1. Open Gardens at Mt. Tamborine in September 2019 = Springtime in Queensland, Australia in ……… 27th September. Garden No. 1

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Note: I would like to share with you through these few words, photographs and hyperlinked websites, a 3 Dimensional experience as though you were actually there with us. Click on any photograph and it should enlarge to a different size ….. at least half screen or size full screen. It will be clearer in detail than the photo on the post. It will be as if you were really there looking at the actual scene. You are an arm chair traveller with us.

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September 2019 … this years Open Gardens …..

Ken and Harriet Aitken live only about half an hour away from a lovely location called Mt. Tamborine. We are on relatively flat lowland while Mt. Tamborine suddenly rises to a flatish mountain with many gullies, many steep areas and flat areas on top. There are many walks through rainforest areas, passing water falls and through dry eucalypt bush. See this website: Mt. Tamborine Beacons Rd. Lookout in 2008 of one of many sites we have been to. Here is another: Mt Tamborine, Gold Coast

See this website on living at Mt. Tamborine

There are many beautiful gardens tucked away and not open to the public. They grow on the deep brown / red volcanic soil and higher rainfall then we get on the lower country. However, in September every year, there is Open Gardens Trail on a weekend: Springtime On The Mountain – Open Gardens Trail …. 2019.

If you love looking at gardens and flowers, where do you stop and start? ….. there is so much to see !! Every photograph of flowers in the four gardens we saw, may not be named but their beauty must be seen. I was a landscape designer and contractor for twenty years till my very severe brain injury in December 1995. See the post: A life changing situation There are plants I have never seen.

There have been some changes in the volunteer organisation for 2019 so this post can only refer to the 2018 website. The website says:

Springtime on the Mountain is the most spectacular annual display of gardening design and skills in south-east Queensland. This year (2018) the Tamborine Mountain Garden Club will open seven diverse and delightful home gardens for public display – most for the first time – over a three-day weekend.

See the gardens of three houses and the Tamborine Botanical Garden this year in September 2019 The beauty of nature !!

Each house with it particular garden which we looked at, is a series of interconnecting Garden Rooms. The gardens has been designed as a series of linked garden rooms. Each garden room has a different function but has creates a real sense of belonging. It may not be open space but it has a sense of unity different to the next garden room.

Each Garden Room is bordered by colourful beds of flowers. Walking from one Garden Room to the next, if you love flowers, you keep walking and walking, drawn by the unexpected possibility of what is around the next corner. When you come upon a new flower bed, you just want to stop and enjoy the beauty of nature. Specific plants are often not often named but the photos show the rich changing colours and the growing plants.

The soil on Mt. Tamborine: The gardens are growing on deep brown / red volcanic soil and higher rainfall then we get on the lower country. Soils are from basalt, a volcanic, igneous rock so all the minerals are present for plant growth.

We who on the lower country below Mt. Tamborine, are on sandstone rock and the soils are much poorer and the soils hold far less moister compared to Mt. Tamborine . Mt. Tamborine is an island in the sky. It is 500m above sea level and the year round is an average four degrees temperature cooler than the surrounding lowlands. The annual average rainfall is 1550 mm.

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House 1: