Every gardener and visitors to Canberra, should start the New Year with a stroll around the Australian National Botanic Gardens located on the slopes of Black Mountain. The gardens provide an ideal landscape in which to display one of the world’s finest living collections of Australian flora and an extended range of ecosystems that encourages extensive bird life and fauna such as water dragons.
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The Rainforest Gully is a cool place to spend a warm day, in both senses of the word – a damp shady place where ferns, mosses, epiphytes and vines grow in layers under a canopy of overlapping trees forming a closed forest. While some species (such as ferns) tend to dominate, temperate rainforests are less complex than those in the tropics, frequently referred to as ‘jungles’.
The Red Centre garden represents sand planes and dunes, rocky ecarpments and desert rivers. Artwork and native lifestyle are intertwined with a selection of plants from central Australia’s dominant plant communities. Children especially will enjoy tracking animals along the garden trail to discover burrows, hollows and nests where many of them live.
For more junior enjoyment, a recent addition funded by Friends of the Gardens is a two-storey tree house set in the canopy of a paperbark forest. Further trails guide both young and old around rockery gardens, water features, eucalyptus forest and numerous sections of Australian plant families.
Native plant lovers will gain much from meetings of Friends of the Garden. Like most other specialist plant groups, those that you meet are always willing to offer advice, exchange cuttings and work on projects that will help to improve or promote the Gardens.
Local gardeners are fortunate in having access to numerous specialist groups such as bonsai, cactus and succulents, geranium and fuchsias and floral art that you can contact from links on the Horticultural Society of Canberra’s website. (www.hsoc.org.au)
The Horticultural Society, which holds a general meeting once a month has played a large role in the development of the local landscape.
Its publication ‘The Canberra Gardener’ (written by a local team of expert gardeners), an invaluable guide to growing in a cool climate, was first published in 1948. The latest edition is currently available in bookshops – no cool climate gardener should be without a copy.