Gardens and Flora of Tasmania and Victoria with Colin Crosbie 814

Enjoy access to the airport Executive lounge before we fly from London to Melbourne on our overnight flight.

Upon arrival in Melbourne this evening we transfer to our city centre hotel. Melbourne is the capital city of Victoria, set around the shores of Port Phillip Bay. The city itself boasts a lively and cosmopolitan pulse, and is world famous for its cuisine, arts and sporting events. Melbourne sits on the northern banks of the Yarra River, approximately five kilometres from the bay.

After breakfast, our tour begins in earnest with a visit to one of Melbourne’s most exciting green spaces, Cruden Farm. Created and nurtured for more than eighty years by Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, Cruden Farm’s garden is a delicate piece of country set amid dense suburbia that feels like it will endure forever. Strong, healthy trees form the property’s backbone and character, while grass adds texture with emerald lawns, rough-cut swathes and paddocks bleached in the sun. Lakes and pools give depth, dimension and sparkle and exuberant flowering shrubs and perennials produce a palette of vibrant colour.

We continue to the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, where lunch (not included) is available on arrival. Cranbourne offers a natural bushland experience alongside the Australian Garden, an award-winning, contemporary botanic garden celebrating the beauty and diversity of Australian landscapes and flora and featuring over 100,000 plants from 1,900 plant varieties. After exploring the garden we will take a walk in the adjacent bushland, which is home to over 450 indigenous plant species. It is a precious remnant of the vegetation that once covered the broader region and is actively managed to control the number of non-indigenous plants and weeds.

We depart this morning for a visit to Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden, Victoria's premier cool-climate garden. With breathtaking views over the Yarra Valley, the garden features important collections of rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and more, in a setting of native and exotic trees.

The garden is home to a staggering 15,000 rhododendrons, 12,000 azaleas, 3,000 camellias and 250,000 daffodils, which leaves it clothed in colour in spring. The garden houses Australia’s largest collection of Australian and overseas raised hybrids of rhododendrons that cannot be replaced, re-bred or re-imported.

We continue to Cloudehill Garden and Nursery, whose principal terraces evoke the Arts and Crafts style of gardens associated with Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens. There are an astonishing 25 gardens rooms in all to explore, combing both formal planting and informal structure. From the entrance steps, formality dominates, with clipped hedges and topiary. This gives way to the sweeping curves and seasonal colour changes of the bulb meadows in lower sections of the gardens. At this time of year, Japanese tree peonies present their sumptuous blooms while lilacs flower in the shrub walk while rhododendrons continue with their hue and cry.

In the afternoon we continue with a visit to the SkyHigh Gardens on Mount Dandenong. Extensively refurbished in late 2004, the resulting landscape includes an English garden, which is set below a canopy of mature blackwoods, a secret garden utilised extensively for weddings and ceremonies and a living hedge maze of Lilly Pilly (Syzigium austral). The front of the site was planted with drought hardy native species and consequently has never been irrigated. At this time of year the mass daffodil display will be in full swing, the Coral Bark Maples will be coming into leaf and in the secret garden look out for the tiny, white fragrant flowers of Camellia sasanqua “Lutchuensis”.

This morning we return to the Dandenong Ranges for a visit to the  Karwarra Australian Native Botanic Garden and Nursery, one of the few public gardens in Victoria to use exclusively native plants. Numerous garden beds give boundless inspiration for those looking to create their own gardens using Australian plants, regardless of the style they have chosen. There is also a walk through an area of undisturbed native bushland where native orchids and wildflowers can be seen in spring and early summer. The garden provides habitat for local wildlife including many different types of birds, butterflies, insects and frogs; echidnas, wombats, native bush rats, Sugar Gliders and other possums.

We continue to the Alowyn Gardens in the Yarra Valley. There are a number of different gardens here, including a formal parterre, edged with three varieties of box hedge; a perennial border and a dry garden filled with plants that can survive extended periods of dryness and temperatures up to 42°C, and a French-style garden that is still a work in progress, planted with bright red tulips for Spring colour. Refreshments (not included) are available here in the sun-dappled courtyard café.

