COOKTOWN BOTANIC GARDENS UPDATE | BLOOMING BRILLIANT

Cooktown's heritage-listed Botanic Gardens has been a hive of activity lately, with a number of upgrade initiatives completed, including enhanced accessibility and pathway upgrades, and the official opening of the First People's Grove, the dedicated team have been kept busy completing a number of other projects and essential works ahead of the wet season.   

Projects have included, constructing quality rockwork for erosion protection in the stone-pitched drainage channel (pictured above) and improving stormwater drainage and public access to the gardens from the Furneaux/Garden St entrance. This also included carefully working around a mass of large tree roots.

Parks and Gardens staff also sweated their way through manually decompacting and incorporating fresh soil, installing irrigation and a new path, planting (over 70 trees and shrubs - pictured below), and mulching Stage 1 of the Orientation Garden, which showcases some of the flora from the Cape York Peninsula. This development has already improved the visual amenity of the main entrance to the Cooktown Botanic Gardens and promises to offer valuable learning for visitors into the future.

And in a fantastic example of Council staff from different departments all working together to improve the Shire, the Parks and Gardens team enlisted the help of members from the water and wastewater team and the Council workshop to excavate - yes, EXCAVATE - the sediment from the ponds in the Gardens (pictured below). Some of which hadn't been cleaned out for years.