Slow down and smell the vanilla lilies.

During 2005, Bush For Life community member volunteers contributed over 27,000 hours of labour to bush regeneration activities, effectively and efficiently managing more than 2500 ha of bushland outside the formal reserve system in the Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia (SA). Frequently, the most difficult task is getting people to slow down and smell the vanilla lilies, which is stressed in our introductory workshop. Bush regeneration is one of the only times in life that people will be told to do a job slowly, in fact they will be corrected if they go too fast. Importantly, this gives the volunteer permission to leave large patches of weeds alone. We advise them to worry only about good bushland and concentrate on weed fronts and, on several difficult sites, this appears to have made a considerable difference to volunteer retention rates. We don’t have a perfect system and we expect mistakes, but we acknowledge this and try to learn from them.