In the afternoon we head for the little town of Seville, for a visit to the private garden of plant lover Virginia Heywood. Sweeping views of mountains and vineyards frame this four-acre garden, filled with many camellias, salvias, an orchard, a dam and abundant birdlife. Hard-working owner Virginia is also a garden show presenter on local radio, a Royal Botanical Gardens guide and secretary of the Plant Trust.

Our first stint in the state of Victoria comes to an end this morning as we transfer to Melbourne airport for our 75-minute flight over the Bass Strait to Hobart, Tasmania. On arrival we visit the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, located on land originally occupied by the Muwinina people - archaeological excavations have uncovered extensive shell middens and stone artefacts dating back more than 5000 years. The RTBG is Australia’s cool climate garden, with a number of unique collections including Australia’s only Subantarctic Plant House. Established in the early years of the colony of Hobart, the rich history of the gardens is evident throughout the site, and it is Australia’s second oldest Botanic Gardens, established just two years after Sydney.

Following our visit here we continue to our hotel in Hobart.

After breakfast it’s off to Margate for a visit to the Inverawe Native Garden (you will notice scores of familiar English and Scottish place names here in Tasmania). In 2001 this was 22 acres of weeds, before work commenced on the central section and continues today on more far flung areas. Inverawe is a sustainable garden - native plants are water wise, low maintenance and require little in the way of fertilisers or other chemicals.  We will scent the faint aroma of the essential oils that the sun teases from the leaves of many species and the distinctive, pleasantly understated perfume of the blooms. Inverawe is also a wonderful place to spot birds, with 110 species recorded here, 12 of them endemic to Tasmania. Lunch (not included) is available at the Pancake Train Restaurant adjacent to the garden.

In the afternoon we have a specially arranged visit to a private garden in Kingston, Hobart.

We spend today in the magnificent surroundings of the Styx Tall Tree Conservation Area. Lush rainforest and wild rivers constitute the area but it’s the towering forest giants, among the largest and tallest eucalypts on earth, that dominate the landscape. Some are more than 500 years old, more than 20 metres in girth and stand taller than 90 metres. These remarkable forest giants are aptly named giant ash (Eucalyptus regnans), the tallest hardwoods and tallest flowering plants on earth and many have earned legendary titles. The 'Devil's Pitchfork' is an awesome sight, vaulting out of myrtle beech understory. At 20 metres it splits into three trunks. Its GPS reading is reputedly 666, the devil’s number! Coupled with an understorey of myrtles, giant ferns and laurels, the giants of the Styx constitute one of the world’s most carbon dense forests.

The lifeblood of the forest is the Styx River. Its dark colour, not unlike black tea, is stained by the fields of button grass upstream. Platypus and native water rats can be in and around the river while pygmy possums, owls and bats are high above. Black cockatoos nest in large hollows that develop in the crooks of giant ash branches. A packed lunch is included today.

This morning we depart for Launceston (here pronounced ‘lawn-ces-ton’ rather than the English ‘lawns-ton’), breaking our journey with a visit to the Brickendon Estate and Heritage Gardens, for a glimpse into Tasmania’s convict heritage. Brickendon is one of Tasmania’s oldest farming properties, settled in 1824 by William Archer. In July 2010, Brickendon Estate, along with its neighbouring property, Woolmers Estate, was listed jointly as a World Heritage Site being part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage Property. The two Estates are regarded as the most significant rural estates in Australia, having the second largest number of convict workers and still retaining a living history from early European settlement to the present day. The magnificent Heritage Gardens include one of the most unusual collections of trees in a private garden in Australia. Trees of these species and age are found together nowhere else in Tasmania, apart from the Royal Botanical Gardens.

We continue to our hotel in Launceston.

We begin today at the Wychwood Garden and Nursery, a small specialist nursery with two and a half acres of display garden and a diverse collection of interesting perennials from the world’s cool temperate climates.

We continue to the nearby Marakoopa Café in Mayberry, noted for its sweeping flower beds, shady woodland area and productive garden, with stunning views of Tasmania’s wilderness beyond. Refreshments are available here (not included).

