Google ‘Off Track’ and click on ‘Radio National’ and ‘Flower pots for biodiversity’. You will find a website with illustrations and links to a very interesting Off Track program broadcast on 21 and 22 February about the concrete flower pots included in the rebuilt sea wall in Blackwattle Bay. [Editor: Alternatively, go to: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/offtrack/flower-sea-power-in-blackwattle-bay/6116656]

Here is an extract from the Radio National website:

Sydney’s harbour is an urbanised ecosystem where the natural environment exists along with buildings encroaching on the shoreline, industry, shipping, fishing, street run-off, micro-plastics, floating chip packets and even weeds and invasive animals.

It would be easy to despair about the state of this once pristine area when you read a list like that, but that is not the attitude of Rebecca Morris or Ross Coleman from the Coastal and Marine Ecosystems Group at the University of Sydney. They’re looking into ways that the current environment can be enhanced.

‘A city is a thing, and since most of the world’s population now lives in cities, understanding biodiversity in the context of an urban environment is absolutely critical, because most people live in cities,’ says Associate Professor Coleman.

‘We’re actually looking at a variety of different strategies that when we build stuff, we actually put biodiversity back in. As always there is a new term for this, we call it ‘green engineering’.’

Enter the flower pot: the latest in habitat creation.

A very pretty concrete flowerpot, Blackwattle Bay. (image: City of Sydney)
A very pretty concrete flowerpot, Blackwattle Bay. (image: City of Sydney)