Wollongong Botanic Gardens in a city of steel and coal

Lou's family lived in Wollongong when she was little and her father was just embarking on his life as a community pharmacist. However her family's connections with this busy city on the coast south of Sydney go back well before that, and they survive to this day. It was to catch up to some of this family that we spent a few days there late last year, when we (inevitably) discovered the botanic gardens. 

Wollongong occupies a long strip of land between the sea and the sandstone escarpment, and this escarpment provides a superb backdrop for its 312,000 inhabitants.

Mount Keira from Wollongong Botanic Garden.

Wollongong still produces huge quantities of steel, the port bustles and the coal mines on the escarpment still churn out the product, though presumably for all our sakes those days will end. However there are other engines driving 'the Gong' these days, especially higher education and even tourism. Wollongong University has a good reputation, and right on its boundary lies the youthful but impressive Wollongong Botanic Garden. 

In 1929 Arthur Hoskins bought 30 hectares of land there, mostly dairy farm but later featuring a professionally designed and managed garden around his house which he completed in 1939. Just 12 years later in 1951 he donated 18.5ha of it to the council to develop as a botanic garden. (I would, for no good reason, usually say 'gardens' there, but it's officially the Botanic Garden, so I'll stick with that for this post.) In 1981 Hoskins' house was leased by the council to the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music, who still occupy it. 

Professor Peter Spooner of the UNSW, a pioneering landscape designer, prepared a master plan in 1963 and the first plantings (of azaleas) began the following year. The garden opened to the public in 1971, though it had been informally accessible for the previous three years. 

Mature Blackbutt Eucalyptus pilularis, growing by the path in one of the forest sections.

While garden beds were being laid out during this time, we were more interested in the fact that, in the early 1980s, a series of 'landscape' plantings were established, to replicate the wet and dry eucalypt forest types typical of the area. Here are some more photos taken along the forest paths, which we largely had to ourselves during our visit on a warm afternoon.

At around the same time work also began on restoring the rainforest which had originally grown along the creek line (Middle Creek I think?), based on shady remnant stands of paperbarks Melaleuca sp. and Turpentine Syncarpia glomulifera. Most of the plantings are of regional species, though apparently higher up the creek are species from North Queensland and from New Zealand, New Caledonia, Lord Howe Island and even South Africa, though we didn't find (or perhaps didn't recognise) those sections. Here are some of the very peaceful rainforest sections that we did enjoy.

Elsewhere the plantings are more formally conventional, but with a lot of native (mostly local) species alongside exotic selections. Several areas are themed, one such being the hill of succulents which we first admired from the main path and later walked across.

Succulents evolved to deal with arid climates (by stockpiling water during the wet
season) but Australia's drylands are not seasonal, so the strategy doesn't work here
and this collection is of necessity mostly of exotic species. This garden was
developed between 1982 and 1986 and emphasises good drainage, aided
by the introduction of large boulders.

On the same theme, the Sir Joseph Banks Glasshouse is home to a formidable array of cacti!

The impressive collection of cycads concentrates on threatened species, mostly not from Australia. The display was only opened in May 2023 and is based on the Sydney private collection of Dr Ian and Norma Edwards, who bequeathed their plants, some being 50 years old, for public enjoyment. In the event this involved carefully extracting them and transporting them on trucks to Wollongong. Threatened and Critically Endangered species include plants from Taiwan, the Philippines and Kenya and, in addition to the Edwards contributions, cycads have been transplanted from elsewhere in the gardens, while others were donated from the Sunshine Coast. This display is still developing but well worthwhile investigating nonetheless.

Part of the newly-planted cycad collection.

More established, and more extensive, is their palm collection of which they are justly proud. It comprises some 6000 square metres spread across lawns and incorporated garden beds, with some 800 palm species (!), all of them at best uncommon and many endangered. There is an emphasis on species from Oceania, especially Hawaii, and from Madagascar, but there are others including Australian. Plantings began in 2013 and were substantially completed by 2015. Many palm species are dioecious - ie having separate male and female plants - so the emphasis here is on clumped same-species plantings to maximise their chances of setting seed to assist in conservation of the species.

Pritchardia minor is a small Hawaiian palm, highly endangered (like most
Hawaiian palms) and restricted to less than 200 mature trees on two mountain
ridges on just one island. The abysmal story of the unique Hawaiian birdlife is
fairly well-known, but the situation of its endemic plants is no better.

Here are some more general shots of the palm gardens; no species identification, I'm sorry.
 

And some individual plants that caught our attention. Some were local... 