Our afternoon visit is to the privately-owned ‘English Heritage Garden’ of Old Wesley Dale, designed with an ‘Arts and Crafts’ approach to create a garden that is in harmony with the 1830s stone house and unique outbuildings. This has evolved into a series of ‘garden rooms‘ that lead from one area to another: the walled ‘topiary garden’, the picking and potager garden, the white garden and the hot garden. Each has their own distinct personality while still providing that connection back to the house. A dovecote style henhouse, a peacock garden pavilion, a potting shed and an English style conservatory embellish these different areas. A pergola with a variety of climbing roses leads to the sculptured urn walk which overlooks the ‘ha ha’ and the more naturalistic garden encircling the lake. All this is set within a landscape once described as ‘the vision splendid‘.

Our day begins with a visit to the Emu Valley Rhododendron Garden at Romaine. Widely known internationally, this outstanding garden is unique for its design and its ability to grow all rhododendrons outside in a sheltered natural amphitheatre. A series of lakes fed by natural springs is enhanced by waterfalls, bridges, gazebos and dry stone walls, and provides a stunning setting for over 24,000 rhododendrons and companion plants including native flora. It is also home to some amazing natural wildlife, such as the echidna and the platypus and some reptiles.

We continue to the Tasmania Arboretum in Devonport, home to the world’s largest collection of Tasmanian woody plants, southern hemisphere conifers and plants from northern hemisphere forests, all set in a beautiful and peaceful landscape. It is also the best place in Australia to see the platypus in the wild as they can reliably be seen most days in Founder’s Lake.

Returning to Launceston, we call in at the Grey Sands Vineyard for a wine tasting and nibbles. Continuing the Cornish place-name theme, the vineyard is set in the Tamar Valley and produces a wide range of complex and intriguing wines. There is also an extensive garden, the perfect setting in which to enjoy a refreshing glass of local wine.

We return to Hobart today, breaking our journey with a number of visits en route, beginning with the Liffey Falls State Reserve. The main attraction of the reserve is Liffey Falls themselves, but we will also see some spectacular tall trees and plentiful wildlife within this scenic corner of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. 

We continue along the scenic Highland Lakes Road, with hairpin bends, lush forest and panoramic views, to the Steppes Reserve, which protects an important piece of Tasmania’s high country sheep-grazing heritage. Sheep grazing was an integral part of early settlement life and the need for grazing pastures and stock rotation meant pastoral families tended to live remotely, allowing them to more effectively manage their stock and ensure access to an adequate food supply year-round.​

Finally, as we approach the outskirts of Hobart, we call in at GASP! (Glenorchy Art and Sculpture Park), which hugs the water’s edge along a linear stretch of public land from Wilkinson’s Point to Montrose Bay on the Elwick Bay foreshore. GASP! is a dynamic and inspiring open space providing unique ways to interact with art and creating memorable experiences in the natural environment.

We continue to our hotel in Hobart.

Today we are privileged to have specially arranged visits to three private gardens, in and around Hobart.

We begin this morning at the Corinda Garden, judged to be one of the finest private gardens in the whole of Tasmania. Laid out in a series of rooms, defined by yew and box hedges with antique urns, delightful topiary figures of native animals and tiers of espalier limes, it is richly planted to provide colour and botanical interest throughout the year. A magnificent Magnolia tree, more than 100 years old, is floodlit at night and is visible for miles around.

We continue to the privately-owned garden of Crawleighwood, which will be a definite contender for the most outstanding garden of our tour. On arrival we will enjoy a barbecue lunch with drinks, hosted by the owners, before exploring the garden, which features rhododendrons, maple woodlands and Gondwanan rainforest species, along with many rare and unusual plants. There are also some unexpected pleasures along the way, such as a water feature, elegant wrought iron furniture and rusty steel farming equipment rearranged into delightful sculptures.

Today we take our leave of Tasmania, but not before we have explored the gardens of Government House Tasmania, regarded as one of the finest private gardens from the Victorian era in Australia. They are thought to have been laid out by Mr William Thomas, landscape gardener, in accordance with plans drawn up by the architect of Government House, William Porden Kay. The garden has been maintained much as it was developed in the 1850s and 1860s and includes fowl yards, an orchard, and kitchen and picking gardens. 

