After a full week of rich experiences in Sydney, LC Australia ’18 made our way up to the Blue Mountains, about 50 km west of the city. The mountains get their name from the expansive forests of gum trees that emit eucalyptus oil from their leaves and refract light so that they look blue from a distance. The more you know!
Our first day here began at the Australian PlantBank and surrounding botanic gardens. Here we learned more about the evolution of plants and the Australian landscape. Australia hasn’t always been the arid and dry climate we know today, in fact it first started as expansive, wet rainforest. In our walk through the botanic gardens we were given a tour through time with glimpses of what the continent’s vegetation would have looked like 65 million years ago, four million years ago, and what it is now at the present. We travelled through landscapes of cycads and ferns, then to flowering plants, and then to the eucalyptus dominant forests of today. We also got to tour the science and research facility of the Royal Botanic Gardens where great conservation feats of Australian flora are occurring. We saw glimpses of their seed vault and tissue cultures as well as the labs where all this work takes place.
The day ended with a ride on the world’s steepest passenger railway, where we explored the varying dry and wet landscapes of the Blue Mountains (as well as some fear of heights). I also can’t fail to mention that our group was lucky enough to encounter two lyre birds! Needless to say, this first day in the mountains was an incredible introduction to the biogeography of the Australian landscape that we will soon get to know even better as the program continues on.
