The Arboretufm is the perfect outdoor site to get the family outdoors during the school holidays and beyond. Or catch up with friends! Ginger Catering now offers hampers for breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon nibbles! And their Coffee Cart will be open Friday to Sunday from 9am - 2pm. Hooray!

Attached is a brochure on WeedScan, a project of the CSIRO, the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions and the NSW Department of Primary Industries. Given that as many as 80% of invasive weeds in Australia are escapees from gardens (since first settlement), the Garden Clubs of Australia (with whom Friends are affiliated) is encouraging all affiliate members to participate. We would encourage as many of you to become involved. Collectively, there is hope that more than 1 million photographs of weeds across Australia will be assembled, which will make identification, mapping and eradication so much easier. See below for the brochure.

From today's Canberra Times Food & Wine section, comes this beautiful article, Kitchen Garden: When life gives you lemons from our Friend Susan Parsons. It's a delightful read and I can't wait to make the Meyer Lemon Olive Oil Cake!

Beth Moon is a photographer based in New York who has gained international recognition for her large-scale, richly toned platinum prints. Her prints are held in numerous public and private collections and have appeared in more than sixty solo and group exhibitions around the world, receiving widespread critical acclaim.

At the end of 2020, Friends agreed to sponsor the Arboretum's first Forest Pod Gazebo and entered into a Memorandum of Understanding to pay for the structure in four bi-annual installments. The MoU was duly signed at our End-of-Year Friends & NAC party. The Gazebos are a multi-purpose shelter around forest and garden locations throughout the Arboretum environment. The structures are environmentally and aesthetically designed to fit within the landscape. They will provide sun and rain protection, and offer on-site interpretation for visitors, with seating suitable for educational, corporate and tourist groups.

Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, is on a mission to plant a million trees over the next two years, increasing vegetation in her city by fifty percent while shoring up eroding riverbanks and increasing biodiversity.

Congratulations to Matthew Hartley, winner of the 2020 Jake Keller Award. The presentation was made at the joint Friends & National Arboretum Canberra end-of-year event on 16 December. A great night!

Wow! Check this out! One of our cherished volunteers, Joanne Maples, made a 20-second recording of the sounds in Forest 2 (local eucalypts and grasses) on 20 December. These cicadas are really loud! You can just hear the traffic noise from the parkway underneath them towards the end.

Help us capture and record the history of the Arboretum - because the Arboretum will be celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023. The Friends are planning to embark on a project that will capture the ‘told’ and ‘untold’ history of the Arboretum - the stories and the people who made it happen and so successful.

This video tells the story of the plantings on the western edge of Walter Burley Griffin’s city plan, the Green Hills, now known as Roman Cypress Hill, Dairy Farmers Hill and the Himalayan Cedars. Originally marked on plans as a forest and game reservation and later a continental arboretum, Griffin finally settled on the afforestation of the three bare hills with cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) and cedars (Cedrus atlantica), from 1918 to 1920. Narrated by Trevor Lipscombe, ACT National Trust Heritage Walks organiser and filmed and directed by Anne Claoue-Long and Bronwyn Blake from the Australian Garden History Society, this short video reveals the connection of these three green hills which are driven past and visited by thousands of visitors every year.