The Creek in the Garden: The Adelaide Botanic Gardens' busy winter with Keith Conlon

Winter in the green world is usually a quick time, but in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens this winter it won't just be the creek that's bubbling busy. On this week's Postcards, I took viewers for a stroll along First Creek as it cuts through the grounds in Adelaide's Parklands.

Once called Greenhill Rivulet (now, that's move romantic), First Creek has been transformed by the break of season from dry depression into a gurgling and chuckling stream again. And Waterfall Gully has its cascade back. It's the same creek, rising in Cleland Conservation Park near Mt Lofty, and spilling over the falls before its often subterranean - drain - run through the suburbs of Tusmore, Norwood and Kent Town before it emerges into The Botanic Gardens.

The trash rack cleaners will tell you it picks up a lot of stormwater and grubby rubbish along the way. It was once much worse, with tanneries and brickworks along its banks. A little bluestone building in the Gardens was originally the morgue for the large lunatic asylum in grounds resumed by the Botanic Gardens. It poured raw sewage into the creek!

On most winter days now, it's a pretty reminder of pre-European days on the Adelaide plains, but in the nineteenth century, First Creek could turn into a torrent of disease and destruction.

The great Director and garden designers of last century, Dr Richard Schomburgk spent a lot of resources redirecting and taming the creek. The waterway then struck at his own family living in the old lodge nearby. His 20 year old daughter, Antonia attracted fatal typhoid fever from the creek.

Happier times there are today along the creek, and as the water tumbles under one small vehicle bridge, the traffic above will turn into an exodus. In August, 1999, all of the Botanic Gardens staff - and the entire herbarium collection - will move a stone's throw across the creek to the old tram depot on Hackney Road.

The impending construction of the new National Wine Centre means the Garden's Administration will take up residence in the old Goodman Building nearby. Since 1908, this area of the Parklands has been Municipal Tramways Trust territory, or more recently, a vast bus depot. This winter, it's going green again.

The Brookman Building, built for the MTT, is an Edwardian collage of classical verandahs and high gables atop its three stories. The Postcards crew mingled with painters and concrete trucks as we noted the refurbishment progress. Gardens staff start their migration in August.

A little further downstream on First Creek, another small Roadway Bridge in Botanic Garden leads to the sleek silver-Gray Bicentennial Conservatory. And just before it, a very popular glass sculpture sits in its own round pool.

Created by Sydney sculpture Sergio Redial from 500 panes of glass, it resembles a breaking ocean wave in time. It is soon to create another axis as a whole new area of garden is created.

Earlier, on the other side of what was until recently a concreted bus park, I watched bricklayers setting granite cobblestones into a new circular entrance to the Gardens off Hackney Road. Looking from there, visitors will find their eyes taken along radial design lines to the pasty-shell of the Conservatory, the old tram-barn-turned-plant-biodiversity-centre, and between them, the glass sculpture in the distance.

In front of them will be the new International Rose Garden. The landscaping contours are now clearly evident, and , in another flurry of activity just off First Creek, the first of more than 5000 bloomers will be planted next month. Their spread over gardens, pergolas and arches will enhance Adelaide's reputation as the rose capital of Australia.

A couple of bends along First Creek, it will be a more traditional, quiet, subdued winter in the Italianate Garden. Deliberately planted in lower key Renaissance style, it's lifted by a pure Victorian flounce - a much photographed pavilion.

A few steps across a little footbridge take you into a different world on the other side of First Creek. First planted as an Australiana section more than a century ago, its silent sawdust paths lead you into a domain of giants...superb examples of huge Bunya Pines, bulbous bottles trees, and towering eucalypts. Winter in here still reveals bursts of colour in bernes and blossoms.

By the time First Creek passed the gatekeeper's cottage in The Botanic Gardens, it swished and swayed through a great S-Bend, eroding deep banks. It had turned ugly!

As late as the 1960's, the staff were still trying to tame it, turning it into a slightly beautiful concrete drain. Waling this section, you pass two mighty, long term residents of the plain....our much loved river redgums. How old are they? They say it's hard to pick the age of a jockey; with a river redgum, it's even more difficult. They are at least 200 years old, and perhaps 300.

Botanically speaking, they are Eucalyptus Camaldulensis....and that's a very multicultural moniker. 'Eucalyptus' cones from two Greek words, meaning 'well-covered', a reference to the gumnut caps. The genus was named in the British Museum.

As for Camaldulensis, would you believe the Italian Court of Camalduli, on the foothill of Naples? He was growing them there in the 1820's. Indeed, river redgums were grown from seed in several European sites before the colony of South Australia was even a gleam in a London banker's eye.

If you continue your winter stroll along First Creek, it will take you briefly through Botanic Park outside the Gardens. It ends not with a bang but a whimper, slipping through a culvert into the River Torrens just downstream from the Zoo landing. A great place for a pleasant stroll, for more info you can email info@postcards.sa.com.au