Wildplant Community Nursery

Wildplant Community Nursery

The Wildplant Community Nursery was established by the Central Coast Wildplant Rescue Service and the Community Environment Network. Construction of the new nursery was completed in mid 2009 at the Old Pioneer Dairy site at South Tacoma.

It has long been the hope of CEN to be able to provide access to the flora of the Central Coast Region to its members. While it has always been spoken of to use ‘local provenance’ plants in our gardens to encourage wildlife and promote sustainable development, it has been difficult to access these plants for the general public with very few nurseries actually supplying these species.

The purpose of the nursery is to promote and grow ‘local provenance’ native plants for use in our many projects such as:

• Habitat for Wildlife - members will be able to access local native plants to compliment their gardens and provide a habitat for our local wildlife as well as sustaining the coasts ecology.
• Land for Wildlife - members can take advantage of the nursery to grow natives from seeds collected from their properties which can then be replanted on their land for reforestation purposes.
• Bush Regeneration - projects undertaken by the CEN team will be able to access the nursery to grow seeds collected from areas under their care to use in the revegetation of these areas.
• Central Coast Wildplants Rescue Service – members and volunteers require nursery facilities to care for and grow plant material collected from development sites under their care.
• Community Groups – the nursery is also available for community and Bushcare/ Landcare groups to use the facilities at the nursery for their various projects with prior arrangement.

The nursery is complimented by our Regional Seedbank which we have been building on for 3 years, collecting seed from our various projects and storing them for future use. Well, the future is here and we have begun planting seeds from over 100 different local species from various areas throughout the coast to make them readily available for our members.