Banksia Festival is coming to Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne in the upcoming August.
Presented by the Cranbourne Friends of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (RBGV), the Banksia Festival celebrates Australian culture inspired by the plant genus Banksia.
The week-long festival runs from Saturday 16 August till Sunday 24 August at the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne.
It incorporates a series of presentations, walking tours and workshops based on the science of botany and botanic art and an exhibition of artworks featuring cultural interpretations of the genus in paintings, literature, gardening, glasswork, sewn craftwork, photographs, sculpture, basketry and floral art.
Exhibition entry will be free and open to the public on weekends during the festival, along with entry into the world-renowned Australian Garden, which is open nearly every day of the year.
The Opening Day (16 August) will feature three presentations in the Tarnuk Room at the Australian Gardens Visitor Centre.
A brief launch will be followed by a presentation by Professor David Cantrill from RBGV on his work on Fossil History of the Proteaceae based on work conducted in the Antarctic when he was based at Uppsala University in Sweden.
This will be followed by a presentation on Growing Banksias by Australia’s foremost authorities on this subject, Kevin and Kathy Collins, from South-west Western Australia. The final speaker after lunch will be author Dr. Inga Simpson, an award-winning nature writer from the South Coast of New South Wales, speaking about Banksias specifically and Australian nature generally in Australian literature and identity.
Inga will sell and sign books after her presentation.
Additionally, there will be a plant sale featuring some 600 Banksia plants, artworks, cards, prints, glasswork, sculptures, basketry, sewn craftwork and floral art pieces.
Tours of the back of house Special Collections will be available for the able-bodied. These collections are important to the history of the Cranbourne Gardens and were experimentally planted in the 1970s to test the site suitability.
They contain many unusual and outstanding specimens.
A walking tour of the Australian Garden Banksia collection has also been developed for the festival.
Bookings are needed for both the Special Collections visit and the Australian Garden tour as spaces are limited
The Amanda Louden banksia vase pictured will be raffled along with a framed Banksia coccinea print personally signed by the artist Celia Rosser and a framed high-resolution photograph of the Banksia serrata plant materials collected by Banks and Solander at Botany Bay in 1770 (later chosen as the lectotype).
Raffle will be drawn at 12.30pm on Sunday 24 August. Tickets at $5 or 5 for $20 are available at the venue.
Bookings for the presentations, tours and workshops are now open, and places are limited: cranbournefriends.tidyhq.com/public/schedule/events/71798-banksia-festival-2025
