I’m a botanist-poser in Perth

King’s Park and Botanic Gardens  is a must-see in Perth.  Not only is it a beautiful park and garden overlooking the city of Perth, it also boasts being one of the largest city parks in the world, beating out Hyde Park and even New York’s Central Park.  It’s a beauty.

The park offers free year-round guided walking tours several times throughout the day.  I was lucky enough to partake in a Wildflower walk which lasted an hour and a half.  We had two guides (to a group of 6) and they were very knowledgeable about the gardens and flower species.  All the guides are volunteers and that made the walk even more enjoyable…just knowing they were out there with us because of their love of the garden and flowers and that they wanted to share that love and knowledge with us.  I was a little intimidated when it became clear that all the walk participants had extensive botany knowledge.  One of the guides asked me if I had a keen interest in botany and I sheepishly replied ‘I appreciate beautiful flowers’.  (GROAN)

Perth’s Botanic Garden boasts about their focus on local (Western Australia) flora due to the extraordinary diversity and the fact that many of the flowers couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world.  How cool is that?! And still only about 3,000 of WA’s 12,000 species of plants are in the garden.

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In the slideshow you’ll see my photos of the acacia, eucalypt, and banskia varieties.  (Towards the end of the tour, I was even getting pretty good and differentiating between them.  No one was more surprised than me.)

The slideshow also has a photo of the solemn Perth War Memorial overlooking the city and my favorite garden feature…the Pioneer Woman Memorial Fountain.  You see a statue of a Pioneer Woman carrying her baby.  The fountain had several different small spouts of water that shot out randomly, representing the woman’s search for a suitable place for her family in WA.  After a few seconds, the small spouts go away and one big spout of water shoots out really high symbolizing that she found the place she wanted to make her family’s home.  Beautiful symbolism.  And to think, if I hadn’t done the walk, I might have just thought it was a nice-lookin’ statue.  🙂

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Happy Birthday To Me!

I celebrated a birthday this month.  21 again, feelin’ pretty good.  🙂

For a special treat, Ryan took me to Moonlight Cinemas in the Botanic Gardens.  We caught a good Scoopon deal which entitled us to two passes to a movie of our choice and included a small hamper from a nearby cafe.  I can’t say much about the hamper, other than it disappointing but the moonlight movie experience was too cool.

We arrived early and had some time to sit out and enjoy the view looking out towards the city (that’s the Eureka skytower way back in the picture).  The “security” at the gardens wouldn’t let us set up our short festival chairs so we parked ourselves on a blanket, read, and relaxed.  I have to admit I was a bit jealous of the people who rented the comfy recliner pillows but we were nice and cozy on our blanket.

As daylight faded and the moon came out the movie crew began to inflate the screen and just like that, a movie theater was made!  The movie didn’t start until it was dark enough to see the screen and just as it began, a shooting star fell from the sky.  Birthday gift indeed!  I highly recommend the experience.

We saw Ides of March, George Clooney’s latest creation in which he wrote the script, produced/directed, and starred.  A man of many talents to be sure.  The movie is about two candidates for the Democratic primary in the US and their campaign managers.  The script was clever but there was a lot of subtle humor and asides that I wasn’t sure would if they’d make sense to an Australian audience.  We were intrigued by how many Aussies showed up for a movie of this nature because this place was packed.  Granted, with a cast of George Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marissa Tomei, who WOULDN’T want to see this?  I’m not going to lie, a beautiful moonlight movie was not as much of a draw for me as Ryan Gosling.  Just sayin’.

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