Burra Open Gardens

Each year the local Lions Club arranges for a set of gardens in the Burra Valley (more or less) to open to the public.  This year we visited 5 of the 7, and found 3 of them particularly interesting, both for gardens and art.

Our first stop was the Tijara Iris Garden.  We go there with the ntention of purchasing bearded irises for our own garden.  I'm sure that we will never get our garden to look like this.

or this (especially the view).

After a very pleasant visit and opening my wallet a little (at $9 per pot, which often contains 3 large plants, this place is the greatest bargain in the gardening world) we moved across the valley to Felix.

As might be gathered from the entrance there is a resident artist here.  A feature of the garden is the appearance of red-poles in a similar role to Japanese torii throughout.

Much of the external fabric of the house has also been painted.

In addition to the art the place sold jams and preserves (which we didn't acquire not being jam persons).  A very interesting feature of this aspect was the raising of vegetables in old bath tubs.  Apparently this prevents the roots from surrounding trees invading the growing area.

Our final stop was described rather mildly in the brochure as it is a new garden and still being constructed.  The main feature of the garden as such  is a series of ponds with landscaping.  (The owners have used a garden designer but from the array of backhoe attachments visible in part of the garden they do a fair bit of the earthmoving themselves.)

The other aspect that was enjoyable was the number of sculptures of animals scattered around the place.  A group of abstract metal flamingos were a tad weird but most others reflected the area: