Thursday, November 17, 2005

Back to the zoo!

Two days in a row at the zoo, that's a first! Today I went on a horticultural tour of the zoo. How so? Zoos are no longer a symmetrical arrangement of cramped cages in crowded rows. That is my childhood memory of the Bronx Zoo. Today's good zoos try to imitate nature, providing the animals with as much of their natural environment as possible, and this means that the grounds of good zoos are worth visiting in their own right. In Melbourne we have an excellent zoo, further enhanced by a small Japanese garden. As a member of Friends of the Zoo I can visit the zoo as often as I like, and I still find something new.

Wherever I've travelled to, I've always tried to visit the local zoos. In the 60s and 70s I visited the famous San Diego Zoo, and the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, both beautiful zoos even then. By the far the worst zoo I ever visited was in Rome. I hope it has been totally renovated by now, or closed!

2 comments:

Val said...

Thanks for the link to the japanese garden brochure, delightful. Is that real moss between the stepping stones? You said it was in a cool and shady corner, so I guess it could be.

Val said...

No moss yet near our summerhouse, but there is moss in the Japanese garden in the zoo in various spots. That's difficult to achieve with the drought that we've had for the last 10 years or so...