Stories From: Gardening

Rain gardens are a brilliant way to manage water runoff. Recently Council teams and contractors collaborated with Sydney Water to create three different types of native rain gardens at Glenbrook Visitor Information Centre, showcasing how sustainability and beauty are the natural features of these innovative but simple water management solutions.

Volunteering offers mutual benefits for the helper and those helped. Along with a sense of empowerment, purpose and contribution, it can give us skills for the workforce, new friends and social connection. While this list is by no means exhaustive, it offers a wide range of options for where to help out in our local community.

Pollinators are critical for life on earth. As we face a biodiversity crisis in which we’re losing plants and animals at an alarming rate, the Rotary Club of Blackheath and Planting Seeds have collaborated on the B&B Highway pollinator program.

'Middle Earth' is a remarkable off-grid paradise in the Kanimbla Valley, created over many decades by Hans and Tillie Coster. What was once a degraded grazing property has been regenerated, with its underground 'Hobbit Hall' built to survive all weather extremes.

Led by First Nations students and community, Blaxland High School has established a native food garden and students are using crops grown in the garden as ingredients in food technology classes. The school received injections of expertise from many quarters including an Aboriginal-owned social enterprise to learn about and embrace the use of native plants for cooking and sustainability.

Renewed efforts to save the Dwarf Mountain Pine in light of its potential upgrade to ‘critically endangered’ status are giving greater recognition to a rare and unusual prehistoric native in our midst.

Maligned through the ages for their association with witchcraft, disease, drug use and poisonings, the fungus kingdom is gaining due credit thanks to ecologists, photographers and foragers.

Blackheath Public School is providing hands-in-the-dirt lessons on how the students can make their school more sustainable. Students will soon be eating spinach and cheese scrolls made by the canteen using garden produce.

What do tea, samurai clans, William McArthur, Benjamin Franklin, Vietnam and the Botanic Gardens at Mount Tomah have in common? Read on to explore the way camellias and cultures are woven together and why it’s important we think about conserving biodiversity as a global project implemented at a local level.

Take a tour of the community farms in Blackheath where you'll find alpacas, compost to die for, hundred-year-old ‘Shipley’ apple trees, native bees, friendly faces, wonky tomatoes, life philosophies and much, much more.