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Grass trees in Mt Annan's Terrace Garden |
Information and orientation as well as the opportunity of a guided tour can be had at the visitors' centre. Above it lies the Terrace Garden. comprising about 4.5 ha of hillside shaped into a series of steps, where representatives of the 25,000-odd species of Australian plants are laid out in their family groups. This is the place to begin exploring what Mount Annan has to offer. You are soon inveigled into a fascinating display that starts among the ferns and moves up through the cycads and rainforest-type plants into sections displaying some extraordinary flowers. If Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens represents an old world style, this is something else. It has a boldness of design that demands you see the distinctive Australian plants in the context of other native plants to which they are related.
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| Formal walks of varying distances are shown on guide leaflets. The main loop path visits all the family groups in the course of about a kilometre, while shorter paths provide an introduction to the major families. Tracks lead every which way for the adventurous. Often, the side tracks show the way to a multitude of flowers. Many should soon establish themselves as garden favourites. For example. Dryandra quercifolia, the oak-leaf dryandra, is only one of many wild flowers from Western Australia to more than rival the proteas and other exotics. |
Dryandra quercifolia. |
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The four-winged malee (Eucalyptus tetraptera) |
From here, two one-way loop roads, each of about 5 km. wind through the gardens past theme plantings, ornamental lakes, the various arboreta where related trees such as eucalypts or wattles are grown, and picnic areas. On the northern loop, one of the more interesting eucalypts is the four-winged malee (Eucalyptus tetraptera) with fruit so spectacular their brilliant redness stands out from 100 metres away. There are substantial tracts of grassland and woodland that will be kept as examples of native landscape. |