We then transfer to the airport for our flight back to Melbourne and return to our hotel there.

A day of botanical discovery in Melbourne lies ahead, beginning with a visit to the University of Melbourne Burnely Gardens. The nine-hectare gardens are home to nearly 1000 different species of plants, including some of the oldest trees in Melbourne. Located on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people, the gardens have evolved since the 1860s as a location for research and teaching.

Next up is the Maranoa Botanic Gardens, which play a significant role as one of the most diverse botanical displays of Australian plants. It is a rich resource for students, researchers, botanists and nature enthusiasts alike, home to some of Australia’s most fascinating and unique flora. As we follow the circular path we will discover a collection of around 4,000 native plant species, categorised into major vegetation groups from rainforest to arid zone.

We conclude in the distinguished surroundings of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, which have been a treasured part of Melbourne’s cultural life for more than 170 years – much loved by generations of Victorians, as well as by many visitors from interstate and overseas. It is a picturesque haven for recreation and an important resource for education, conservation, science and horticulture. Melbourne Gardens extend over 38 hectares and house a collection of more than 8,500 species of plants from around the world, including diverse plant collections such as camellias, rainforest flora, cacti and succulents, roses, Californian species, herbs, perennials, cycads, plants from Southern China and, in the Rare and Threatened Species Collection, plants from south-eastern Australia.

This morning we depart for Geelong, the second largest Victorian city after Melbourne, for a visit to the Geelong Botanic Garden, which dates to 1851 when the Governments set aside land for the development of a botanic garden. The trees here are some of the finest examples in Victoria, planted both as single specimens and in avenues. The garden is also home to some of the city’s original heritage buildings and monuments, including a statue of Queen Victoria.

We continue to the Yarrabee Native Garden in nearby Lara. Yarrabee is aboriginal for ‘place of many gums’ and the garden, built on the site of a former horse farm, is a mixture of Australian native and exotics, with dry sunny spots and shady spots. There is a covered orchard which has over 38 fruit trees and houses strawberry beds along with loganberry, blackberry, raspberries and Inca berries. Numerous succulents and salvias provide colour.

In the afternoon we return to Melbourne with free time to relax or shop and sightsee in the city.

Our last day of touring begins with a return to the Dandenongs, where we visit the William Ricketts Sanctuary, a place of beauty and tranquillity, featuring extraordinary sculptures of people and animals half-hidden in the natural environment, just waiting to be discovered. Interconnecting paths take us on a magical tour of cool temperate forest, lush fern gullies, and the 92 striking sculptures, perfect for quiet reflection and contemplation of the vision of artist William Ricketts.

We continue to the Ferny Creek Ornamental Gardens Reserve. On the western side the ‘old’ garden is dominated by large Mountain Ash and Mountain Grey Gums. Extensive collections of Rhododendrons, Magnolias and Azaleas have been planted here. There are also many fine deciduous trees and other beautiful shrubs including Viburnum, Hydrangea, Mahonia and Camellia. On the other side there is a magnificent planting of the Protea family, including its Australian members. These are complemented by many species and varieties of South African Ericacea. Other features include the Calluna Collection, Rock gardens and the Golden Garden, which celebrated the Society’s 50th anniversary in 1982.

In the late afternoon our tour concludes with a visit to Heronswood Garden, home to the Digger’s Foundation. At the heart of Heronswood is a cottage garden of meandering paths and lawns, seamlessly combining edible and ornamental plantings. Australia’s first certified organic open garden, it is the place to learn about sustainable practices and the preservation of heirloom flowers and vegetables. One of the highlights is the Colour Wheel Border, which cleverly arranges annuals and perennials according to their hues, with cool shades of blue and violet giving way to vibrant hot reds, oranges and yellow in the sun.

After exploring the garden we will gather in Heronswood’s restaurant for a farewell dinner, a chance to look back with new found friends at the botanical and horticultural wonders that we have experienced, both here in Victoria and across the Bass Strait in Tasmania.

We transfer to Melbourne airport for our flight back to the UK.

We arrive in London, where the group will disperse or make onward connections.