Inside the Botanic Gardens
Needing some respite from the hustle and bustle of Adelaide festival events in the city centre? Why not take a wander across North Terrace and explore the cool haven inside Adelaide’s lush botanic garden dating back to 1857.
It’s been an action-packed few years for the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
The highlight was a spectacular Dave Chihuly glass exhibition that not only captured the imagination of 1.4 million visitors last year but also landed the garden a coveted Major Tourist Attraction state award.
Former Sydneysider Michael Harvey – who has been at the garden’s helm since 2021 – assures visitors can still see two remaining pieces of the striking works of glass art.
Benefactor Dr Pamela Wall has ensured the dazzling glass Glacier and Ice Lapis Chandelier from the exhibition is still hanging in the Palm House that dates back to the 1870s and houses a collection of endangered plants from Madagascar.
While another 40 local donors purchased the glass installation Jet and Crimson Fiori inside the Bicentennial Conservatory. A unique artwork crafted to represent SA’s striking, blood-red and black floral emblem, the Sturt’s Desert Pea.
On a warm summer day and surrounded by hundreds of tourists, Harvey tells how he is now looking forward to the state’s festival season drawing a new crop of visitors into the gardens with a Slingsby Theatre production as its centrepiece.
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A Concise Compendum of Wonder will be staged on the Plane Tree Lawn near the famed Moreton Bay fig tree walk that was planted some 150 years ago.
Today, Harvey, who has worked stints at the Natural History Museum in London and Australian National Maritime Museum, sports a bee stickpin purchased from a museum in France as he points out favourable spots for festive season visitors.
As an aside, it turns out the Adelaide Botanic Gardens and Herbarium director has quite the collection of natural-history themed pins ranging from a “beautiful flying fox” to the latest acquisition, a corpse flower from Kew Gardens.
It is a fitting adornment as we wander past the recently renovated Mediterranean gardens with its striking water feature and onto the Nelumbo Lotus pond that Harvey says will be a “dazzling spot of colour” during January.
Nearby, Harvey says the prehistoric Wollemi Pine with its lineage dating back to the time of the dinosaurs is worth a visit along with the chic and newly refurbished Botanic Lodge restaurant alongside the central lake.
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Harvey talks of interstate visitors travelling to Adelaide for a single night to savour the flavours of the garden’s upmarket Restaurant Botanic but says there are many other spots for festival goers to bring a more cost-effective picnic.
After four and a half years in the job there is still much enthusiasm as Harvey talks about continuing to grow one of the city’s most precious institutions.
When Harvey first started in the role he travelled from Sydney, stayed in COVID isolation and then took his first steps in the Adelaide gardens as director for an opening night of the Illuminate festival of lights.
A successful event he has inherited along with a 20-year masterplan, hundreds of Friends of the Botanic Gardens members and about 200 volunteers running tours and the site’s gift shops.
Harvey points out the number of volunteers has since grown to around 400.
And he also has the passionate backing of groups like the Dahlia Society SA, the Rose Society of SA, the Rare Fruit Society and numerous benefactors.
Harvey was elected chair of the Council of Heads of Australian Botanic Gardens in March 2024, and he hopes festival visitors garner an awareness of the organisation’s commitment to plant conservation and research.
“There’s scientific and conservation work going on with living specimens and often highly endangered seed conservation centres,” Harvey says, telling of Adelaide’s own Threatened Plant Seed Orchard.
Its Museum of Economic Botany is the last of its kind in the world with a permanent collection of plant specimens from across the globe dating back to the original display 130 years ago.
All, he assures, are well worth a visit for festival goers – but when it comes to a favourite spot Harvey shows little hesitation.
“I’ve got a particular fondness for the Australian forest near the Bicentennial Conservatory side of the garden; it’s a really quiet, shady, calm space, you could almost close your eyes and forget you are in the city,” he says.
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