Royal Botanic Gardens

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We were so impressed with our first visit that at the next opportunity we went back to the Botanic Gardens with a view to joining a guided tour. We met with the guide at 1pm - a lovely, sweet older guy who knew his stuff when it came to Australian plant specimens.

We started the tour by looking at a tree that had bark which flaked off and was soft and paper-like - apparently the Aborigines used to use this to wrap around newborn and young babies to keep the warm!

We moved on to the Bottle tree which, despite the name and shape of its trunk it retains water in its roots - if you tap on the roots at a depth of about 1m the water shoots up into the tree!

We also saw some medium sized trees which had leaves that were very rough - it is known, not surprisingly as the “sandpaper” tree - women often use the leaves for shaping their nails in place of a nail file!

We saw some beautiful spring flowers and the “dinasaur” tree which we saw on our first visit.

There were also plenty of flying foxes or fruit bats roosting in the trees above our heads!

The last tree we saw was a Moreton Bay Fig which unlike the Australian Fig, attaches itself to a healthy tree and eventually grows into the trunk strangling the life out of its host - the specimen we saw was huge, beautiful and heavy with fruit - it is just such a pity that this is at the expense of another tree.

The tour only lasted an hour but we found it very interesting and well worth the second visit.

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