Botanical Gardens

During my current visit to Canberra, I visited the city's wonderful botanical gardens. They are well maintained, highly aesthetic, and have a large range of mainly Australiana. The pictures accompanying this post show general views over the gardens, specific plants, and even wildlife.

Let us start with the views below. The first shows Max pointing to some feature; the second is a water feature which was crawling with lovely lizards. And third is a panorama towards the city centre.

Let us now look at some of the more spectacular plants in the gardens. The are, in order, the grass tree, the Gymea Lily, the Wollemi Pine, the Rain-forest Garden, and the Kangaroo Paw from Western Australia. Of these, the Wollemi Pine is very interesting. Prior to its discovery in the Wollemi National Park north-west of Sydney  in 1994, the tree was only known from fossilised records dating from, of all things, 200 million years ago!!! In other words, we found a supposedly extinct tree from far back in the geological record but is actually living in a secluded gorge in a remote national park. The tree was an instant hit and was immediately propagated in quite large numbers. I can now buy one for my garden if I like and I quite fancy a 200 million yo tree ... but for the lack of space. The Wollemi Pine in the Canberra gardens is small as you can see from Max's height.

Finally, I have slide of one member of the gardens' wildlife ... a wallaby. Cute isn't it.

AS