Adelaide Botanic Garden & Adelaide Zoo

On this, my first morning in Adelaide, Australia, I explored the Adelaide Botanic Garden and the Adelaide Zoo. They are close to each other in a generous, almost bucolic, near continuous string of green space that surrounds Adelaide’s central business district.

But before I get into that, a very brief comment on Adelaide. I haven’t seen much yet, so my thoughts might change over the next few days, but having just come from Brisbane, I can’t help but compare the two.

I don’t know about the relative sprawls of the two cities, but based on their central business districts, Adelaide seems the much smaller of the two. I didn’t haul out a measuring tape, but I’m pretty sure Adelaide’s CBD has considerably less of a footprint than Brisbane’s. What’s more, Adelaide has fewer skyscrapers and its tallest are shorter than the tallest skyscrapers of Brisbane.

Despite, or because of (I’m not sure which), that, so far Adelaide seems quite pleasant. My hotel is on a main street, but I went to dinner last night on a nearby cross-street that’s closed off to cars. A number of restaurants, including the one I ate at, had tables out on the street. I saw a parallel street with the same arrangement.

And my walk to the Adelaide Botanic Garden took me along a wide, pedestrian shopping street that’s quite pleasant.

Speaking of the Adelaide Botanic Garden…

Adelaide Botanic Garden

If Brisbane and Adelaide are representative, Australian cities know how to do botanical gardens. To the best of my knowledge, Adelaide has only one, the Adelaide Botanic Garden, whereas Brisbane has two official ones, the City Botanic Gardens and the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, and one that is a botanical gardens in all but name, and a splendid one at that, the Roma Street Parkland.

But the Adelaide Botanical Garden has nothing to be ashamed of. It’s splendid. And it’s free.

The Adelaide Botanic Garden has beautiful flower beds, forested areas with lovely paths through them, shrubs, lawns, a long pergola with I don’t know what sort of plant growing thickly on it, a stream, a pond, and a few simple statues. And there’s a large international rose garden with countless varieties of roses.

OK. The “countless” part is a lie. I’m sure someone with the patience to do so would be able to count them. But I have neither the patience nor the inclination to do so. I think it’s sufficient to approximate it as “oodles of varieties (+/- 27.3%).”

A small “Amazon Water Lilly” pavilion has a little pond inside containing, not surprisingly, Amazon water lilies. But it also at least one other species that the signage labeled as “Blue Lotus of Egypt.” The Blue Lotus of Egypt looks a lot like what one would expect of water lilies. But the leaves of the Amazon water lily are amazing. They are large green circular leaves with raised circumferences.¹

They appear to be such perfect circles that it’s difficult to believe that they grow naturally that way. But they do. There are pictures of them in Wikipedia, confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are natural not manufactured. Wikipedia wouldn’t falsify anything, would it?

Another, larger pavilion contains a small tropical rain forest. A ramp and upper walkway inside allowed me to walk up among the trees and the paths below afforded views from ground level.

An old, middling sized building in the Adelaide Botanic Garden houses the Museum of Economic Botany. It contains display cases of botanical items used for commercial purposes, mainly, but not exclusively food. I believe that the items with long shelf lives—such as seeds, nuts, and wood—are real. But the fruits are definitely models. A bunch of grapes looked particularly plastic.

Normally, the grounds and all of the pavilions are free to enter. However, there was an exhibition of wildlife photography competition winners i the rainforest pavilion when I went there. Because of the exhibition, they charge students and decrepit people, such as the likes of me, $8 AUD to enter now. Normal people pay $10. I paid the money and went inside. The small rainforest sprouted easels that held the photographs.

I’d definitely recommend a visit to the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Then again, if you live on the other side of the world and your only reason to travel here is to visit the gardens, it’s probably not worth it.

Here are some more pictures from the botanical gardens:

Adelaide Zoo

The Adelaide Zoo is on the smallish size. They’ve got a decent collection of animals from around the world, including giraffes, sumatran tigers, lions, red pandas, meerkats, otters, penguins, and so on. A walk-through aviary has some pretty birds. There are also a few non-human apes. And the Adelaide Zoo has a variety of human apes wandering around for the other species to look at. I was one today.

The stars of the show at the Adelaide zoo are its two giant pandas, one male and one female. There are two panda enclosures, one for each. Pandas don’t socialize much and the two usually live separately. They’re put in the same enclosure only at mating time, which occurs once a year for 24 to 48 hours. Lucky animals.

I forget how many years the Adelaide Zoo has had their pandas, but it’s been a long time. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful at breeding. And, they missed their shot this year. The Adelaide Zoo’s contract with China for the pandas expires next year. The zoo hopes to get it extended, but that hasn’t happened yet. In case pandas have to go back, the zoo didn’t want to risk their female panda getting with child and having to travel pregnant. Apparently, that would be dangerous.

When I first visited the pandas, the male was nowhere to be seen. The female was barely visible, sleeping on a rock at the back of her enclosure. I came back later. The female was still up on her rock, but the male had come out toward the front of his enclosure and was playing with a ball.

Speaking of animals sleeping and hiding. A lot of the animals at the Adelaide Zoo seem to do that a lot. Few were particularly active. And many were hiding somewhere in a hole or behind some obstruction in their pen.

The zoo has a building for nocturnal animals. It’s a darkened room with glass-fronted enclosures. Signs say what’s inside each enclosure. I didn’t count, but I think there are about a dozen exhibits. I saw two animals, a snake and a large rodent. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see the animals in the other displays. I think they learned to read clocks and weren’t fooled by the darkened room. “We’re nocturnal, dammit. Its daytime. Leave us the hell alone for god’s sake. We’re trying to sleep.” Fair enough.

When I referred to these as morning activities earlier, that was a bit of a stretch. My time at the zoo extended into the early afternoon. I grabbed a sandwich from the snack bar there. Of course, I didn’t just grab it. I paid for it too. That’s just the sort of guy I am.

I ate my egg sandwich at a small, simple, round outdoor table near the snack bar. I hadn’t finished even half of it when an ibis, cheeky devil, leaped up smack dab in the middle of my table and eyed my sandwich with a lean and hungry look.

I was so startled, and too busy protecting my sandwich from the ibis, that I didn’t think to take a photo. Eventually, realizing that I would defend my sandwich to the death, the ibis hopped off the table defeated.

I have nothing against ibises. I would have shared my sandwich with it, truly, but there are signs by the tables asking people to not feed the birds. Otherwise, I would have starved myself for the poor bird, for sure. That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.

Now that I’ve mentioned lunch, I’m obligated to sign off on this morning post. More this afternoon.

1. Regular readers no doubt expected that I wouldn’t be able to resist spinning a pun about the online purveyor of everything, Amazon, when mentioning the Amazon water lilies. It was hard to resist, but I like to surprise my regular readers every once in a while. ↩︎