A highlight at this time every year for lovers of Australian flora, the Burrendong Botanic Garden & Arboretum Spring Plant Sale in 2026 is offering something very special. Located an hour north of Orange and adjacent to beautiful Lake Burrendong, the garden boasts an unparalleled display of some of our continent’s most exotic native species, chairperson of the Friends of Burrendong Arboretum, Katrina MacLennan, told this masthead.

“This year we have a really lovely specialty bench with a number of rare and unusual plants, and they’re all Australian natives,” Ms MacLennan revealed of the Saturday, October 17, sale. “This sale is our biggest chance each year to raise funds to restore the Botanic Gardens,” she added.

Plants on sale from the rare and special bench include Eremophila gibbifolia (the coccid emu-bush), Lechenaultia biloba (the blue leschenaultia), Veronica derwentiana (the Derwent speedwell), Chamelaucium uncinatum (the Geraldton waxflower), Correa pulchella (the salmon correa or native fuchsia), and Verticordia species (featherflowers or morrisons). Money from the fully volunteer-run sale funds good work in one of the region’s most authentic and pristine native areas.

“Since we lost our external funding in 2017, this money helps in trying to restore the gardens. It helps to keep the place going as we now have to be a stand-alone business. “We’re trying to re-establish the botanic gardens as a destination and we absolutely spend 100 per cent of what we make from the sale on the gardens,” Ms MacLennan explained.

All the plants for sale have been acclimatised to the region and will thrive in local environments and gardens looking for a splash of native colour and authenticity in the coming years. The team at the botanic garden, she revealed, has been focused on one of its biggest weekends of the year, with days, weeks, and months put into propagating some real old Aussie beauties. “

They’ve all been grown here on the nursery premises, and everything should grow well in local gardens,” Ms MacLennan said. “We have literally thousands of individual plants for sale; we’ve been working really hard since autumn to get as many plants established as possible,” she concluded. The sale is on from 9am to 2pm at the arboretum on Tara Road at Mumbil.

The Burrendong Botanic Garden & Arboretum is a unique 167-hectare sanctuary dedicated to the preservation of unique Australian native flora. Nestled on the shores of Lake Burrendong near Mumbil, it is also the only native botanic garden west of the Blue Mountains in NSW.