When Fringe and Festival burnout kicks in, head for the hills and the calm of Mt Lofty Botanic Park, writes Kerryn Goldsworthy.

THERE comes a point during the month of Fringe and Festival shows and partying when even the most enthusiastic seekers of culture start to feel all festivalled out, their circuits overloaded by the non-stop hot acts and the all-night bright lights. At this point, the thing to do is pack a picnic and head for the hills. Less than half an hour from the heart of the city, there’s a retreat where the contrasts are absolute in every way. It’s cool. It’s green. It’s quiet.

The Mt Lofty Botanic Garden covers seven small intersecting valleys on the eastern slopes of the Mt Lofty Ranges, across the area between the little towns of Crafers and Piccadilly. Because of the area’s relatively high rainfall and cool-temperate climate, away from the heat and dust of the Adelaide Plain, the land was chosen specifically for the cultivation of cool-climate plants, as an annexe to the long-established Adelaide Botanic Garden in North Tce. The original 40 hectares of land was acquired in 1952; the garden is now more than twice that size, developed over 25 years from the first Government land purchase in 1952 to the opening in 1977.

Each area of the garden is dedicated mainly to a particular plant group or region: you can find Magnolia, Syringa, Rhododendron, Fern and Viburnum Gully on the map, as well as the areas dedicated to South American, New Zealand and East African plants. There are thousands of other cool-temperate plants, both native and exotic, planted among the tall trees of a regeneration stringybark forest; these slopes were clear-felled a century ago to fuel the factories and bakeries of Adelaide.
There’s also the National Species Rose Collection, displaying the various original species from which all modern roses have been bred. There are three different rock gardens – Asian, Alpine and Perennial – and a big area of native vegetation along the northwest boundary where the Nature Trail, an official alternative route along the Heysen Trail, can be negotiated as long as you’re wearing sturdy non-slip shoes.

Good walking shoes are a necessity in any case, as is a reasonable level of fitness and a healthy heart; some of the gradients are very steep, especially if you enter from the upper car park at the western entrance. The eastern entrance, via Piccadilly, is more negotiable and a number of easy walks can be taken from that side. For those who are cognitively challenged when it comes to the three-dimensional navigation required by hilly landscapes, it’s easy to get momentarily lost among the steep slopes, winding paths, lush vegetation and constantly changing perspectives. But there’s a general brochure, with a visitors’ guide and a map of the garden, available in the upper and lower car parks.

You can also find detailed brochures and leaflets about different areas of the garden, including a guide to the Nature Trail, and a Special Plants of the Month bulletin listing suggested seasonal walks. And the Visitors’ Guide suggests a number of walks to take, giving their approximate times and degrees of difficulty. The Rhododendron Ramble seems easy enough, but the Woodland Wander (‘Steep gradient: allow 2-3 hours’) sounds like something you should embark on only if you’re feeling strong.

No brochure can prepare you, however, for the small but abundant moments of grace into which you stumble if you happen to be looking the right way at the right time. There’s the bandicoot which hangs out near one of the picnic tables and will materialise without warning, waddling over fearlessly to examine your shoes in quest of snacks. There’s the shaded slope completely covered in miniature cyclamens the colour of the inside of a seashell.

There are also the startling, alien-seeming leaves of the Chilean rhubarb, as big as beach umbrellas; and the pin oak trees, whose bright leaves and slender, black fingerbone branches hang down to the ground around you like a curtain of green to filter the sunlight. And then, of course, there are the bright and innumerable birds: the paint-box colours of rosellas and lorikeets, the speedy, mouse-sized wrens, the whole stately families of large and handsome ducks.
The highest point of the garden is the Lothian Viewing Platform, from which there are long views east and north, across and up the Piccadilly Valley and beyond. Quite apart from the beauty, it’s a quick, effective lesson in geography: a view that will give you a much better understanding of how the region is shaped.

It’s also a good example of the startling changes in perspective and scale that are a large and unexpected part of this experience. You can glance up from close examination of the fingernail-sized flower on an ankle-high plant to see a glimpse through trees and between hills of a horizon line, lost in haze, halfway to Victor Harbor.

While spectacular for its foliage in autumn and its flowers in spring, the garden in summer is more of a regenerative experience than a touristy one, conducive to introspection, meditation, and peaceful retreat in the shade. But while its virtues as a retreat are all around you, the garden is also in its own quiet way a feast for the senses – particularly if you remembered to pack your picnic. There’s the hot sun on your back, and the cold wet smack in the head of the sprinklers if you forget to dodge them. There’s the fresh green smell of 97 hectares of plant life. And most of all there are the small noises that would go quite unheard in the partying city down on the plain: bee hum, water trickle, lizard scuttle, frog plop, leaf fall, and the beating of wings.