Royal Botanic Gardens (Melbourne)

After flying in from Hobart today, I didn’t get to my hotel until close to 3:00 in the afternoon. Because I’m not at all a night owl, or any type of night bird for that matter, more like a slug that likes to try to sleep at night, that didn’t leave me a lot of time to do stuff here today. With what little time I had, I decided to sate what unexpectedly became an obsession on this Australian trip and visited the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

This is my fourth city on this Australian trip and the fourth one where I’ve visited at least one botanical garden. And in Brisbane, I visited two different official city botanical gardens, the City Botanic Gardens and the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, and a park that is a botanical garden in all but name, the Roma Street Parkland.

But before I get into a discussion about Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, and the walk to and from it, here’s an incredibly boring story I want to tell so the rest of the narrative will sound exciting in comparison.

Finding my hotel presented a bit of a challenge. I took an Uber from the Melbourne airport. When I booked the Uber, I typed the hotel name into the app and it found the right location without a problem.

The Uber driver drove along a street that is part of Melbourne’s Chinatown. He stopped at an intersection on that street. That’s where the Uber app told him my hotel was. The driver and I both looked out the window at the signs on the buildings on the street and neither of us could see one for my hotel. I opened up Google Maps and it told me we were in the right place. So I told the Uber driver to let me off and I’d find it.

There is a hotel where the driver let me off. It’s another brand of the same hotel group as my hotel. I was going to go in and ask where its sister hotel is, but I saw a plain, nondescript laneway. I looked down it and, a little piece down the laneway, hanging perpendicular off the wall, I saw a sign for my hotel. I walked to the sign and found a back door to my hotel.

I went to the reception desk and told the person there about how difficult their hotel was to find. She told me that, yes, their front door is on a street that cars can’t go on, only trams. So Uber directs drivers to the back door.

I’ll have more to say about the front-door street later, but now on to the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Royal Botanic Gardens

More of the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne is rugged than at most of the botanic gardens I’ve been to in Australia. I hesitate to use the word rugged because that probably leaves you thinking that you have to don sturdy hiking boots and carry mountain-climbing gear to visit it.

That’s not what I mean. Not at all. There are gentle pedestrian roads and paths through it.

It’s just that there aren’t as many carefully sculpted flower beds that are meticulously manicured, almost to a fault, as you might find in other botanical gardens. In fact, I found only one or two that might be described as such at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. I don’t mean that in any sort of negative way. I liked the gardens.

At Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, there are a lot of treed areas, with a very wide variety of types of trees. But as you walk the paths, every once in a while, you come upon a small flower bed’s brilliant splash of colour.

There is one small forest area with a dirt path through it. The trees are so dense that as you walk along the path you feel that you are deep in a forest, even though the path is not long and the forest is small.

There’s also an arid plants section with a wide variety of cacti and other desert plants.

And, as I said, there are a couple of beautiful, well-sculpted flower beds.

The Royal Botanic Gardens also has a small, hot, humid glass house with tropical plants. If you want a free sauna, spend some time in there. “Free” reminds me. Entrance to the gardens is free.

But the most spectacular parts of the Royal Botanic Gardens are its lakes. They are beautiful.

However, “lakes” might leave the wrong impression. The smaller one, Nymphaea Lily Lake isn’t large enough to warrant being called a lake. It’s a pond. The larger one, Ornamental Lake, might qualify as a small lake, but a toddler who has had swimming lessons might be able to swim across it if the gardens allowed swimming in the lake. I don’t think they do allow swimming, but a rebellious toddler might try.

But, unlike ponds in some other botanical gardens, these aren’t circles, ovals or other regular shapes. They are as if nature formed them without knowing what regular shapes are.

Oh, about the “lily” in the “Nymphaea Lily Lake” name. When I was there, lily pads almost choked large portions of the pond. But there were only a very small number of open flowers. It lacked the brilliance of the lily pond at Hobart’s botanical garden. But that might just be a coincidence of timing.

Oh too, about the “ornamental” in “Ornamental Lake,” that might be misleading. It is peacefully stunning, with a couple of islands, lots of vegetation on the islands and surrounding the lake, and aquatic vegetation in the lake. But the name sounds like there are ornaments of some sort in or around the lake. Other than the beauty of its nature, there aren’t. The lake is ornamental for the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne. At least, that’s my explanation of the name.

More pictures from the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne:

To and From the Royal Botanic Gardens

The Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne is about a half-hour walk from my hotel. I went out the front door rather than the back one that I came in through. As the front desk clerk said, the only vehicular traffic on that street is trams. The street has wide sidewalks, lots of trees, and, when I walked on it to and from the Royal Botanic Gardens, lots of people. It is what a downtown street should be.

I didn’t have to walk far along the street before I came upon a very handsome orangey-sand-coloured train station. I didn’t go inside so I don’t know if it’s as handsome inside as out. Perhaps I’ll duck in and take a look over the next few days. If so, I’ll let you know.

Just beyond the train station, I crossed a bridge over Melbourne’s Yarra River. The city makes good use of the river, with riverside walks on either side and, at least along the downtown portion, a lot of activity on both sides of it.

Past the river, I walked through a wide swath of parkland on my way to the gardens. Unfortunately, a busy, major thoroughfare runs through it, but it still leaves a lot of park space.

The park contains ponds, trees, and flower beds. Some of those flower beds are of the stunning, carefully sculpted, meticulously manicured type that you’d normally find in a botanical garden, but they’re well outside of the Royal Botanic Gardens boundaries.

Another thing that stands in the park is a large Queen Victoria monument. Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, an Australian State. So it’s only natural that it’d have a large statue of Queen Vic.

On the way back from the botanical gardens, I trod a little bit on a walking and cycling path beside a calmer section of the Yarra River than the central business district bit I saw from the bridge. Grass and trees line the shores on both sides. A few rowing crews were out training on the river when I walked by.

Melbourne often ranks high on lists of the most livable cities. I’ve only been here a few hours and haven’t seen much yet. But I think I’m already starting to get a hint of why it ranks so highly.

Today was a short day for me in terms of activities. So you get off easy with a short post here. Enjoy your reprieve by going out and doing something fun. I’ll see if I can come up with an excruciatingly long post or two tomorrow.