Landscaping refers to the hard and soft surface treatments, suited to the location, applied along the back of kerb and roadside areas.

It is often implemented on larger projects or for works in high profile areas. These areas will have a higher standard of ongoing maintenance and may include other landscaping elementssuch as planting beds, turf, reticulation, decorative gravel and/or mulches.

• Typical hard landscaping treatments include paving, concrete, compacted or bound gravel.
• Typical soft landscaping treatments include organic mulch, grass and planting of native seedlings and potentially advanced plants.

• incorporate the road into the surrounds (physically and visually).
• improve the visual amenity of the road reserve.
• provide a focal point or sense of place.

Revegetation refers to planting seedlings and the direct seeding of native shrubs and trees along the road reserve.

It is used on both small and large projects, with traditional techniques of seeding and/or planting native seedlings back into a disturbed area.

Revegetation is primarily used in metro and agricultural areas and may involve regeneration, direct seeding, and/or planting methods to help establish a vegetation cover.

Establishing a vegetation cover helps to prevent soil erosion, maintaining the stability of the roadside and road formation, as well as improving the biodiversity of the road reserve and providing visual interest.

In certain climatic and geographic locations, rehabilitation works may be limited to earthworks reshaping of the soil surface, followed by spreading of topsoil and ripping to promote plant growth. This ‘Rip and Respread’ method allows the regeneration of natural vegetation to occur.

• Ripping is traditionally carried out by a dozer and opens hard soil layers to allow water penetration and assist root growth of germinating seed.
• Respread is spreading site topsoil and any available mulch, sourced from the area around the project site.

This technique is typically used for material pit rehabilitation and projects that employ topsoil management for their rehabilitation strategy. Rip and Respread is mainly used in the state’s north (Pilbara and Kimberley), with the correct management of topsoil crucial to the success of this technique. Where limited topsoil is available direct seeding can be employed to supplement the rehabilitation.

A Wheatbelt Revegetation Bank is currently being developed to provide a central pool of offsets available for use by future Main Roads projects, where works impact on native vegetation classified as Wheatbelt Woodlands Threatened Ecological Community.

• Wheatbelt Revegetation Bank Fact Sheet- PDF (3.28 MB)

The offsets will be established in advance, primarily through re-establishing native vegetation within widened road reserves. The geographic coverage of the offsets bank is the natural distributional range of the Wheatbelt Woodlands TEC (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Distributional range where the Wheatbelt Woodlands TEC may occur. The Main Roads road network and the boundaries of operational regions are indicated.

 Information is available in the form of drawings and specifications for both landscaping and revegetation works.

For drawings these are broken into three categories; Standard Drawings, Guideline Drawings and Presentation Drawings.

• Standard Drawings can be found in our technical library under Standard Contract Drawings > Vegetation
• Guideline Drawings can be found in our technical library under Guideline Drawings > Vegetation > Revegetation and Landscaping
• Presentation Drawings can be found in our technical library under Presentation Drawings > Vegetation

The specification used for our landscaping and revegetation works is known as the 304 Specification and it too has three versions.

• 304 – Landscaping and Revegetation, contains the full suite of clauses and is used for larger projects and those with additional landscaping elements such as planting beds, reticulation and/or turf.
• 304 – Revegetation, is a reduced version for use in revegetation works and smaller projects with traditional seeding and planting techniques.
• 304 – Rehabilitation of Disturbed Areas (non planting), tailored for material pit rehabilitation and projects that employ topsoil management for their rehabilitation strategy.

  For additional information regarding revegetation/landscaping requirements please see our Technical Library > Revegetation and Landscaping.