Australian flower festivals: Toowoomba, Renmark, Grafton and WA
Gardening enthusiasts will have spades of fun at these flower festivals.
Gardening enthusiasts will have spades of fun at these flower events.
Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers, Queensland
Founded following World War II to promote the region’s Garden City reputation, this festival is one of the country’s oldest and largest. This year’s event (September 18-27) has been impacted by corona restrictions but still offers a jam-packed program of 30 events and 48 tours, including displays across the city’s parks, with 170,000 flowers planted in readiness. The 25ha Queens Park remains true to its 19th-century roots, bursting with colourful bedding displays. This year’s grand floral parade will be a static display with the extravagant floral floats parked in the Grand Central Shopping Centre. There’s art, music and foodie tours and a special Petals and Pups program. Rambo (pictured), a seven-month-old Australian shepherd, is the festival’s doggie ambassador spruiking a range of events including a Cultured Canine walking tour.
Renmark Riverland Rose Festival, South Australia
The festival state is also the rose state, known in gardening circles worldwide as one of the best places to grow this queen of flowers; the World Rose Convention is to be held in Adelaide in 2022. Each spring sun-drenched Renmark is bedecked with roses, some 50 beds stuffed with thousands of booms. This year, the town’s 26-year-old festival has been pruned back in line with Covid restrictions and rebranded to reflect the festival’s expansion in recent years to involve all South Australian Riverland towns. The festival’s main activities will be condensed into a four-day weekend, October 16-19, but the popular Open Gardens will run for the customary 10 days. New this year is the participation of Calperum Station, owned by the Australian Landscape Trust, offering tours of its gardens and bush trails guided by rangers and ecologists.
Grafton Jacaranda Festival, NSW
Get your purple on at this lively celebration of a South American import that’s become one of our most beloved trees. In cities across Australia, the deep lilac blooms of the tough jacaranda herald summer and the Christmas season, but in the NSW Northern Rivers city of Grafton, where the streets are awash with purple, the locals venerate this brief season as enthusiastically as cherry blossom time in Japan. The program for this year’s event is still being finalised and will be released in early August. As one of the country’s oldest floral festivals, the event has garnered an international reputation in recent years but in line with Covid restrictions will be pared back in 2020, returning to its community roots (October 30-November 8). All events will be ticketed and held in private venues; check for updates.
Western Australia’s Wildflower Season
WA is home to one of the largest and most spectacular wildflower displays on Earth. The season commences in winter in the north and wraps late spring in the southwest, as the flowers of about 12,000 species bloom, of which more than 60 per cent are endemic to the West. By early spring this floral tsunami hits Perth for the September-long Kings Park Festival. The park provides a snapshot of the state’s flora and stages a series of events including bike tours and guided hikes to wildflower hotspots (bgpa.wa.gov.au). And across the state there are more celebrations. Ravensthorpe Wildflower Show (September 7-16), a six-hour drive east of Perth on the Fitzgerald Coast, marks the season with a fantastic display in the town hall’s temporary herbarium, along with guided bushwalks and tag-along 4WD wildflower tours (wildflowersravensthorpe.org.au). There’s also the Esperance Wildflower Festival, September 22-26 (esperancewildflowerfestival.com) while the Nannup Flower and Garden Festival has extended its program to five weeks (August 13 to September 20), allowing more time to enjoy the town’s 10,000 tulips, market stalls and open gardens (nannupgardens.org.au).