Continuing a botanical legacy: Blue Mountains Botanic Garden.
Nine years before Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson made their historic trek across the Blue Mountains in 1813, a naturalist named George Caley – curator of the colony’s first botanic gardens at Parramatta – forged a route along the northern rim of the Grose Valley, the first European to penetrate the mountains west of Sydney.
His mission was to collect botanical specimens; and on November 10, 1804, Caley reached a place of great beauty, a summit cloaked in magnificent tree ferns known to the Darug people as Tomah. Several days later, however, Caley’s party aborted their mission at nearby Mount Banks, thwarted by the rugged, seemingly impenetrable terrain.
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