Welcome to Blue Mountains Wildplant Rescue Service If you live in the Blue Mountains and would like to have your own beautiful waterwise native bush garden then The Blue Mountains Wildplant Rescue Native Plant Nursery is the place to come. All the plants for sale are of local provenance and therefore ideally adapted to their environment. You can purchase native plants propagated by us from seed collected locally or, more interestingly, you can buy pots of 'rescued' plants. These are plants which we have saved from the clutches of the bulldozer. Our team of volunteers is always ready to offer advice about the most suitable plants for your garden and how to care for them. Volunteers and the Work they do Without the contribution of volunteers, Wildplant Rescue Service could not function or even exist. Volunteers are the backbone of the organisation, proving that people who care can make a difference. In a time when it is easy to despair at the amount of work that needs to be done to repair and safeguard our earth's ecosystems, volunteers bring great hope. Who are volunteers? Volunteers for Wildplant Rescue can be drawn from a broad cross section of the local community. They are usually people with some availability during the day and a determination to do something positive to preserve their local biodiversity. Volunteers bring a variety of knowledge, skills, energy levels and attitudes. There is a place for anyone who is willing to contribute, regardless of age, intelligence, fitness level, ethnicity and health. Volunteers collecting seeds What do volunteers do? Volunteers' work will depend largely on their interests, skills and availability. Some will prefer specific tasks while others will be willing to do whatever is required on the day.There are five main areas of work available: Rescues - site assessors and coordinators, instructing/educating workers about the site, digging and potting rescued plants, collecting mulch, brushmatting and other rescue material. Seed collection - a certain level of knowledge and skill are required to ensure that the seeds are collected at the appropriate time and handled correctly. Nursery - seed cleaning, sowing, potting-up, watering, weeding, pot cleaning, labelling stock and restocking sales outlets. Office -Administrative tasks including updating the database, word processing, bookkeeping, membership and volunteer record keeping, filing and photocopying. Fundraising and promotion -Preparing funding submissions, organising and manning street stalls, media liaison and releases, merchandising and community education. About Us Introduction The Blue Mountains Wildplant Rescue Service (BMWRS) - the first of its kind in Australia - was formed to help protect and promote the natural values of the Blue Mountains. It has been hailed as a model for communities around Australia working in a practical way to conserve and extend local biodiversity and to save remnant bushland from sprawling development. The inception of BMWRS Wildplant Rescue Service was formally established in 1994 as a community driven, not-for-profit organisation, based in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. It was a new and innovative concept for saving the natural plant heritage in urban areas of the Blue Mountains. The concept evolved in January 1993 when Mikla Lewis, founder of the organisation, was working alone to rescue plants from a block of land destined for imminent development. It occurred to Mikla that if a group of people were working together, so many more plants could be saved. Mikla had been instrumental in the establishment and management of the NSW Wildlife Information and Rescue Service (WIRES) nearly a decade earlier. She reasoned that the idea of a network of volunteers working to save native plants could be just as effective. What is a wildplant? Another founder member of the group, Wyn Jones, a naturalist then working for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, coined the word wildplant. Wyn - who was later to be involved with the discovery and scientific description of the ancient Wollemi Pine - created wildplant from the botanical equivalent of wildlife. Wyn and Mikla hoped the concept would encourage people to think about plants in much the same way they had come to care about animals. Please visit our website for more information regarding details of stock available from our nursery (Propagated Plants and Rescued Plants), Price lists, View our newsletters or join our mailing list.