Thursday’s Special : Park…

This week Paula has given us “park” as the theme. Now that might seem quite straight forward and I happily began looking through all the “parks” I have visited, and I have been to a lot of them. Or so I thought. Until I analysed them and I realised many of them where Botanic Gardens or National/wildlife areas. Still these can be classified as parks. Then I remembered this one in Townsville in tropical north Queensland. It has covered all the bases for me…

It had lovely lawn areas to sit and relax.

I know someone who took a bite to eat as he sat on a handy seat. (We had been on the road about 3 months and Jack has his travel hairstyle!!!)…

Parks are also great places to see birds and they keep an eye out for people having lunch…

As well as lawns, parks often have extensive ponds and waterways. More birds and of course beautiful tropical lilies and lotus flowers…

Being a tropical park there are lush, jungle-like tracks to explore…

And get lost in…

So this is my interpretation of your theme this week Paula. I hope you don’t mind that I have put more in than usual, but I loved this park and wanted to show more of it than one photo could.

If you would like to find out more about this park, and see more of my photos go here.

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The ever creative Paula has added another dimension to her challenge, she has put in a voting system. So go here to see more parks and the opportunity to choose your favourite next Wednesday when the voting opens.

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Garden Photography : Monochrome, Palmetum…

This is the last week of the monochrome challenge over at Jude’s “garden Photography” challenge.

These are images from a very special Botanic Garden in Townsville, Palmetum.

To see more of it in full colour go here.

For March the theme will be “wild life”. Now that will be interesting. So pop over to Jude’s place to see what others have to show us.

Wild Weekly Photo Challenge : Look Up!

Wild weekly photo challenge has asked us to “look up” this week and record what we see.

A short while ago we visited Townsville, the capital of Northern Queensland. I love to look around botanic gardens and Townsville had three superb gardens. I was in gardens heaven.

• Anderson Gardens is the largest botanic garden in Townsville.  Covering 25
  hectares, the gardens include fine specimens of tropical trees and palms, grand
  avenues and the World Cycad Collection
• The Palmetum is a 17 hectare botanic garden displaying one of the largest and
  most diverse public collections of palms in the world.
• Initiated in 1870, Queens Gardens is the oldest Botanic Garden in Townsville and
  is heritage listed. Now covering 4 hectares, reduced from an original 40Ha, it
  is considered a fine example of a tropical colonial garden of that era.

I took hundreds of photos, but for this post I will just bring you a few I peered into the branches to take.

Tropical palms

Branches and leaves

What are those bundles?

Noisy, smelly and dirty

Fruit bats

How cute, but don’t touch…

 

Blue winged kookaburra

Here’s looking at you…