Visit to Melbourne and Adelaide

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Here’s another topic.

Last year’s annual meeting of the Medit Garden Society was held in Adelaide, Australia for the first time. This also marked the first time it was held in spring since the meeting is always in October/November of the year per the charter in Greece. This limitation has resulted in some interesting visits to the Mediterranean Sea area countries plus Pasadena and Monterey over the past ten years in the fall, not necessarily the best time to see blooms and spring growth.

Spring in Australia is beautiful with a gazillion roses everywhere in town gardens where they do very well with the winter rainfall and less in summer. We were treated to mostly high end gardens that belonged to avid plantspeople. Each of these gardens either had large tanks to hold all the rainfall gathered from roofs or private wells that were metered and cost a pretty penny to use. Some gardens even had signs in them alerting diligent neighbors that the water was from a bore (well) instead of city water. Fines are steep for using city water on gardens. The gardens were very English as would be expected with lawns, roses, mixed flower beds but there were also decomposed granite (their equivalent) paths with natives also planted in mulches of mostly gravel.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Melbourne, Cranbourne and Adelaide were wonderful, particularly the gardens/hardscape/natural areas/water features/metaphors of Cranbourne. It’s a fairly new park that just opened phase II and it’s hard to explain. Much of the design is intended as a representation of the country using hardscape and plants and water in very interesting ways. If I lived nearby, I’d volunteer there a lot. Here’s an article about it. http://bit.ly/WNqZMX  By the way, bandicoots look like small-eared rabbits with a rat tail and a pointy nose.

We had several visits to bush gardens that were really interesting with native plants in bloom. The Pimelea and Isopogon were particularly full of flowers. Some banksias were starting to bloom and acacias were also beautiful. There’s a comment in the article above that native plants are perceived as drab but they weren’t where we went.

There’s too much that we saw to cover it all here. We did finish up with a visit to Kangaroo Island, south off the coast of the Adelaide area. Much of the land had been protected from animal grazing so the bush was intact and fairly regularly burned as is the normal occurrence in Australia. It looked very much like our coastal scrub here in central California. Grass trees popped up along the roadsides and kangaroos hopped across grasslands. Koalas also slept in trees. Very cool place.

Cheers,

Bracey

San Jose