Building resilience for an historic garden

Eryldene is a heritage listed house and world-renowned garden of camellias, run by volunteers as a community Trust in Sydney, Australia. To build its organisational resilience to the impacts of climate change, Trust volunteers (with expert advice) developed a Climate Risk Register for the house and garden. An Environmental Sustainability Action Plan followed, which identifies the day to day mitigation and adaptation activities and longer term planning needed to improve the resilience of the house and garden to protect the heritage values of the property. The register is within the Action Plan, and available online. To sustain rare and significant plants through increasing periods of high heat, succession planting and propagation, specific irrigation and heat relief measures are implemented. Rainwater is harvested from the roofs of the house into large tanks buried under the driveway; and some changes to more heat tolerant plant varieties have been made. Lawns are no longer watered and all tours and public programming engage visitors in climate action discussion.