6th February 2010
Like most of Australia’s cities, Adelaide has a Botanic Garden. Opened in 1857, the lovely gardens boast ponds, fountains, wisteria arbours, statues and heritage buildngs just like a clasic English-style garden, but with plenty of native trees too.
This is where our Saturday began, with one of the free walking tours of the gardens. Our guide started by walking through the Australian bush section of the gardens pointing out interesting plants used by the Aborigines for various medicinal and food purposes. The Australian forest in these gardens is actually an example of sub-tropical bush from further north than Adelaide, which has very dry bushland which doesn’t require a lot of water. This forest actually needs to be watered because it comes from areas of Australia where they have a higher annual rainfall.
After a wander around the native section, we headed to perhaps one of the garden’s most spectacular features, a pond full of Lotus flowers. An absolutely stunning display of colour beneath the blue skies.
We also visited the elegant glass and wrought-iron Palm House which was based on a similar building in Germany and sent flat-packed in the late 1800s from Germany. Believed to be one of the last examples of its kind in the world it used to house tropical plant species. However, the water used to maintain these plants started to destroy the building and it is now used to showcase hot, desert plants which thrive in extremely hot and dry conditions.
The tropical plants have been moved to the stunning Bicentennial Conservatory. This is the largest glasshouse in Australia and houses a complete tropical rainforest environment with its own computer-controlled cloud-making system, but time was catching up with us so we didn’t go inside this. Although, it was still a pretty impressive sight as we walked through the rose garden.
We needed to visit the market before closing to get some food for our evening meal and our train journey tomorrow so we headed out of the gardens and caught one of Adelaide’s free city centre trams to the market.
Bedlam reigned. It was so close to closing time that many stallholders were selling their stock off cheap and shouting about it. Each one competing to try and get the last bits sold. Noisy, busy and manic but a good way to experience it.
Bags overflowing, we returned to the apartment to prepare for the next stage in our Australian adventure.