Alowyn Gardens

If you are venturing out to the Yarra Valley for a day then don't just go to the wineries make a detour to see the beautiful Alowyn Gardens near Yarra Glen. Even as locals it has taken us a LONG time to get to these gardens but they were worth the wait. The garden is seperated into different garden 'rooms' with the ubiquitous parterre garden, some foresty areas, great little windy paths that lead to sculpture and water features. Matt and I are always particularly interested in food gardens and Alowyn has a beautifully designed kitchen garden with avenues of apples, crabapples, quinces and what not. In the picture above Matt and Lucy are framed by the wisteria and rose covered arbor. A great place to go for a nice walk to burn off the winery indulgences.

Tesselaar Tulip Festival

Today we went to the tulip festival on the penultimate day. The tulips were a bit blown but some were still at their peak and even fully open they're stunning planted on mass. It's beautiful to see these wonderful flowers in the ground doing their thing rather than as cut flowers. There were amazing collections of other flowers too, irrisistable were the poppies... Lucy found them a little too irrisitable as well as I parked her a little too close for this photo and she nabbed one.


We missed going on the weekend when it was family day, but having the place to ourselves held it's own charm and there was still a cute puppy bounding around, to Lucy's amusement and some stunt alpacas and a couple of alpaca breeders there to chat to about fleece and yarn.

There was awesome muzak duo (double bass/piano) playing for our amusement and they busted out into a bit of Wiggles and Bananas in Pyjamas for Lucy although she's not quite old enough to appreciate that they were for her and she was a little more interested in the jazz numbers they played before and after (and the ABBA too).

We brought some Peonies and Tuber Roses to start our own cottage garden so wish us luck.