We had been passing the "Fully Licensed" pancake Café for some time now wondering about so many things. Why did they need a license? Were these some sort of certified pancakes, why do pancakes need such tight regulations? So to find out the answers to these questions we had to visit. It is situated inside an old brick church. We sat in a set of tiny pews and order up some pancakes for Leslie and hash browns sausages and eggs for me. Then it was off to the Mt Coot-tha Botanical Gardens. The gardens in the city were flooded one too many times, so they developed another botanical garden up on top of a "mountain". With an elevation of 750 feet it is not much of a mountain, but it gave us some great breezes and a tremendous view of the city. The gardens were spectacular and we luckily started in the sensory garden. So many fragrant plants and flowers. There was rosemary, my favorite aroma therapy, and an explanation for the Latin roots of the name, ros marinus, dew of the sea. We wandered along the trails and past the waterfalls. These gardens are extensive 138 acres and there are extras too. The Japanese gardens have an attached bonsai garden with more bonsai than we have seen anywhere else. In addition there is a fern house, a tropical dome, a cactus garden and an orchid area. More on that in the next post.
It is open 24 hours for all your pancake needs
The interior
A great job of repurposing
Looking through the pews to the brick wall
Mystery explained, fully licensed means "full bar"
We took the bus to the Gardens
We passed a huge cemetary
A statue honoring Konstantin Tsiolkovsky the father of Cosmonautics
The planetarium is next to the statue
And the flower show begins
Tiny tricolors
Whiskers
Looks good enough to eat
Aunty Ant getting a sip
A Mexican Frangi Pangi
Cool running water in the rainforest
Sparkling glass leaf art
A member of the ginger family
Artsy benches
So fragrant!
A flowering tree from Venezuela
Time for a sit down by the waterfall
Not quite a pineapple
Bursting with life
A fig tree with figs bursting out everywhere
We have made it to one end of the garden
Big and bad looking spider
Ready to bloom
And blooming
These trees are so funky
A huge bloom, so big it sank to the ground
Bamboo garden
