For those who like a dash of history mixed with their horticulture a new tour launching this weekend will offer a perfect introduction to the botanical treasures of one of Australia’s best preserved heritage towns.
The new Beechworth Town and Country Walks and Tours will take in some of Beechworth’s most significant public and private gardens and reserves, offering visitors fascinating insights into the people who created them, original designs and plantings – including some 14 trees of significance listed on the National Tree Register - and the gardens’ continuing evolution to the present day.
The new tours will complement the Historic & Cultural Precinct’s Ned Kelly and Gold walking tours led by expert guides which have become a must for tourists to the area. Visitors can also take part in Historic Courthouse tours and talks, the wildly popular Ghost Tours of historic Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum and Historic Beechworth mini-bus tours led by historian, Pat Doyle.
Chris Dormer, a passionate gardener, artist and former Beechworth Burke Museum programs officer is the brains behind the new Town & Country Walks and Tours. Her own piece of paradise, in the hilltop village of Stanley a few kilometres from Beechworth, has featured in the Victorian Open Garden Scheme.
Each Saturday at 2pm, departing from the Beechworth Visitor Information Centre, she will take visitors on an hour-long Public Gardens Walk, including the formal ‘pleasure gardens’ of the Town Hall, part of the Historic & Cultural Precinct, planned and planted in 1874 by Richard Hurlock Jenkyns.
Developed in the Gardenesque style, the gardens quickly became a fashionable place for locals and visitors to use the wide paths for promenading, a band rotunda for concerts, and the fountain to enjoy the sounds of the cool cascading water on hot summer nights. The gardens were planted with trees including the towering Sierra Redwoods (Sequoiadendron Giganteum) seen today which were grown by Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller, Director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens.
The tour also takes in the cultivated wilderness of the Botanical Reserve, now Victoria Park, gazetted in 1856. A competition to design the park was won by a Hungarian Count, J A Rochlitz, whose romantic vision of groves of acacia, almond and walnut trees, an open belvedere, an archery ground, cricket and boxing grounds, a children’s playground and an ‘Invalid’s’ Corner’ was never implemented. The design does live on, however, in a beautiful watercolour painted by C. Martin, part of the permanent collection of the Burke Museum.
Lake Sambell Reserve, created as a result of Beechworth’s success in the Ideal Town competition in 1928, and now home to the new Chinese Gardens, is also on the itinerary. This exciting new garden remembers the thousands of Chinese people who flocked to the rich goldfields of early Beechworth.
A variety of tours will also be offered by Chris Dormer by arrangement including visits to a selection of magnificent privately owned gardens as well as a ‘Backyard to Farm Gate’ tour of Beechworth and district’s great productive gardens.
FULL DETAILS AND BOOKINGS FOR THIS AND OTHER GREAT
BEECHWORTH TOURS AT: www.beechworthonline.com.au
PHONE 1300 366 321
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