 

Magnificent Gymea Lilies Doryanthes excelsa, above and below. Those flower spikes are
some six metres long! These were just finishing, though the day before, up on the plateau
just a few hundred metres above, they were still in full bloom.

 

Grass trees Xanthorrhoea sp.

Hillock Bush (not sure why) Melaleuca hypericifolia is fairly common on the south
coast, I think especially on sandstone. It is truly a beauty.

Others were from a bit further afield...

Dorrigo Waratah Alloxylon pinnatum, another stunner, this one from the warm temperate
rainforests of the Dorrigo Plateau and the Border Ranges further north.

Kurrajong Brachychiton populneus is mostly found west of the Great Dividing Range.

These delightful Red Kangaroo Paws Anigozanthos rufa are from a whole continent
away, in the south-west of Western Australia.

And this magnificent spread of paper daisies (I'm not going to hazard a guess at their
genus, as this group is subject to a great deal of horticultural experimentation and
hybridisation) probably originated in the west too, though it looks very fine
in its current setting!

And still others are from much further away still, as we've already seen...

... plus others like this glorious Bird-of-Paradise flower from South Africa.

 

And the perhaps even more amazing Dragon's Blood Tree Dracaena draco, a lily
in the family Asparagaceae, is endemic to the Canary Islands off north-west Africa.
Here it is growing in the succulents garden that we've already visited above.

Of course there is wildlife in the gardens but on the warm afternoon that we spent there not much was active. Here are a couple of common birds, though that never means we shouldn't admire them each time.

Rainbow Lorikeet Trichoglossus moluccanus feeding on a flowering Xanthorrhoea spike.

And of course the waterbirds on and in the ponds didn't at all mind it being warm!

Masked Lapwing Vanellus miles bathing enthusiastically.

Eurasian Coot Fulica atra and Pacific Black Duck Anas superciliosa sharing the facilities.

White-browed Scrubwren Sericornis frontalis in the cool gloom of the rainforest gully.

And while we didn't see any of the guests this time, we're always happy to see one of these 'bee hotels' which are designed to provide accommodations for native bees.

But, the story of the Wollongong Botanic Gardens doesn't quite end there. In the 1980s, for reasons lost to me at least, the gardens took on the management, as 'annexes' of the gardens, of three natural areas in the immediate region. We visited one of these, Puckeys Estate Nature Reserve, on the coast well within Wollongong just 5km to the north-east of the gardens at the edge of suburb of Fairy Meadow. (The other two, Mount Keira Summit Park and Korrongulla Wetland, are on our schedule for a future visit.) In the late 19th century an English chemist called Courtenay, or Courtney, Puckey (really!) bought land here and experimented with extracting edible salt from the water. His work didn't seriously effect the natural values however and after his death in 1944 the infrastructure crumbled into ruins. (While Courtenay doesn't have his own entry in the esteemed Australian Dictionary of Biography, two of his daughters do. Both Mary and Selina were pioneering doctors and hospital administrators.)

The reserve (as noted, it is managed by the botanic gardens rather than the NSW Parks Service, which is a little puzzling given its conservation values) is accessed by a 1.5k walking track, including a board walk and bridge over the lagoon.

The beginning of the walk, looking ahead to the bridge; the sea is just to the right.

Looking across to the mouth of the lagoon (currently closed, as is regularly the case
with many of these coastal lagoons) from the same vantage point as the previous one.

The mangroves fringing the lagoon are just one of the significant habitats protected here.

Another is this Swamp Oak Floodplain Forest, dominated by Swamp Oak Casuarina glauca
and Swamp Paperbark Melaleuca ericifolia which are immersed in water for much of
their existence.

Accordingly the understorey is open. Vines are a characteristic.

Silkpod Vine (or Monkey Rope) Parsonsia straminea along the walking track.

These forest open into Coastal Saltmarsh at the edges of the lagoon, where the soil is always salty and the plants are regularly inundated by brine.

Edge of the saltmarsh between the lagoon and the walking track.

At the base of the dunes on the other side of the track are small patches of scarce littoral rainforest.

Coastal (or littoral) rainforest remnant in the shelter of the dunes.

And the intact dunes themselves are of ecological interest and value.

Path through the dunes from the main walking track to the beach.

'The Gong' is well worth a visit and deserves a good couple of days, with excellent restaurants and cafes to supplement your visits to the gardens and associated natural areas such as Puckeys Estate. We recommend it all to you.

Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo Zanda funerea in a banksia by the track at Puckeys Estate.

NEXT POSTING THURSDAY 8 FEBRUARY

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