Brisbane City Botanic Gardens

Wow, so this place, the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, it's pretty incredible when you think about its history. It's right here on Gardens Point, bordered by the Brisbane River, Alice Street, George Street, and even Parliament House and the Queensland University of Technology campus.

It actually started way back in 1825 as a farm for the Moreton Bay penal settlement, with convicts planting food crops to feed the colony. Then, in 1828, Charles Fraser, the NSW Colonial Botanist, surveyed this spot as the site for a public garden.

A big turning point was in 1855 when Walter Hill became the curator. He was here until 1881 and really got things going with active planting and experiments. Some of the oldest trees here were actually the first of their kind planted in Australia because of his work trying to get plants to adapt to the climate. He was all about finding plants with commercial value, testing things like mango, pawpaw, ginger, and even tobacco and coffee. Get this, the world's first cultivated macadamia nut tree was planted by him in 1858! He also helped John Buhot with sugar cane, leading to the first granulated sugar in Queensland in 1862. There's even a cairn marking where that sugar cane was grown. And the first jacaranda tree in Australia? Planted here in 1864, which is pretty cool considering how many you see around Brisbane now.

By 1866, Hill had expanded the gardens quite a bit. There was also the Queen's Park area along Alice Street, which was a separate park and sporting field. They even had a fancy stone and iron fence around Queen's Park built in 1865-66 using stone from an old gaol. You can still see some of the trees he planted, like avenues of bunya pines and Cook pines, and some fig trees from the 1870s.

It's been a public park and recreational spot since the early 1840s, and it's amazing that it's kept its original land area and use all this time. They even installed underground electricity in 1907. In 1916, the original Botanic Gardens, the Domain, and Queen's Park were all combined, making it about 20 hectares, or 49 acres, which is what we see today. The old curator's cottage, built for John Frederick Bailey who was curator from 1905 to 1917, is actually a cafe now, which is a nice touch.

It's had its challenges, like being flooded nine times between 1870 and 2011, which led to the new botanic gardens at Mount Coot-tha. But even with that, this place is still a premier public park and recreational spot for Brisbane. It really is the most significant non-Aboriginal cultural landscape in Queensland, with such a long, continuous horticultural history.