Gardens
First set aside in Colonel William Light's city plan for Adelaide in 1838, it wasn't until 1854, after a public appeal to Governor Sir Henry Young that gardens were established at the current location. They were founded the following year and officially opened in 1857. The garden's design was influenced by the Royal Gardens at Kew, England and Versailles, France.
One of the garden's nineteenth-century directors was the botanist Dr Richard Moritz Schomburgk, brother to the German naturalist Robert Hermann Schomburgk. He was a major advocate for the establishment of forest reserves in the increasingly denuded South Australian countryside. Dr Schomburgk's successor, Dr M. W. Holtze I.S.O., did much to make the gardens more attractive to the general public.
Amongst other scientific and educational displays of native and international horticulture, the gardens hold one of the earliest propagated specimens of the Wollemi Pine tree, which was discovered as recently as 1994.
Read more about this topic: Adelaide Botanic Garden
Famous quotes containing the word gardens:
“Have We not made the earth as a cradle and the mountains as pegs? And We created you in pairs, and We appointed your sleep for a rest; and We appointed night for a garment, and We appointed day for a livelihood. And We have built above you seven strong ones, and We appointed a blazing lamp and have sent down out of the rain-clouds water cascading that We may bring forth thereby grain and plants, and gardens luxuriant.”
—Qur’An. “The Tiding,” 78:6-16, trans. by Arthur J. Arberry (1955)
“The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If I could put my woods in song,
And tell what’s there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)