If you walked through the Reserve in late spring or early summer at that time you could suddenly be in a forest of vicious saffron thistles, surrounded by the bright yellow flowers of St. John's Wort or confronted by a thicket of briar roses or blackberries.

The good news is that, thanks to the efforts of our volunteers, the worst weeds are much less prevalent now than they used to be and small native plants and grasses are making a comeback in areas once dominated by weeds. This has been helped in recent years by a string of wetter than average seasons that have been more favourable to native plants than weeds, at least where weed numbers have been reduced. Between 2020 and 2023 we identified 92 native plant species not previously recorded on The Pinnacle Nature Reserve, an increase of more than 50% over the previously known number. The new species included 2 rare or uncommon species, bringing the total of those to 8.

Continued vigilance is required to consolidate and extend these gains and make more areas in the Reserve where native plants are more visible than the weeds.

A weed can be an exotic or native species that colonises and persists in an ecosystem in which it did not previously exist. Weeds range in size from small herbs (e.g. Paterson's Curse, Verbascum sp.) and grasses to shrubs (e.g. Briar Rose, Cotoneaster sp.) and trees (e.g. Chinese Pistachio).

Not all weeds pose the same risk to native ecosystems. For more information, see our guide to the risk of all the exotic species that have been found on The Pinnacle Nature Reserve.

Priority weeds for control, identified on the basis of the 2009 survey (see sections 3 and 4.1 of the Plan), included: African Love Grass; St. John's Wort; Blackberry and a range of woody weeds (including briar rose, cotoneaster and privet); Saffron, Nodding (Spear) and Scotch Thistle; Horehound; Verbascum spp; Paterson's Curse; Sorrel; and Capeweed. Control treatments depend on the weed species and season, and include spraying with herbicides, slashing, grubbing, and (for shrubs and trees) cutting and dabbing with herbicide.

Significantly, as well as tackling the weeds, the Plan dealt with the challenge of increasing and improving the area and condition of native grasses across the reserve. It was proposed to slash large areas of exotic grasses prior to seed set, so that later seeding native grasses can out-compete exotic grasses and gradually recolonise slashed areas. This strategy was complemented with an experimental approach to directly restoring native grasses by sequentially burning, slashing, harvesting a crop plant and soil treatment - see Defeating the Weed Menace ( now completed).

A monitoring and reporting program was included in the Plan in order to to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of its implementation (see section 5 of the Plan).

The Plan concluded that the major barrier to weed management is trained volunteer time and effort. This is therefore a prime target for fotpin activity. It was estimated, without including time for monitoring and reporting, that achieving the Plan's performance targets would initially require 1,182 hours per year, distributed across autumn (135 hours), winter (132), spring (447) and summer (468).

Implementation Status

Aspects of the The Weed Plan are still evident in our current weed control activities, but the plan itself was superceded to some extent after a few years by its successful implementation, with some of the original target weeds no longer a problem. In the first 6 years that the plan was in operation (2010 to 2016) an average of 924 hours per year was spent on weed control on the Reserve. This is less than the amount projected in the plan, partly because of the difficulty of making accurate predictions, partly because of improvements in our control approach and partly because within that 6 years there was already evidence of a reduction in prevalence of a number of weed types. Changing weather from year to year also influences the effort required.

Our efforts also expanded beyond the Reserve to include the bordering paddocks of North Kama and Bottom Pinnacle (see the location map), primarily to provide buffering against weed infestation of the Reserve from those quarters. When the effort spent in those areas is included the average over the first 6 years was 1169 hours per year.