Eurobodalla Botanic Garden Brings Back Annual Festival Featuring Bonsai Displays

Bonsai will feature in this year's "From the Forest" festival at the Eurobodalla Regional Botanic Garden, with the two-week event running April 4 through 19 across the garden's 42-hectare forest site on the South Coast of New South Wales, five kilometres south of Batemans Bay.

Volunteers Ernie Moules and Jill Atterbury will lead the bonsai activities, bringing hands-on knowledge to a program that, in past editions, has grown into one of the region's most forest-focused community events. Over two weeks, the garden hosts exhibitions, storytelling, music, and workshops that pay homage to the forests and the lives connected to them across countless generations. The bonsai component fits squarely into that ethos: few horticultural practices distill the essence of a forest tree into as intimate a form.

Garden Manager Michael Anlezark has timed the festival for the autumn school holidays, and the 2026 edition continues a tradition that has drawn artists, naturalists, and plant enthusiasts to the South Coast each April. The festival features over 100 works by regional artists, showcasing creative use of natural materials inspired by forests and the natural world.

For the bonsai community in particular, "From the Forest" offers something you don't often find at public festivals: a garden setting with genuine ecological depth. The garden grows and displays plants that occur naturally in the region, with the site supporting many of the 2,000 species of plants, trees, and shrubs found across Eurobodalla. Walking through that landscape while studying bonsai specimens curated from the same botanical tradition gives the display a grounding that a convention center exhibition simply cannot replicate.

While some events such as workshops will be ticketed, most of the program will be free. Further event details and registration are available at erbg.org.au.

The garden itself has its own story of resilience: nestled in the Mogo State Forest, it was struck by bushfires on New Year's Eve 2019, affecting more than 95 per cent of the 42-hectare site just days after completing a major redevelopment. That it now hosts an annual celebration of forest bounty and beauty, with bonsai among its featured arts, carries a weight that anyone who works with collected native material will immediately understand.