Never too many gardens!

Over the years, I've spent uncounted hours rambling through botanical gardens, from Hong Kong to Sitka, from Edinburgh to Cairns, with stops at major gardens all over the US thrown in. Sometimes the sensory overload is so high, I think I don't absorb what I'm seeing, then years later, it's an Aha! moment when a botanical relationship or display comes roaring back into my memory. It can be a visual trigger, or a color, or a scent. (BTW, don't ever pass up a chance to visit the sensory garden at Chicago's wonderful botanical garden!).

On our recent road trip, it was total overload. The National Botanic Garden in Canberra is a marvel of hard work, appropriate botanic choices and a superb setting, focusing hard on restoring part of Australia's unique botanic heritage. Here are some before and current images.

The site was over-grazed, with topsoil eroded, and native flora and fauna almost completely gone.

Now the garden spills up Black Mountain and includes a rainforest gully that is quite lovely.

The garden also features an incredible index of Australian flora online, and a lab where pressed examples of a huge number of native and introduced species are available for the public to use in identifying plants in gardens or in the wild.

Since it is late summer here, all kinds of things are blooming in the garden. Some Australian flora is so flamboyant I think someone must be making it up; for example, the huge red blooms of the gymea lily are borne on stalks about ten feet tall! They may take years to produce a bloom, and the foliage is over my head. That's some lilly! In the opposite extreme, some of the eucalypts, hakea, wattle and banksia have flowers so delicate they appear to be made of fairy floss. Trees of the grevillea family have flowers so varied, without knowing what I'm looking at, I can't correctly identify them.

All  throughout the garden, native fauna have moved into their niches; this water dragon apparently cannot read the admonition to stay off the rocks! 

The hibiscus family is a huge native group of plants that happily thrive just about everywhere. I have learned that all parts of the plant are edible. This blue-blossomed hibiscus was peeking out of a shady area.

The delicate pink blooms of this eucalypt are an absolute magnet for lorrikeets, noisy miners, honeyeaters and other local birds. The honey is sticky, as our azalea blooms are.

Kangaroo paws come in a myriad of colors, from pale yellow to deep magenta. The hardy native has leaves like an small iris, with blooms borne on stalks 12-15" tall. The garden features some rangy big ones as well.

Banksias are named for pioneering botanist James  Banks. The amazing group of plants bloom in yellows and pale creams, but the shapes are small, candle-shaped (called, of course, birthday candle banksia), to large blooms the size of a big loofah sponge. The larger banksias have adapted to life in a fire-prone environment. The seeds are set in the bloom, looking like a fat chestnut crammed in the dried blossom. In a bushfire, the seeds pop open with such a big bang they sound like gunshots going off.

Water in the garden is sparingly used, recycled, collected in rainwater tanks and husbanded as the precious resource it is.  But a pond judiciously placed offers refuge to huge numbers of critters, plus gives a respite to weary garden visitors.

     Another glorious fairy-floss eucalypt bloom.
     The scent is as delicate as the look.

A visit to this wonderful, evolving garden is both an inspiration and a challenge to any gardener; turning the dry slopes of Black Mountain into the showcase for wise gardening shows what can be done, with lots of effort and planning.

--30--