Trips into the Bush

While the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra is a good place to see local ferns growing in plausible locations, the only real way to find out about ferns in the wild is to head out into the Bush. This may mean a walk up one of the local hillsides, or a precarious drive along narrow rutted tracks up steep mountainsides.

Twenty years ago, our expeditions verged on the foolhardy. These days, the equipment is just a bit better. There's still nothing quite like the feeling like climbing over a ridge in unfamiliar country, to spy tree ferns in a deep valley below. Or the thrill of finding something quite new or unexpected. We have embarked on several expeditions in the past year, to map fern distribution and to look for new species and unexpected occurrences.

This page links to reports on these trips. I intend them to emulate the excellent reports by Anne Herrington.

The first of these describes a walk I took (4 October 1998) up the Molonglo Gorge in the drier north eastern quarter of the Territory.

Trips to date:

• Molonglo Gorge Nature Reserve

David Nicholls
October 1998