Adelaide Botanical Gardens

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It was Dan's choice of walk today and he chose the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. These gardens are located on North Terrace in Adelaide city. We spent 3 hours wandering around these lovely gardens and I managed to take 94 pictures! A selection of them are saved here.

We started out walk in the park behind the zoo (access from Hackney Road). On Sunday the car parking is free - and of course there is no charge to enter the gardens. There is a fee to get into the Rainforest Conservatory, but more about that later.

On the North west corner of the park is where we entered. From here we went to the kiosk and bought lunch and headed past the Duck pond and in front of the Palm House for our picnic. We headed inside to check out the weird Madagascar plants, the watery grotto and the pretty clear and blue glass panels. Next was the cactus garden to find many spiny delights.

Deciding method was better than madness, we planned to walk the perimeter paths of the gardens and proceeded to head South towards the North Terrace Entrance. There were plenty of plants, statues, pavilions, sneaky paths and ducks. We saw an amazing Queensland Kauri pine that was HUGE, and then headed to the Australian bush section (South East corner) to see what the names of the plants we had been seeing on our bush walks were. Our quest was to find a golden wattle as Dan had been studying Australian symbols in class this week.

Working North we saw a small rectangle lily pond and a monument to the Brownies (Brown Owl) that I had never noticed before. We then went to the Rainforest Conservatory. It cost $10 for a family ticket. The plants were great and the humidity intese. There were quite a few birds as well. The White-browed Wood Swallows have been introduced to tackle a caterpillar problem that was causing the palms to be stripped. Two Noisy Pittas hop around on the ground - and appeared quite keen to be photographed. Boxes with weird insect specimens provided much interest.

Next was the Rose garden - my favourites were the Brass Band floribundas. There was a movie of a wedding happening in the rose garden while we were there. I had the feeling it was a staged piece - no guests or parents etc.

The Italian garden is being redeveloped and promises to be quite nice - I noted another coffee shop is planned. We walked down the lane lined with Morton Bay figs and over to the kiosk before going past the Museum and visiting the big Lily pond. The lilies were huge!

We finished up visiting the Wollemi Pine (before 1994 it had only been known of in fossil records) and then passing through the herb /cottage garden area (old rose garden) where we saw enormous sunflowers.

Dan says...

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