Another trip - and a visit to the Hunter Valley Gardens

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We have begun another little trip - this time we've headed west. After three weeks of continuous rain in Sydney, we are hoping away from the coast will mean sunshiney days.

We left home yesterday afternoon, and drove north to Swansea to spend the night by Lake Macquarie, which looked quite beautiful in the golden sunset. Today we headed to Pokolbin, an area we often visited when the children were young - a nice drive from Sydney with wineries, restaurants, antique shops and picnic areas. When we enquired about where the relatively new Hunter Valley Gardens were, we were very surprised to find that they were in this same area - in fact the dustbowl area transformed, not all that far from where we once picnicked.

We loved it all - 60 acres containing 10 distinctive gardens - the Rose Garden, dedicated to grandmothers - in a corkscrew design, the centre of which showed a grandmother surrounded by happy children and many many roses encircling it. Of course it's the wrong time of year, but there were still a few flowers hanging on and even though a lot of the northern hemisphere trees had lost their leaves, it was still very beautiful throughout the gardens.

The Formal Garden featured yet more rose bushes and topiaried bushes, the Indian Mosaic Garden, topiaried elephants and interesting groundcovers, as well as an Indian tea house on the lake's edge. The Chinese Moongate Garden featured magnolias and camellias and weeping mulberries, Sunken Garden had a 10 metre waterfall and lovely garden beds, the Border Garden contained formal hedging and fountains, the Italian Grotto Italian urns, citrus trees, the Oriental Garden - Japanese Pagoda on the waterfront with beautiful bushes and grasses and finally, for children, the Storybook garden. This featured figures from nursery rhymes, the Mad Hatters Tea party and all sorts of wonders to delight. We finished our visit with lunch on the cafe verandah in the sunshine, overlooking the oriental lake and pagoda.

It was then a drive through the Upper Hunter Valley, lovely farmland, horse studs, green paddocks and high rugged mountains in the distance. Most of the drive was through areas we haven't been to before - always good to try the road less travelled. We stopped for the night at a small caravan park in the small town of Merriwa - tomorrow, Dubbo

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Photos

Looking down to the Rose Garden
It must look beautiful when they're all in flower - just a few roses hanging on now.

Jack and Jill
tumbling down the hill

With Alice and Friends
at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party