Cairns is on the edge of a rain forest. Several miles north of the city, they've set aside several hectares to be kept wild and natural. Across the street, they established Flecker Botanic Gardens and populated it with exotic species from around the world. We focused our visit on the cultivated areas with excellent walking paths. If we had several days to explore, we could have walked up into the Mt Whitfield Conservation Park or even circled the Centenary Lakes.
Frequent visitors to my blog no doubt realize that I'm a bit of a plant enthusiast. I thought I took lots of underwater photos, but that's nothing compared to the volume of photos I took at Flecker!
The posts that follow will be much like the Great Barrier Reef posts. I'm mostly unsure what's in the picture. But I'll do my best to point out the stuff I know.
Peace lilies are common in Illinois...as houseplants. Here, they grew wild.
And they had purple ones, too!
Star-shaped and red. Like garden phlox, only better!
This is called Tahitian Ginger (Alpinia purpurata).
Snake Cactus. Native to Mexico.
There were several types of these trees, pink, melon, orange, etc. If I remember correctly, they smelled heavenly.
These looked like wax roses. They were so cool.
Very interesting shape.
There were several types of these plants, too. The flowers came in all sorts of colors, including a even a green one I'll show later! I believe they are all part of the Fabaceae or Leguminosae family. They share traits with peas and beans.
There is only one type of plant shown in this photo. The green leaf is the top side. The burgundy leaf is the bottom side. Even up close, you would swear it was satin.I loved the graphic quality of so many of the leaves. I'm not an artist, but they made me want to paint a picture. I may still do that. Or, perhaps I'll just make a collage with zoomed-in versions of several photographs.