What immediate post-fire procedures are best to save plants damaged by fire and to encourage regeneration?
The first task is to find out what plants have been irreparably damaged and which are savable. The key to this is knowing your species and their ecology. Tree ferns, for instance, look terrible after a fire because all their fronds are burnt off, but the crowns will recover quite quickly and send out new foliage. Smooth-barked eucalypts are often badly damaged and may not be salvageable, but rough-barked eucalypts often survive. They look awful initially but they have epicormic buds and lignotubers and have evolved to survive bushfires. After the fires at Mount Macedon we came across some giant Redwoods (Sequoia) about to be felled in the clean up. Luckily we knew that these trees are fire resistant and we were able to save them. They recovered and stand out like beacons in the landscape now. We were also able to intervene to save some large rhododendrons which were badly scorched but not burnt. Within twelve weeks of the fire they came into leaf and recovered. It would have taken many
