P^ MED cM o a a n CHEER. — 7 ndis 
REPORT OF THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT BOTANIST. 185 
lish the river, consolidate the banks, afford more shade, shelter the 
Garden against the piercing westerly winds, and replace permanently 
the fences, apt to be carried away by the floods. 
Tall Danubian Reeds, Callas, patches of Tea-tree (Melaleuca erici- 
Jolia, transferable in an upgrown state), Poplars, Ashes, Elms, Oaks, 
all of various kinds, Toi-Toi, Pampas Grass, Tamarix, Ampelodesmos, 
Wiry Muehlenbeckia, Poa ramigera, will ere long impress on the once 
dismal swamps and river banks a smiling feature. 
The many thousand large plants required for this purpose were 
partly supplied by donations or interchanges. Clover and Lucerne are 
also established on the lagoons and even on the rises. 
To render, in our zone of evergreen vegetation, the Yarra valley no 
longer of a wintery, leafless aspect, the City Council very kindly allowed a 
strip of ground all along the northern banks to be ploughed for the recep- 
tion of seeds of such quick-growing evergreen trees (chiefly Eucalypts, 
Acacias, Exocarpus, and Casuarinas) as will resist those occasional 
inundations to which we are still likely to be exposed, unless many 
more of the ledges of rocks across the Yarra are blasted away, to de- 
crease still further the niveau of the river,—a measure which the still 
rapid fall during floods will admit of. 
To secure the lower part of the Garden against such calamities and 
destructions as were experienced during the last four floods, it will be 
necessary to raise the river bank still three to four feet higher, perhaps 
with the formation of a terrace, although the embankment has been 
heightened already all along the Garden to the extent of several feet. 
is security could, however, not be afforded on the expansive flat next 
to the City Bridge without serious impediment to the flood stream ; but 
the swampy ground, now with the change of seasons wet and dry, will 
absolutely need deepening in several places, and raising (under forma- 
tion of islands and such like ornamentation) in other spots, inasmuch 
as localities on which the area of dry land and of ponds is not pro- 
perly defined, are prone to originate, by algie growth, malarian fevers. 
Consequently, on grounds of sanitary necessity alone, I feel bound to 
recommend this measure. 
A spacious sluice was built, by Garden labour, last year, to admit 
of the sudden filling of the Garden lake whenever the river rapidly 
. fises, in order that the demolition of the embankments of the lake may 
. in future be obviated 
VOL. vir. [JULY 1, 1869.] d 
