It is Spring and every year Toowoomba celebrates Spring in a big way. Toowoomba is a good two hours drive west from where I live on Queensland's Gold Coast and it has a completely different climate to here. Being on the top of the Great Dividing Range at an altitude of 700m it has a more temperate climate with cold winters and low humidity during summer. The soil is an amazing orange red colour and is the envy of every gardener working the heavy clay soils of Mudgeeraba (my home!) Things grow in it!
A Spring Festival is held at Toowoomba for a full week during September and it culminates in a Grand Parade on the last Saturday of that week. I joined a two day tour to Toowoomba that included a tour of the gardens on one day and the parade on the second. Today I will share a mere handful of photographs that I took in the gardens. More photos will be shown in a separate link to a web album later.
Wisteria is one of the plants that would grow here - I have tried but with limited success, the flowers were not as impressive as on this vine - so I dug it out! The cooler climate seems to suit the Wisteria much better and many of the parks and gardens in Toowoomba have either a purple or a white wisteria.
The brilliant mauve and sheer mass of blooms really is a treat for the camera!
Not all the gardens in Toowoomba are filled with colour like this. The majority of residents do not have the time nor inclination to create a flower garden. But the few people who do have a passion for plants must spend a good part of every day at work in their gardens to have them look so fabulous. This is one of the smaller gardens but the grand champion garden was over an acre in size.
Flowering trees give colour above the head as you walk through the prize gardens. How everyone managed to get all their plants blooming at the same time amazes me! I wonder if these prunus will grow here - I guess there is only one way to find out!
Here is one more garden - I was lucky to be able to take a picture without people in it! These gardens are "crawling" with people wandering through them. One gardener said that last year he had 23,000 people through his garden!
Finally, a little indulgence! I tried not to take too many close up shots of "flowers" - I was supposed to be admiring the gardens rather than individual specimens! However this one just begged to have its picture taken!
Click on any of the pictures to see them larger, then click on the "back" arrow to get back to this blog.
I will share my album of photos tomorrow.
AJ
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