Jurasic Cycad Gardens

 I have made this blog on the Jurasic Cycad Gardens separate from the others as some people might find gardening uninteresting.  This fellow had a large collection of cycads & wanted to donaate them to the Charles Darwin Pk Gardens in Darwin, but they didn't want them or have anyone to look after the plants.
so he set about creating his own garden.
The 2.5 hectare garden of native & exotic, rare & endangered plants from around the world is in Katherine. It was built from scratch around 1984. The natural boulders dug up on the block were incorporated in the 1.4 kms of walking tracks through out the garden
The gardens nursery also germinate thousands of cycad seeds & export mature plants to all over the world. The Sultan of Brunei bought a shipping container full of cycads.

Only some of the hundreds of cycads & succulents were labelled. I didn't write down the names of the plants I took pics of either.

Unfortunately we didn't see any Cycads in flower

 This Cycad is from Africa

 Some like this 1 were ugly

 This is a desert rose from Zimbabwe.

 Wierd

 Found only in north Qld

 Ugly

 Look out for the spikes - deciduous as well

 More deadly spikes

 In that nice bush are more deadly spikes

 spikes there too

 I think from Tanzania

 As you can see, I enjoyed looking through this garden. Rod actually was interested as well :)
There was 1 disappointing feature about this garden though.............
The plants didn't have ages on them or rather yr of birth, as most of these plants looked decades old.

Like the plaque at the top says, cycads have been around for 250 millions  yrs - when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

Hope you enjoyed my pics :))