Robert Clark Conservatory

The Ballarat Botanical Gardens are among the oldest botanic gardens in Victoria: the city council dates their foundation to 1858. Some of the first trees and plants came from Alfred Ronalds' nursery on the far side of Lake Wendouree. The central reserve, laid out in the gardenesque style of the Victorian pleasure garden, is flanked by two areas of open parkland, the North and South Gardens. It gained twelve Italian marble statues donated by Thomas Stoddart in 1884, which were moved into a pavilion after vandals damaged them in 2002 and returned to their original pedestals in March 2010.

The conservatory's story is above all a story of begonias. In June 1952, Mayor William Ernest Roff and Edgar Bartrop, president of the Greater Ballarat Association, took their cue from the Edinburgh Festival and proposed a major local event ahead of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. The first Ballarat Begonia Festival opened on 12 March 1953 with a parade of 6,000 schoolchildren watched by 20,000 spectators and 100,000 begonias placed around the city; Queen Elizabeth II attended the second festival. Today the municipal collection is displayed every autumn in the Robert Clark Conservatory.

The Robert Clark Conservatory is a large modern conservatory. It belongs to the Central Gardens, the most ornamental part of the 40-hectare site, where it stands alongside the fernery, heritage-listed trees, the marble statue collection and garden beds replanted every year.

The building works as a floral exhibition hall rather than a permanent collection house: its beds are completely changed five times a year, and it closes from time to time for these changeovers and for maintenance. The plants on show are raised behind the scenes; the begonias, for instance, are grown on in unheated glasshouses before being installed for the season. The conservatory stands near the Robert Clark Horticultural Centre, which shares its name and is used for meetings and functions, and the lawn behind it is one of the gardens' favourite settings for wedding photographs.

The conservatory follows a calendar of five displays a year: hydrangeas, fuchsias and pelargoniums in summer; tuberous and non-tuberous begonias in autumn; chrysanthemums in May; cyclamen, cineraria and primula in winter; and schizanthus in spring.

The autumn display showcases the city's begonia collection, which the council describes as rare and world-renowned; its horticultural team grows thousands of begonias every year for the festival. The tubers spend the winter dry in vermiculite, are repotted around September or October and are then grown on in unheated glasshouses. Gardeners remove flowers and buds until four weeks before the festival, and each large flower is supported by a metal stake.

The conservatory stands in the Central Gardens of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens, on Wendouree Parade beside Lake Wendouree, about four kilometres from central Ballarat; Wendouree railway station is 1.1 km away. The highlight of the year is the Ballarat Begonia Festival, held in March over the Labour Day long weekend. As the conservatory closes during display changeovers, it is worth checking the calendar before a visit.

Volunteer guides from the Friends of Ballarat Botanical Gardens lead guided walks. Nearby, the memorial to former prisoners of war, the statuary pavilion, the avenue of prime ministers' busts, the tramway museum and the walk around the lake round off a visit.