Gardens to visit in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia

Last September my husband and I fulfilled a long-held dream of visiting Australia, when we decided to take a road trip from Brisbane to Sydney. When you look at the map, our trip marks only a tiny slice of this massive country, but we knew we wanted to take it slowly and really soak up the countryside and enjoy the places we did have time to see.

From the very first day, fighting off the jetlag with some fresh air in Brisbane Botanic Gardens, we were wowed by the range and diversity of gardens and plants we saw in New South Wales. And even had they been lacking, the spectacular countryside would have more than made up for it.

Our trip took us next to Byron Bay – a charming surfer town just south of the Gold Coast. It’s a perfect spot to spend a few days exploring both the stunning local beaches and food scene or further inland where you can hike the Wollumbin and Nightcap National Parks. I also loved visiting the nearby Crystal Castle and Shambhala Gardens which are truly unlike any garden I’d seen before with some of the largest crystals in the world on display. The gardens here are full of subtropical plants and the team have gone to great efforts to help restore the local natural rainforest, too.

Although I knew that this coastal slice of Australia was far greener than other parts of the country, I was shocked to discover that most of what we saw was greener than the UK. Arriving at the Dorrigo National Park – and our halfway point – we hiked for hours under lush rainforest canopies, never seeing another person and just stopping occasionally to snap photos of huge stag ferns and at one point an enormous lace monitor lizard climbing a eucalyptus tree.

Coming out of the rainforest and into The Hunter Valley region, we