MORE than 20 volunteers put on their gardening gloves for World Wetlands Day on Saturday (February 3) to help plant out the banks of Masons Gully in Rosewood.
The Masons Gully Bushcare Group meet for a working bee at the site on the second Saturday morning of each month, but were out in force last week to mark Wetlands Day.
Species such as lomandra, tall sedges, blue flax lily, common rush and native wetland grasses were planted along a 100m stretch of the gully.
West Moreton Landcare member and Native Plants Queensland Ipswich treasurer Heather Knolls, said the local bushcare group had been working on the area just downstream from the Rosewood Scrub Arboretum to control further erosion in the gully affecting the flow of Western Creek.
Mrs Knolls said the project was a collaborative effort between Ipswich City Council and the Masons Gully Bushcare Group.
“The object of the exercise on Saturday was planting riparian plants lomandra, sedges and grasses to try to control stream bank erosion,” she said.
“When we have the amount of rain we have had recently the detention basin overflows and it goes through a gully in the Arboretum, down through the area we were planting, under the road and alongside John Street and winds around town and empties into Western Creek.
“The planting was an attempt to control further erosion along the streambanks of the bushcare area.
“It is working to slow down the flow. We could see on the day how much the water going through had flattened existing vegetation which was starting to stand upright again.”
The volunteers planted about 200 plants along the banks.
A new initiative from Council was also on show, a kit put together for loan to schools to enable students to study wetland areas and their inhabitants.
