Toowoomba

The Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers started in 1949 to boost the city’s appeal as “The Garden City,” and over 60 years later, the Carnival attracts thousands of visitors and raises over $40,000 a year for local charities. Greg heard about the Carnival at work. Knowing the weather wasn’t going to be great for the beach, we decided to go check it out. Sian so graciously volunteered to drive us, so all three of us enjoyed celebrating flowers. The festivities take place over two weekends. We missed the wine and food festival that goes along with the flower festival, but we feel like we probably skipped the crowd too.

On the way to Toowoomba, we decided to stop at Mt. Coo-tha, about 20 minutes outside the city to enjoy the best views over breakfast.

Sian had a brilliant idea when we arrived in Toowoomba: stop at the visitors’ center for a map of the best gardens.  Every year the city holds a competition for the best private gardens, or yards, but they also host beautifully landscaped public gardens. We visited two amazing exhibition gardens with bright, fragrant, creatively placed flowers and took tons of pictures.

At lunch time, we drove up to the lookout point and enjoyed more magnificent views of hills and valleys. After lunch we browsed around the Japanese garden much like the one in Memorial Park in Houston, only more extensive. The Japanese garden hosted at least three weddings that afternoon. We were so close to all of them that we forgot that we weren’t invited. Our final stop was the Grand Champion garden, a meticulously landscaped yard, front, back and sides. The homeowner’s were definitely not amateur gardeners and there was no shortage of time that went into planting where each and every flower was placed.

We learned that we don’t have to go to the beach every weekend to find amazing landscapes.