One trip EVERY month: February

This month I took a trip without leaving town: my husband and I hopped on our bikes and rode to the National Botanic Gardens.

I posted about the Gardens not long ago, here. But what I didn’t tell you is that it’s a great place to de-stress. Just take a look at the Eastern Water Dragon up in the header. Is he stressed? Nup. He strolled up onto the café deck from the forest floor to sun himself, not at all afraid of the visitors. The dragons are a thrill for café customers taking morning tea. But of course you can’t go there for coffee and cake and leave without exploring the unique gardens and forests and the comprehensive collection of native Australian plants.

Up in the dry gardens, there are tall eucalyptus trees that are a living support system for other life forms like staghorns and climbing hardenbergia and fungus. How beautiful are the burnt black and rust tones of the flaky bark on that tree I spotted near the bike racks! It’s simply nature imitating art. Down in the rainforest, accessible by timber steps and boardwalks, it’s darker and the atmosphere is noticeably cooler and more humid. I read the sign telling me to ‘breathe’, and instinctively did. The air was fresh and cool and clean. Here, tree ferns and Stream lilies, ‘Helmholtzia glaberrima’, one of the few flowers in these Botanic Gardens, grow in lush gardens beside the stream that flows below the wooden path you’re walking on. Writing about it makes me want to go there right now.