Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens
This entry was posted on 3/15/2007 5:33 PM and is filed under Australia.
SYDNEY'S ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS
We were lucky
enough to have the Circular Quay (the Harbour) in our front yard and
the Botanic Gardens in our backyard. 66 acres of land devoted to
the Gardens is a wonderful addition to this City.
The first
thing we noticed was this art piece called "Memory is Creation Without
End" by Kimio Tsuchiya. It is at one of the many entrances
of the Gardens. A reminder of the old Sydney, it is a collection
of old sandstone building columns, arches, plaques, keystones and
ornamental facades. It sits on the grass looking like a grave
site, which in a way, it is. A reminder of another time when the
City looked quite different than it does now. A nearby plaque
says "Each piece of stone, carved by stone masons long ago, now
darkened with age, testifies to their lost function and to the loss of
those old buildings in the collective memory." "...It symbolizes
the connection of past, present and future. In salvaging and
reconfiguring the stones into this spiral unification of sculpture and
landscape the artist endows them with new life, meaning and
memory." April 2000
(And by the way, the building in the background of this shot from the
garden is our apartment - so literally the park was in our back yard)...
Here are some of the individual elements in the ensemble...
Another sign we loved reminds people to "Walk On The Grass" and picnic here and feel free to use these Gardens.
This
is where we saw the family of gorgeous Lorries eating berries from this
tree. There must have been at least a dozen in this tree...
And the Cockatoos who made such screeching sounds and loved to
play in the trees. This one was just a few feet above us in the
tree and could care less we were right there underneath...
This was an unusual bird we spotted in the gardens too - not sure what it is, but it looks like our kingfishers...
This just added!!! Our friends Bill and Ray just wrote confirming
this is a kingfisher - but not just any kingfisher. It is the
famous Kookaburra of this song:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry, merry king of the bush is he
Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra!
Gay your life must be (see - we told you Sydney was gay friendly)
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Eating all the gum drops he can see
Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra!
Leave some there for me
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Counting all the monkeys he can see
Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra!
That's not a monkey that's me
This song was written in 1936, and introduced at a Scout Jamboree in
Melbourne, Australia. The "gum tree" is what we Americans know as a
eucalyptus. The "gum drops" that the kookaburra eats in the song are
beads of the resinous sap.
As Bill & Ray explain it:
"It's a kookaburra or 'the laughing jackass'. They live in family
groups and mark their territory by flying from tree to tree and letting
go with a wonderful, raucous laughing sound. An aboriginal legend tells
us that Agoodenout, the keeper of the sun's fire, sent the kookaburra
to awaken man and all the bushland creatures to the glories of a new
day."
The
Gardens are also the home of the Flying Foxes (Fruit Bats) that live
high in the trees and have a huge migration each night at dusk as they
leave the Gardens and head for fruit orchards outside of town.
For more photos of the Bats, see the prior entry called "Birds and Bats
of Sydney".
But here's one more photo of them, because you can't think about the garden without thinking of these bats...
The garden was divided up into many sections (outdoor rooms) - here's
an overview of the lower garden, looking out to the Harbour...
This huge pyramid shaped building housed many species of plants from the Rainforest.
There
was an exhibit going on called "Sex and Death" which showed orchids
from both the highlands and the lowlands and their reproductive
cycles. We found it quite fascinating to see a video on how these
exotic orchids are pollinated. Often times the orchids lure a bee
into their depths only to attach a bit of pollen to their backs so that
when the bee finally escapes from the clutches of this orchid he can
carry that bit of pollen off to the next plant as he is seduced all
over again. Here's EJ inside the rainforest orchid exhibit...
There was a Succulent Garden, but sorry, didn't come
close to ours. Other highlights were the Herbal Garden,
Australian Rainforest Garden, Rose Garden, Japanese Garden and various
beautiful blooming plants and flowers.
Santa
Barbara has some wonderful cycad gardens, like Lotusland, but we pods
had never seen one with a seed pod like this before...
We are fortunate to have a friend who is a docent at Lotsuland - which
has the largest (or second largest?) collection of species of
cycads--and the most botanically valuable--in a private garden in the
world. Shelley wrote to us and added this cool info on cycad
seeds: "Right now there are large numbers of male cones, not so
many female. Never seen so many males coning at one time myself,
but maybe that's how they do it. Last summer and fall there were
a lot of huge females--they are the ones that get so colorful when
mature, probably to attract the animals that disperse the seed.
Dinosaurs, that is, which are in rather short supply at present. And
some bats. (Not all female cycad cones get colorful, lots of variation.
Depends on the species.) One reason cycads are so rare in nature
most places is that there are few animals that can eat the seed without
being poisoned, so the seed does not get dispersed, just sits at the
base of the mother plant....". Thanks Shelley!
in summary....
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