Mum's visit to Wigandia garden

A short while ago I wrote about Wigandia garden. This is a famous Australian garden, renowned for being extremely drought tolerant, low maintenance and with its own unique style. You can see the garden's website here.

Well, thanks to the garden creator William posting a comment (thanks!) I discovered that the garden was opened to the public for the first time in years over Easter.

Unfortunately I couldn't go myself, what with being on the other side of the world, but I convinced Mum to go in my stead. It was a very long day for her, around 4 hours drive each way(!) but I think she enjoyed it, and she did an amazing job of taking photos and video.

In Mum's words:
"It was all a surprise – I had not expected it to look so good. And his sculptures would be, anywhere else, just a heap of old junk like the rusty decrepit bike thrown on a heap of sort of garden rubbish. It looked just perfect – a guy there (another visitor) and I both commented it would look like waiting for the rubbish collection in our places, but was so exactly right where he had placed it! I think it was one of the volunteers who told me he had given it a LITTLE water to make it really nice for Easter, since about Christmas. that is, probably the bathwater to cover an acre or so! "

I've put the full set of Mum's photos up on Flickr here. As well, to give you a flavour of the garden, below is a short video compilation showing one side, plus a couple of photos.


Music thanks to Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)







Based on the photos, the garden is amazing. The fact that it's so full of life, at the tail end of a long hot summer and drought, is phenomenal. Yes, I imagine it'd be prettier still in late autumn after some rain, but it's easy to make a garden look lovely when it's lush and green - what's hard is what this garden succeeds at - to look wonderful even when it's dry and overbearingly hot. It's also clearly a garden for wildlife, with the various drinking bowls for birds and all the butterflies. Just wonderful. I hope I get a chance to visit it myself in person one day.