Public History, Current Climate Change and the Possible Future of Australia’s Botanic Gardens

Can we justify maintaining water-intensive botanical gardens in an era of climate change and rising water prices?

Perhaps such gardens are no longer adapted to Australia’s changing climate – if they ever were.

It is uncomplicated to argue that Australia’s botanical gardens are remnants of an empire full of European plants, an increasingly disturbing reminder of British colonisation.

But gardens and their gardeners are not immobile. They are internally changing entities.

Low story

Most Australian botanic gardens were established in the 19th century, the first of these being the garden at Sydney Domain established around 1816.

The earliest gardens served many functions.

These were food gardens. They were test gardens, used to determine the suitability of crops and vegetables brought from Europe and other colonies.

Nostalgia, European ideas of beauty and a desire to test introduced varieties meant that the botanical gardens were planted with trees familiar to British visitors. Oaks, elms and conifers were planted, as well as species of flowers and shrubs naturalised in British private and public gardens.

As part of their acclimatisation, settlers were given plants and trees to make the Australian landscape more familiar and ‘productive’.

Botanic gardens have also reversed this trend by collecting, growing and distributing internationally native Australian plants identified as potentially useful or handsome.

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Read more: Friday Essay: The Forgotten German Botanist Who Brought 200,000 Australian Plants to Europe

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At the end and the most controversialthese were public spaces.

Australian public gardens drew from then new ideas from European social reformers and progressive politicians. These gardens were seen as providing fit air for citizens of increasingly crowded cities. They were also built on older ideas about the commons and providing shared public space for recreation for the poorer classes.

These different uses sometimes conflicted with each other. Ferdinand Mueller, director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, was you could say that it has been moved from his role, as his vision for the garden was an educational botanical nursery. Public demand shifted towards a desire for a more aesthetic and useful garden.

In the face of the climate crisis

Providing trees and ornamental plants with water from very different climates has always been a problem in these gardens.

Already in 1885, Richard Schomburgk served as director of the Adelaide Botanical Gardens he told Nature about the drought that hit the city and the drastic effect it had “on many of the trees and shrubs in the Botanical Gardens, native to colder countries.”

As the climate changes, droughts, changing water tables and uncertainty about climate change are bringing the plight of these thirsty trees to the forefront, and some died.

Geelong Botanic Gardens founded in 1851. give an example water requirements and work done to preserve historic trees, using wastewater to maintain these plantings. The garden now also has a “21st Century Garden” focused on sustainability, featuring hardy native species including acacias, eremophiliasalt bushes and grasses.

Today’s botanical gardens continue to function as test gardens and are currently important places for research on global climate change. They show what not to plant, but also that not all introduced plants are unsuitable for Australian conditions.

Adelaide Botanic Gardens offers a guide to choosing plants where residents can check whether a particular plant is suitable for local conditions.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne have rose display “ready for climate conditions”a up-to-date take on the decimated collection of rose species that adapts exotic plantings to climate change without throwing the baby out with (as much) water.

Some European, Mediterranean, North and South American plants are ideally adapted to the Australian climate or are hardy enough to adapt to changes such as increased drying and heat in many areas, and the possibility of increased humidity in formerly deserted zones.

Colonial monuments

There was The latest trend to erase all traces of our colonial past.

Do the best lessons come from removing colonial monuments or rewriting their meaning? Uprooting giant trees and exotic gardens or using them to demonstrate and examine the assumptions and errors of the past, and to design the future?

Various horticultural exhibitions, such as a traveling exhibition Garden Variety Photography Exhibitiondo the latter by foregrounding the problematic history and future possibilities of a given space.

Many gardens now also include Indigenous recognition and content: heritage walks, tours and talks led by indigenous people, aimed at revealing the long history, names and uses of local plants that have subverted their colonial position.

Changing landscapes

Botanic gardens in Australia have changed greatly over the last 200 years.

Botanical gardens They are adapting to climate change by replacing dying and stressed trees and old-fashioned gardens with more resilient varieties and up-to-date opportunities, protecting endangered species and acting as a testing ground for the effects of climate change.

For decades, state and national gardens such as Western Australia Botanic Gardens and regional gardens such as Mildura Inland Botanical Gardens native, indigenous or atmospheric gardens have been installed as well as, or instead of, time-honored European heritage styles.

The Botanic Gardens in Australia and Up-to-date Zealand offer landscape succession toolkit:a guide to identifying what is doomed, what is most in need of protection, and what adaptations are most imperative for our botanical gardens of the future.

Finally, we do not need to remove the non-frost-resistant trees introduced to the market: climate change will gradually remove them for us.