International Rose Festival 2000 in Adelaide
with Keith Conlon"Roses are red, the gardens are green - Adelaide's blooming, haven't you been?"
That's the rallying cry for the rose and garden lovers overseas, over the border and even over the road to come to the first International Rose Festival in Adelaide, 19th to 22nd October, 2000.
The Botanic Park site for the never-seen-before Garden and Flower Show is all fork lift trucks and wheel barrows as it is transformed, but in other parklands, all is serene.
Adelaide is already proclaimed as the Rose capital of Australia. Veale Gardens on South Terrace has been a rose fancier's paradise since 1961, and its thousands of plants are in glorious Spring bloom. The experts say that's in part because Adelaide is one of about five places on earth that are perfect for growing roses. The prolific pink "Adelaide" rose blooms in testimony at the entrance steps in the sunken rose garden. South Australia grows about six out of every ten plants purchased round the country, and the same goes for florist blooms. In the last decade, Adelaide has cemented its claim with many roadside plantings.
A thriving cluster beams on Le Fevre Terrace, North Adelaide for instance, Wellington Square (again in North Adelaide) has its own rose show on each side, there are beds in bloom along O'Connell Street as it winds up through the North Adelaide parkland gardens and Hutt Street in the City has a long nature strip spilling over with ground cover roses that will flower in time for the Festival.
Some plants go back to the 1960's, and we found Joe Tambourrino amongst the Rymill Park roses he's treated as family for more than thirty years.
"Keep up with the dead heading, fertilise them every eight weeks - and give them plenty of water", he advised as he cut the first tired flowers of the season.
The Rose Society has been involved at Rymill Gardens since its inception, and has assisted the Adelaide City Council with its continuing "rosification" that's added bright colours to our green belt. Society members await the coming Festival eagerly, but their involvement in a garden nearby is critical.
All the parkland roses are champions in a sense. They're winners from a field of thousands of attempts each year to breed a new and better variety. The test track is a group of beds behind the new Botanic Garden headquarters on Hackney road (the old MTT building featured earlier this year on Postcards). This is the only official rose trial garden in Australia. Talk about Survivor shows ... this is tough ! No fertiliser, no sprays - they're left to prove themselves under the watchful eye of a Rose Society panel, who mark them regularly on tough criteria. Only the fittest survive to be allowed onto the market. Then they can be part of the extraordinary roses, food, wine, music and garden show that's about to happen nearby in Botanic Park.
On Thursday 19th October, launch day of what is hoped will be a biennial rose festival, the new International Rose Garden in the Botanic Garden will be open to the public for the first time. With acres of varieties, this is a serious rose garden. It would surely have impressed Madame Josephine.
Buonoparte's Empress gathered as many varieties as she could a couple of centuries back . . . just under two hundred of them. In this new show garden, there are well in excess of two thousand. Once they were the domain of aristocrats who had plenty of fertilising manure from their stables and servants to dig it in. Now we can all tend a rose or two and admire them for their symbolism - from passion to purity.
The first plantings here go back only fifteen months, and yet it is already a sea of spring colour. What was a scruffy old tram and bus depot for most of the twentieth century is turning into a new millennium tourist attraction. The International Rose Garden will be opened officially by the Premier, and then we can all stroll the radiating paths. A cautionary note, however - the beloved old rose garden with fountain has gone (it will become a herb garden). And you will need to pack your wallet as well as your picnic basket, because there will be a fee to get into the new rose garden.
A hillside of sand and soil, kilometres of timber and pipes and a forest of potted plants and trees are coming into Botanic Park next to the new garden. They will transform the parkland into the most original rose and garden show Australia has ever seen. That's a big wrap, but Adelaide is very good at festivals. Adrian Greenoak is the creative genius behind the coming weekend's International Rose Festival. Looking very English in sports jacket and tie - and very practical with rubber boots for endless treks around the site - he is cajoling the constructors and keeping an eye on the details. This nuclear-science-graduate, composer, musician and actor cut his teeth on garden design before becoming founding Director of the now famous Hampton Court Flower Show in England. In Australia's rose capital, he loves the Botanic park canvas with its open green park space under huge nineteen century Moreton Bay Fig trees and pines. Interestingly, Botanic Park was designed with horticultural spectaculars in mind.
Another garden expo this aint! There are no Tatiana - show me the money entries here. Exhibitors submitted designs, and the best were invited to participate. There'll be everything from a Roman garden (with milk bath), to a French street scene, and olde world roses mingling with contemporary gardens. Acoustic music ensembles will add atmosphere to the cafÈ scene under the green canopies. It promises to be a very different garden festival in Spring - the International Rose Festival in Adelaide.
Details:
Date
Thursday 19th - Sunday 22nd October 2000Venue
Botanic Park, Hackney Rd
Adelaide. South Australia
Enter from Plane Tree Drive and Frome Rd.Admission
Adults $11
Pensioners $9
14 years and under $5
5 years and under freeOpen Times
10am to 6pm dailyAssociated Events Program Includes exhibitions at the Art Gallery of South Australia State Library, Carrick Hill and Ayers House.
Brochures
SA Travel Centre
18 King William Street, Adelaide SA 5000
Phone: 1300 655 276
