Beautiful Botanicals

One thing we hadn’t expected to enjoy so much in Australia were its many botanical gardens, all different, but all spectacular in their own ways.

We spent a good amount of time in the Sydney and Melbourne gardens and as a bonus, also visited the very different and wonderful Eurobodalla Botanical Garden while we were staying in Paradise.

Sydney’s bot garden is the oldest in the country, established in 1816, when Governor Macquarie set aside a large parcel of land along the harbour as ‘the Governor’s Domain’. (Part of it became a separate park across from the gardens called the Domain). The old governor’s mansion also sits within the botanic garden’s grounds. It boasts some very lovely flower displays and a fabulous succulent garden.

Melbourne’s botanic garden, across the Yarra from the CBD, began as a kind of standard European garden, but its second director, William Guilfoyle, recreated the gardens in a flowing and open plan of glens and ponds, forests and meadows that was quite visionary.

He built a ‘volcano’ on the highest point of the gardens that has fairly recently been resurrected—it’s a cone shaped hill with a large pond in the center of which are floating islands of water plants—very interesting!

There is also a fantastic fern forest and succulent garden and some truly spectacular lily ponds.

There are some excellent forest walks and some amazing tree specimens, including a species of Kauri, which I didn’t even know existed outside New Zealand.

In contrast, the garden at Eurobodalla is all natural Australian woodland-much of it badly burned in the fires of four years ago, but now recovering well.

It was in these gardens that we saw kangaroos grazing peacefully, and two deadly red-bellied black snakes soaking up the sun.

Each of these gardens proved to be an oasis of beauty, affording peaceful strolling and the enjoyment of Australia’s floral bounty—and in the big cities, a welcome respite from the noise and hectic pace of urban life.