Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden
Five kilometres south of Batemans Bay, a turn-off from the highway leads into 42 hectares of managed forest where the South Coast’s unique native flora has been gathered, labelled and put on show. The Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden is free to enter, open five days a week plus every day during NSW school holidays.
On a weekday morning, with kangaroos sunning on the lawns and birds bathing at the bird hide it is one of the most peaceful and relaxing places to spend a couple of hours in Eurobodalla.
Quick facts
Where: Deep Creek Dam Road, Mogo State Forest, Batemans Bay NSW 2536
Open: Wednesday to Sunday, 9am – 4pm. Daily during NSW school holidays and on public holidays, except Good Friday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Cost: Free
Phone: (02) 4471 2544
Note: Dogs and bikes aren’t permitted however assistance dogs registered with an accredited organisation are welcome, and cyclists need to dismount before the entrance bridge.
Accessibility: Two trails suit limited mobility, and wheelchairs can be pre-booked through the Visitor Centre on site.
Check the website to confirm these facts are still current.
what to do when you get there
Walk! Six tracks totalling around six kilometres fan out from the Visitor Centre, and they’re short enough that you can string two or three together without committing your day. You can download a garden map with walking trails here.
Arboretum Track (1km, easy) formed paths and gentle slopes over the Deep Creek bridge to the Amphitheatre and Arboretum. Suitable for limited mobility.
Aboriginal Heritage Walk (1km, easy) a around 30 native plants interpreted through local Indigenous knowledge, passing the play space and sensory garden. Also suitable for limited mobility.
Deep Creek Track (500m, moderate) a bush track with steps and uneven ground, past the scar tree and along the creek.
Forestry Children’s Walk (1km, moderate) a forest and creek, several bridges, some moderately steep sections. Not suitable for strollers, and it can close after sustained rain.
Forest Track (2km, moderate) a steep in places, with steps, climbing to a viewing platform over Deep Creek Dam. The best view on the site.
Hill Track (2km, moderate) a drier forest, a dry creek crossing, quite steep. Also subject to wet-weather closure.
Bring lunch… or don’t. There are barbecues at the Snotty Gobble Pavilion (shared, first in best dressed) and the Spotted Gum Pavilion (bookable), built from local blackbutt and forest red gum. If you’d rather not carry anything, Mossy on Gardens Cafe is open Wednesday to Sunday, 9am – 3pm, with the kitchen closing at 2:30pm house-made cakes, locally sourced ingredients, and gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian and vegan options. A table booking is a good idea on weekends: (02) 4471 2400.
Let the kids loose. The play space came through the fires intact and sits right on the Aboriginal Heritage Walk, so it’s easy to build a short loop around it.
Buy a plant. The shop stocks more than 200 species propagated on site from regional seed and cuttings, alongside books, local art, bush tucker and preserves made by the Friends of the Garden. If you want something in your garden that will actually survive an Eurobodalla summer, this is the place to find it. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 9am – 4pm.
Take the free walk. On the first Sunday of every month at 11am, volunteer guides run a free walk from the Visitor Centre. No booking a just turn up. Coffee afterwards is traditional.
Watch for wildlife. Kangaroos, wallabies, bandicoots, possums, echidnas, lizards, frogs and a long list of birds all use the site, alongside around 2,000 plant species native to the region. There’s a bird hide for the patient.
bushfire recovery: what burnt and what came back
The Garden was established in 1985 by locals worried about how much native vegetation was disappearing to development. Together with Eurobodalla Shire Council they spent 35 years building the garden they’d hoped for; a working reference collection of South Coast flora that also happened to be a lovely place to walk.
On New Year’s Eve 2019, the Black Summer fires tore through it.
The damage was close to total across the planted displays: bridges, walkways, picnic areas, toilets, barbecue shelters and garden structures were destroyed, and more than 250 dead or dangerous trees had to be removed afterwards. What survived? The Visitor Centre, the café, and the herbarium all miraculously survived, in no small part because of how recently and how well these structures had been built, a lesson the Garden has since written up for other fire-prone sites.
The rebuild took three years and ran through COVID-19 restrictions that kept volunteers off the site for months at a stretch. Timber bridges came back as steel. Less flammable materials went in across the landscape. Hundreds of trees, thousands of plants and a full set of signs and labels were replaced. The bird hide, finished in February 2023, was the last construction project on the list.
Meanwhile the bush did what the bush does. Ground covers and climbers came first; Brachyscome daisies, Scaevola aemula (Fairy Fan Flower), Brunoniella pumilio (Dwarf Blue Trumpet), Chrysocephalum apiculatum (Yellow Buttons), Commersonia hermanniifolia, Arthropodium milleflorum (Vanilla Lily), Kennedia rubicunda (Dusky Coral Pea) and the climbing Hardenbergia violacea (False Sarsaparilla). This was followed by mass germination of local Eucalyptus, Corymbia, Acacia and Hakea species.
What you walk through now isn’t the Garden as it was in 2019. Sight lines opened up that had been closed for decades, fences came out that nobody had questioned in thirty years, and the replanting was done with the next fire in mind. It’s a younger landscape, and in places an obviously rebuilt one. It’s also, by the Garden’s own reckoning, a stronger one.
The conservation work you don't see
Behind the walking tracks, the Garden runs a living plant collection, the Wallace Herbarium and a seed bank. In 2025 it coordinated a project across eleven NSW botanic gardens which found that seeds or specimens of 97 per cent of the state’s threatened plant species are held somewhere in the network, including plants officially listed as extinct in NSW. Eurobodalla is one of only two of those gardens with a naturally occurring threatened species on site: the vulnerable East Lynne midge orchid.
Making a day of it
The Garden sits between Batemans Bay and Mogo, so it slots easily into either. Mogo’s heritage themed main street, mountain bike trails, and the wildlife park are five minutes further south; Batemans Bay is five minutes north. An hour or two in the Garden, lunch at the café or in town, and you’ve filled a morning without driving anywhere twice.
Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden, Deep Creek Dam Road, Mogo State Forest. Open Wednesday to Sunday 9am–4pm and daily during NSW school holidays. Free entry. (02) 4471 2544.