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- The Botanic Gardens Bicentenary 2016
Bog GardenThe Blue Mountains Botanic Garden's Bog Garden showcases a special type of wetland habitat - the hanging swamp. Hanging swamps form on hillsides and cliff edges in depressions with poor drainage. Water seeping through the ground is caught in layers of sandstone and shale, creating damp conditions suitable for ferns and mosses, which in turn trap sediment and leaves to create a rich wetland ecosystem. Plan of the Bog Garden
Section through the Bog Garden Wetlands all over the world are under threat due to land clearing. Yet they are extremely valuable - in wet periods they soak up water like sponges, providing essential buffer zones that protect downstream areas during floods and droughts. They also filter the water as it makes its way via creeks and rivers into city water supplies. In the Blue Mountains, hanging swamps occur between Springwood, Mt Victoria and Mt Wilson. Our ‘Bog Team’ has created this garden so that you can see some of the plants adapted to hanging swamps without damaging their precious, fragile natural habitats. The Bog Garden is a ‘peat free zone’, and the team has used environmentally sustainable coconut coir fibre instead of peat, mixed with washed river sand. In constructing the Bog Garden our team removed about a hundred tonnes of soil. Then they added layers of washed river sand, geofabric, butyl liner and more geofabric to build up a compacted base that would retain filtered water in the area. Licensed staff from the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden collected small amounts of authentic plant material from Dean’s Swamp to provide stock for propagating plants for the Bog Garden. The Bog Garden contains some rare and endangered Blue Mountains plants, as well as various interesting orchids and carnivorous plants from Australia and overseas.
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Bog plants
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