FEATURE GARDEN
Sherwood Arboretum – adapting to ‘climate variability on steroids’ Andrew Benison, President, Friends of Sherwood Arboretum Association Inc.
Poet Dorothea Mackellar could not have summed up the current Australian experience of weather better when she wrote My Country over a century ago. Her words, ‘I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains’, are a very timely reminder of the variability of today’s climate on all things botanical. Just upstream of the iconic Indooroopilly suspension bridge sits the 15-ha heritage-listed Sherwood Arboretum, home to more than 1000 Australian native trees, on the banks of the Brisbane River. The site is also a text book example of a local catchment with the in-flow of two creeks, fed by a leafy urban environment, into a basin topography with wetlands, which out-flow into a creek leading to the nearby Brisbane River.
The never-to-be-forgotten event Just six years after 72 prominent citizens planted a signature avenue of Queensland Kauri Agathis robusta trees to celebrate the opening of Brisbane’s first arboretum dedicated to Australian native trees, the city was struck by a catastrophic flood in 1931. More major floods were to follow. The never-to-be forgotten event of the devastating 1974 Brisbane floods are remembered in the arboretum by a simple historic marker of angled timber beams, reflecting the power and destructive force of untamed water on our river city. The 1974 catastrophe, the city’s highest flood since 1893, inundated large areas of Brisbane, including all but the highest ridges in the arboretum. Thankfully, the destructive January 2011 flood was two metres below the peak of the previous major flood of 1974, which cost 14 lives and left an estimated 6700 homes ruined.
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THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 50 JUNE 2018
