The Classground project

Date posted: 04 December 2017

If you've walked past Adelaide Botanic Garden's Classground section in recent years, you might have completely missed it.

It's taken on a tangled, secret garden aesthetic in recent years, but a bold new five-year project - involving Botanic Gardens horticulturalists and trainees, and Seed Conservation Centre and State Herbarium staff - aims to breathe new life into the Garden.

Classgrounds have a long history at botanic gardens as learning hubs for taxonomy, helping people understand how we group, classify and understand plant families.

This year we've started cutting back some of the Classground's dense foliage and we're undertaking an audit of every single plant in the Garden.

The collection will then be reviewed, with some old plants being replaced with new plants (with a focus on showy, unique and/or rare plants) that taxonomically fit better with advances in science and thinking.

The striking new plantings will be accompanied by infrastructure and sculpture upgrades and repairs, and revitalised signage and interpretation so the Classground becomes a hub of learning and exploration, where people have a building block to further their knowledge of plants.

For a deeper look at the Classground project, pick up a copy of the Summer issue of SA Gardens & Outdoor Living, on sale now.

We'll bring you more updates on the project via the blog and Adelaide Botanic Garden's Facebook page as it progresses.