyclists and pedestrians and beautifying what is still mostly a harsh industrial environment.

“We want a green corridor from Royal Park to Fawkner Cemetery, creating a cooling environment for the walking and cycling path and doing a little bit around capturing carbon to combat climate change,” says Bruce Francis, one of more than 250 volunteers who form the Upfield Urban Forest group.

First developed in the 1880s, the Upfield line begins in the city, passing through the North Melbourne junction and ending at Campbellfield, and much of its 20km is an ugly scar running through the middle of Moreland. But a shared path that runs alongside it is highly popular with cyclists, joggers and walkers.

Like many volunteers, Bruce first came across the revegetation project when he was riding his bike along the path. Curious, he pulled over and met some of the volunteers and signed up to join himself.

While Bruce is a relatively recent community gardener, others, like Jo Connellan, have been at it for almost 30 years. Her patch has been around Jewell Station.

“It all started in 1992 when the state government was trying to close the railway line,” she says. “We started cleaning up the line as a way of getting people involved in the issues and the campaign.”

The railway line was saved in 1995, but the spirit that preserved it has continued through the work of volunteers like Jo who have adopted small patches based around their local station.

These local groups were aware of each other but there was no co-ordinating vision until Brunswick resident Tamar Hopkins decided to bring them together under a single banner and so the Upfield Urban Forest was born.

A slick website explains the group’s vision “to create and sustain a shady forest of trees and vegetation along the train line and bike paths and around the stations”.

Within that vision, they want to improve and sustain the existing wildlife and increase the tree canopy to create shade and cooling. Birdlife is returning and as the trees and indigenous bushes grow larger, weeds are dying off.

Tamar says the project also seeks to inspire and train community volunteers and activists to work on revegetation throughout Moreland. She reels off a number of components of the urban forest including an oak lawn outside the Brunswick Woolworths, a vegetable and herb garden known as Rani’s Patch, and two small orchards in Brunswick and Coburg which provide apples, plums and stone fruits to local residents.

“There’s a whole lot of purposes around food production, shade and cooling, drawing down carbon, and building community,” she says.

“We’re working in many sections as guerilla gardeners because it’s also partly about educating Vic Track [the owners of the railway land] and their contractors and getting them to think of this space as more than just a train corridor.”

The group was also active in negotiating with the state government to ensure that trees which had to be pulled down for the Moreland Road-Bell Street skyrail will be replaced with three times the amount of vegetation that was there before.

One of the most advanced sections of the Upfield urban forest is on both sides of the railway line between Albert and Victoria streets, with Brunswick station in the middle. The area is an oasis of green just metres from the railway tracks with mature eucalypt and wattle trees providing shade while at knee and chest level are grevillea, correa and casuarina plants.

Bruce Francis takes particular pride in this stretch of the path. “It’s really doing well,” he says.

The urban forest group now has about 250 volunteers and bolstered by a recent grant from Moreland Council of $10,000 over three years, is looking to lease some space to have a permanent home for tools and to grow plants and trees from seed.

Volunteers meet for a couple of hours every Sunday morning and newcomers are always welcome, no matter how much gardening experience they have. All they need is enthusiasm and a willingness to get their hands dirty.

A typical morning will include weeding and removing rubbish, laying mulch and planting new trees.

“There’s no particular goal each week. We just do two hours and see how far we get,” says Bruce.

A calendar on the group’s website shows the times and locations of upcoming planting and weeding events.