Day Four, Part Two: Dunedin Botanical Gardens (first day...)

In going through all my photos that show my day at the gardens on Saturday, I've come to the realisation that I seem to have stopped taking photos halfway through the day. How will I show you the beauty of the rhododendron dell, or all the camellias?? The beauty of the bush block or all the tall sequoias? I *swear* took more photos that I seem to have, but I patently don't have them.

What a shame. I'll just have to go back! But first, my Saturday afternoon at the Botanical Gardens!

The first path I went up in the botanical gardens. Those trees at the end of the garden are actually in the top half of the garden, not in the bottom garden I'm standing in. They are ENORMOUS. 

Dunedin has a sister city in Japan: Otaru. This beautiful Japanese garden was created to celebrate that relationship.

Dunedin is not a warm city. Even whilst I am here in Summer, it has not been particularly what I would term summerful. We've had some lovely days, and as I'll talk about later, there have been some rather cold & damp days. Saturday was a beautiful day: around 18C and sunny for a lot of the day. I definitely didn't need my jacket and actually got a bit burnt! 18C and sunny in Perth, WA where I grew up, is a good winters day. Here, it was a lovely summers day. Bit of a difference!

As it's so cold here (it's on the eastern coast of the south island of New Zealand, and quite south on that island. With the Southern Ocean on the outer of the Otago Peninsular, it gets cold wet & snowy winters, straight from Antarctica. The gardens have a beautiful big greenhouse, full of tropical plants. Even in the middle of the cold winter, you can come here and get big lung fulls of warm air.

Just outside the big green house is a bit of an English/French garden, with rows of lavender and purple salvias.

And on the other side of that, is the BIG rose garden. I have 30 pictures of roses. I like roses. I've been good and just put a few of them in a montage for you :D

Stunning, huh.

They've also a big round herb garden, which is fantastic. Beautiful and structured, there were dozens of different herbs: edible, cosmetic, decorative, medicinal.

The first part of the gardens that were structured was the rock garden. One mightn't think much of this, but it's actually much like an alpine garden, with an enormous amount of tiny plants - and bigger ones - scattered in it.

I love bumblebees. I was ridiculously excited to see them in the garden! They're so CUTE!! Fuzzy!! And they do bumble from flower to flower :D

And there comes the end of the photos of the garden. The garden is huge, and my post does not show most of the garden. I am going back to the garden either tomorrow or Thursday/Friday if I can, and take some more photos.

On the other side of the botanical gardens, is the original cemetery of Dunedin. Sadly it is in quite a dilapidated state, with some graves still in one piece, and others laying in pieces on their square of earth.

Pretty good spot in Dunedin though.

We're on the way up to Signal Hill at this point. You just need to keep going up the road that divides the botanical gardens and the cemetery and eventually you'll get to the pretty awesome lookout. I was halfway up the hill when I realised something:

The weather was closing in. My friend E was going to meet me at the top of the hill, and she texted me to say it was pretty gross up there and not to bother. So, Signal Hill would have to wait.

The weather kept coming and Sunday was cold and became incredibly damp (not solidly wet, just soakingly damp). I had a day at E's house and had a day off walking around :) No post for Sunday!