Fitzroy Gardens

The Fitzroy Gardens are 26 hectares (64 acres) located on the southeastern edge of the Melbourne Central Business District in East Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The gardens are bounded by Clarendon Street, Albert Street, Lansdowne Street, and Wellington Parade with the Treasury Gardens across Lansdowne street to the west.

The gardens are one of the major Victorian era landscaped gardens in Australia and add to Melbourne's claim to being the garden city of Australia. Set within the gardens are:

• an ornamental lake
• kiosk and cafe
• Conservatory
• Cooks' Cottage - a house where James Cook reputedly spent some years of his childhood (the cottage was in England at that time).
• Sinclair’s Cottage (Visitor information)
• Model Tudor village
• Fountains and sculptures
• Band Pavilion
• the Rotunda
• the fairy tree

Horticulture

The most notable feature of the Gardens is the wonderful trees that have been used to line many of the pathways.

The gardens were initially designed by Clement Hodgkinson and planted by park gardener, James Sinclair, as a dense woodland with meandering avenues. The land originally had been swampy with a creek draining into the Yarra River. The creek was landscaped with ferns and 130 willows, but that did not stop it smelling foul from the sewage from the houses of East Melbourne. The creek was used for irrigation of the western side of the gardens for fifty years. In the early 1900s the creek water substantially improved when sewerage mains were installed to...
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