Our Community Native Plant Nursery has distributed 964,000 trees since it’s humble beginnings. We are well on our way to 1,000,000 trees sold or given away to landholders and habitat restoration groups across the Northern Rivers region. We are looking forward to reaching that milestone!
But first things first: today we are celebrating the 240,000th tree being distributed by our Bushfire Recovery Nursery. Back in 2021, Friends of the Koala launched the Bushfire Recovery Nursery with a grant awarded to us from The Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife (FNPW) as part of their Bushfire Recovery Program which aims to plant one million trees by 2025.
Friends of the Koala’s Bushfire Recovery Nursery is located on land generously provided for the duration of the project by Southern Cross University to produce the trees over a three-year period, gifting them to landholders in bushfire affected areas – and we did it! Read more about the launch of our Bushfire Recovery Nursery.
Our 240,000th tree – a Eucalyptus Robusta (Swamp Mahogany) – is part of a lot of sixty trees headed to a local landholder at Lagoon Cross just outside Lismore who is a Professor at Southern Cross University in Organics Research and Agronomy.
Our final major milestone under the current contract has been reached and the next contract will take us up to 280,000 trees.
Habitat restoration is a huge part of our work at Friends of the Koala and we are immensely proud of this milestone. Without eucalyptus trees there are no koalas, it is that simple. Through this program, landholders can contribute to the preservation of koalas and their habitat, contribute to restoring lost habitat and protecting natural regeneration.
Mark Wilson is our Nursery Manager and one of our founding members. He has been guiding and helping property owners in the Northern Rivers to create koala habitat on their land for over thirty five years. His mantra is ‘plant and they will come’. One landholder went from zero to 600 trees! Please join us in thanking Mark for his outstanding contribution to habitat restoration and to our organisation. What an impressive track record.
If you enjoyed reading about this milestone you might be interested in reading more:
