FEATURE ARTICLES
Mount Tomah and the Order of the Phoenix: the garden rises from the ashes Ian Allan, Supervisor of Arboriculture and Natural Areas, Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah
You’d be forgiven for forgetting about all that came before ‘the rona’. The omnipresent crisis and the 24-hour news cycle have made the bushfires that ravaged Australia’s east coast last summer seem like a distant memory for many, yet for the team at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah, the reminders are ubiquitous and there is still a lot of work to be done. You’d also be forgiven for thinking; ‘not another bushfire story!’, but never fear, we too were suffering from bushfire media burnout (pun intended), so here’s a story on the positive side of things and on what makes our road to recovery different from that of an average garden. The basalt rocks had no sooner cooled amongst the ash, nor had all the fires been extinguished, before we were busy planning the recovery effort. Trees needed to be assessed and areas made safe, essential infrastructure needed repair or replacement, staff needed support and stories needed to be told. All those things are common to anyone whose property has been burnt, and much has been written about that side of things; however, what is less obvious is what we needed to do as highly qualified horticulturists, arborists and scientists. And what was different about the response required by a botanic garden. It would have been easy to rush straight in and start ‘cleaning-up’ all the burnt areas. The desire to remove the visible reminders of the fire and to focus on aesthetics may have helped us all move on, yet botanic gardens are first and foremost a horticultural and scientific institution. We manage and care for a living collection of rare plants from around the world, as well as 240 hectares of our World Heritage Wilderness area. We keep records on every one of the plants in the collection, not just for posterity’s sake, but for scientific research and to improve the global knowledge base for each species in our care. Our conservation area doesn’t exist just to lock-up a parcel of land like a national park; it is an essential piece of high-quality wilderness that can be studied, and where we can carefully refine our management techniques.
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THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 55 SUMMER 2020/21
