The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne is widely recognised as one of the world's finest botanic gardens. There are 12,000 species and 52,000 individual plants in the living collections, including trees and other plants of great cultural value.

Many of these plants are irreplaceable, endangered or even extinct in the wild. It is important that the survival of these plants is guaranteed by an adequate supply of water.

HydroPlan was commissioned to design and supervise installation of an automatic irrigation system for the 25 ha Gardens, and this was completed in 1996.

HydroPlan not only provided a very practical and efficient irrigation design for the many varied plant species, but took great care with the layout and installation to minimise damage to existing gardens and plants.

In 2010 HydroPlan conducted an assessment of the current system to determine the capacity of existing infrastructure to handle a higher flowrate.  One benefit of increasing system capacity was to enable injection of stormwater from the lake to reduce reliance on mains water.