Inside the Yarralumla Nursery, which turns 110 this year. Photo: James Coleman.
If it makes you feel better about your garden’s performance, Canberra’s a tricky place to get things to grow.
And that’s coming from Dr Matt Parker, the general manager of the Yarralumla Nursery, near Weston Park, which has been rearing Canberra’s street trees since 1941.
“We often talk about a 50-degree temperature differential in Canberra, so trees need to survive from -10 degrees into the low 40s, and there’s only a selection of trees – both natives and exotics – that can,” he says.
“The nursery’s made a massive contribution to the city of Canberra. When it was first formed, Canberra … was a treeless plain effectively, and since then, the nursery has grown many, many millions of trees and distributed them around and filled up the streets.”
When the nursery celebrated its 100th birthday in 2015, it was estimated it had distributed about 50 million trees across the ACT.
Now, that figure is thought to be heading towards 57 million, with 300,000 alone planted in the last year.
Today, the nursery stocks more than 500 different native and exotic species, with every seed type ever grown at the site noted down in the so-called ‘seed bank’.
New landowners are eligible to receive a free allocation of plants from the nursery. Photo: James Coleman.
As an institution run by the ACT Government, City Services crews obviously have access to it for street and park plantings, but since the 1930s, the nursery has also provided a ‘Plant Issue Scheme’ to landowners in Canberra’s new suburbs.
“So when a Canberra buys a block of land, they’re entitled to one of three different packages of trees and ground cover they can choose from, whether it’s 20 smaller pots, or 10 larger pots, or a mix of both,” City Services Minister Tara Cheyne explains.
“Then they’re able to come out here, talk to the trained staff – who know a lot about what’s best for the growing conditions, what sort of garden and landscaping are you looking for – and provide really detailed, terrific advice.”
This week, another tree was added to the nursery to mark the birthday, and this, too, wasn’t chosen willy-nilly.
Minister for City Services Tara Cheyne is planting the 110th-anniversary tree at Yarralumla Nursery. Photo: James Coleman.
“The species we’re planting today is an elm tree known as the Yarralumla Weeper, and it was a selection first made at the nursery in the 1930s and … that’s been planted in a lot of Canberra’s streets over those years,” Dr Parker says.
“It’s quite a majestic tree, and it tolerates the Canberra climate.”
In the three years Dr Parker has worked there, a major change has been moving the plant inventory online so people can see what’s available.
“It means our customers can actually see online what plants are available, and the quantity, and that’s really streamlined sales,” he says.
Another significant development has been the acquisition of a potting machine that can pot between 1000 and 6000 plants an hour.
“There might be three or four staff that run that, and it will fill up a pot with soil, puts a hole into the soil, and then staff members pop the plant in, and the machine will water the plant as it goes along a conveyor belt, ready to be taken out into the field for planting.”
The nursery also took home the ‘Employer of the Year Award’ at the 2024 Nursery and Garden Industry NSW and ACT Awards.
As for the next 110 years, neither Dr Parker nor the government see demand dying down.
“There’s always a lot of projects going on in Canberra, whether they’re residential or commercial. Canberrans really value their greenery.”
Dr Matt Parker and Tara Cheyne with staff at the Yarralumla Nursery. Photo: ACT Government.
Ms Cheyne says she has reiterated to the government that it should continue consulting with the nursery on its plant choices, particularly for the Emu Bank development in Belconnen, as well as for future stages of light rail.
She adds that the new potting machine, in particular, means staff are “able to spend less time potting and more time propagating and caring for our plants, getting them ready for major plantings like light rail Stage 2A”.
Visit City Services for more information or to browse plant catalogues.
