2015/11 Australia trip - Arid Lands |
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We rejoined the Lincoln Highway to Port Augusta where we’d been a month ago. It’s a big town, so we took advantage to shop for food, 
wine, propane, diesel, and water – a busy morning. We also booked our ferry trips next weekend to and from Kangaroo Island; an expensive ferry, about the same cost as going to Tasmania, ten times as far.
The Arid Lands Botanical Garden is across town along the road to Alice Springs. It’s been open for nearly twenty years but we’ve always been in a hurry so this was our first visit. It’s a collection of desert plants from all over Australia. There are miles of trails and a large animal population: birds, lizards, and snakes. Sandie did her little snake dance when she stepped over a python, but she wasn’t fast enough to grab its tail so I could get a picture.
The garden includes some examples of how homeowners can save water by replacing conventional plantings with those from the arid lands. Mostly though it’s just like walking through the bush with addition of paths and labels. The picture shows a typical section, with the Flinders Ranges on the horizon.
A surprise was these “everlastings”, flowers we’d hoped to see when we were north of Perth, early in our trip. We’d been about two weeks too late for the everlastings there so it was good to see some here, even if wasn’t the acres of flowers that sometimes occurs in Western 
Australia.
The gardens are organized by desert area and by type of plant, with many paths winding through, easy to end up walking in circles. It’s definitely an all-day place, but we probably saw about a third of the place before we ran out of energy. We had to leave anyway to give us time to get to camp before dark.