Botanic Gardens at Mt. Coot-tha

Another stop on the Hop On Hop Off tour was the Botanic Gardens at Mt. Coot-tha, these gardens were set up after the City Botanic gardens became flooded with eight major floods during 1870 and 1974.  This garden is 52 hectares (over 128 acres) of gardens with more than 20,000 plants of 5000 species from around the world.  Included on the garden grounds are the Fragrant Plant and Herb Garden, Exotic Rainforest, Japanese Garden, Bonsai House, Tropical display dome, a fern house, arid region plants and cacti house, temperate garden, Australian rainforest, Australian plant communities, lagoon and bamboo grove. Personally I think I liked these gardens better. We took the self tour instead of the guided tour and enjoyed a nice walk, through a part of the garden. Afterwards we sat on the open-air restaurant deck and had some water while a nice breeze cooled us down. I think you could spend days here and still not see it all!

Also at the gardens is the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium, we would like to go back and visit there sometime. It is temporarily closed for maintenance. It is named after Sir Thomas Brisbane, governor of NSW (1821-1825) who was a well known astronomer. The statue is of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – the father of cosmonautics (astronautics as applied to space flight).  



Bob is playing a song on this king fern bench!



Rhino Beetle statue



Giant Aussie Bush Cockroach statue!



I tried to crop this but it was too blurry.
Click on it and you can see that there is a real lizard
on the head of the lizard statue! There is another on the rock
up above his head.





Bob was sitting on this when a little girl asked him if he knew where the
snake was. When he said no what snake, she told
him he was sitting on it!



Japanese Gardens





Tropical Dome