Jet lag and botanical garden

I wake up at 4:45 and am not able to fall asleep again. Sun rise around 6:00. Leave to downtown after breakfast around 8:30. It’s a sunny day and temperature around 25 degrees.

 I walk through busy streets, admire sky scrapers and old churches and walk through some shopping malls. Prada, Gucci, Chanel .. I guess you can leave an enormous amount of money in such a shop and leave with noting more than a new pair of pants. Talking about pants – looks like I’m the only one here in hiking clothes, so it may be a good idea to continue to my actual destination: the Royal Botanical Garden of Sydney.

Sulphur-crested cockatoo

According to a tourist brochure the Royal Botanical Garden was established in 1816 on the colony’s first farm and is home to over 17 000 plant species, numerous birds and a colony of flying foxes.

Flying foxes.?? It does not take a long time to locate those huge bats hanging high up in the trees. Surprisingly, they are everything else but having a peaceful day time nap. Some spread their wings now and then, some have a noisy argument with each other, others craw from one place at the branch to the other. Now and then, some single foxes fly from one tree to the other. They are huge weighing up to 1 kg and having a wingspan of up to 1,5 m. 

Flying foxes are night active like most other bat species but in difference to the insect eating species I know they are feeding on fruit of rainforest species, nectar and pollen. They occur along the eastern coast of Australia and are important for the propagation of eucalypts and melaleucas since they are one of the few species which pollinate the flowers and spread the seeds of those tree species.  For me, those foxes were one of the highlights of the Botanical Garden, possibly for many other visitors as well. But actually they are a bit of a problem to the Botanical Garden because they damage the trees they camp in and cause them to die at least from the top part on. To save those old trees and heritage, there are plans to use non-harmful methods to get the bats to choose another roosting place.

Another highlight of the Botanical Garden – at least for me as a carnivorous plant enthusiast – is the Tropical Centre with quite a nice collection of Nepenthes species. Those pitcher plants are really doing well there producing big traps. It is surprising though that they did not have any native sundews there and no Cephalotus either.  Australia is THE country of carnivorous plants with an amazing variety of species, especially sundews and Utricularia species. However, the only sundew I find there in the glass house is Drosera capensis, an African species.  

Giant fern Angiopteris evecta from Madagascar. Did not expect ferns to be able to grow THAT big!

 

After a great walk through the area, along the coast and a visit to the famous opera house my legs are really aching and I feel deadly tired because of the jet lag. Time to rest ..