The International Rose Garden Adelaide Botanic Garden

They say a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Well, not quite all roses smell the same, for some are scentless. But a rose, regardless of its name, is definitely pretty, and when you have a garden, filled with roses...now that is a sight to behold. The International Rose Garden in the Adelaide Botanic Garden offers a smorgasbord of roses for those who adores them. With displays of over 5,000 roses, the garden has sections devoted to Australian bred roses, single roses, heritage roses and pillar roses, it makes an almost guaranteed sensory overload trip for rose lovers. As a starter, here's a rose that is named City of Adelaide. Adelaide was the first Capital City in Australia to have a rose named after it.

City of Adelaide^TM rose. A deep salmon pink floribunda type rose with light fragrance, it has deep glossy green leaves to contrast the glowing blooms.

So be prepared and try to enjoy the display by systematically going through the rows/sections as it would be more rewarding and less tiring than getting overexcited and flit from his row to another section like a butterfly, which yours truly did, and kept on having to double take back and forth between the sections. Even worse is that I did it in the midday heat of summer!

Eye catching and mind blowing bed of red roses. There are many pergola arches in the background, covered by roses that you can walk through.

To the west of the rose garden, the Bicentennial Conservatory provides an interesting backdrop whilst the eastern side slopes up towards Hackney Road. The northern edge of this rose paradise is bounded by Plane Tree Drive whilst the Plant Biodiversity Centre and the Goodman Building sits to the south of the rose garden.

Beds of roses with the Bicentennial Conservatory in the background.

Everywhere I turned to in the rose garden, an interesting rose would catch my eye. After a while, my mind was so flooded with this visual and sensory overload (the colours and shapes and also the scents) that I just had to stand still in one spot and let my mind calm down before continuing on going from flower to flower like a bee collecting honey.

A view of the rose garden. On the foreground are a row of fragrant, pink polyantha rose called Mevrouw Nathalie Nypels. The blooms here fade to white, so you get a nice two-coloured effect. The background sees the Plant diversity Centre with the Goodman building peeking out from behind it. The taller building beyond the garden (further back and to the left of the tree) is the North Terrace House at the intersection of Hackney Road and North Terrace.

PART 2 (will post later)