Entries about royal botanical gardens sydney

The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney is a major botanical garden located in the heart of the city.

Opened in 1816, the garden is the oldest scientific institution in Australia and one of the most important historic botanical institutions in the world.

Its stunning position on Sydney Harbour and immediately adjacent to the Sydney CBD, the Sydney Opera House and the large public parklands of The Domain ensure it is one of the most visited attraction in Sydney.

The gardens occupy 30 hectares (74 acres)

Ficus macrophylla - the most remarkable characteristic of this plant is it's lack of a single trunk.

Instead, it has 10 or more trunks, each having arisen from an aerial root.

In 1882 it was recorded that the largest of the old trees like this covered an area of about 1 hectare!

A single rose from the Rose Garden

The Lake

The lake contains Australian native freshwater eels, which colonise the ponds themselves. Even when the ponds are drained and refilled, the eels are back within weeks - staff have seen them squirming across the damp grass at night from the harbour!

Other wildlife includes plenty of Australian White Ibis

and the frst Kookaburra I've seen since Tasmania!!

Some of the statues include the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, donated by Philip Geeves, historian, author and broadcaster

a Nymph

and the Girl & Boy

A gunman and his dogs

Mare and Foal by Arthur Jacues Leduc (1848-1918)

Mrs Macquarie's Chair is an exposed sandstone rock cut into the shape of a bench, hand carved by convicts from sandstone in 1810 for Governor Macquarie's wife Elizabeth. It is on a peninsula named Mrs Macquarie's Point, and is part of the The Domain, near the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Mrs Macquarie was the wife of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Folklore has it that she used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour.

Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie's Road. That road was built between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House (now the Museum of Sydney) to Mrs Macquarie's Point. It was built on the instruction of Governor Macquarie for the benefit of his wife. There is no remaining evidence of the original road, other than a culvert over which the road ran.
The peninsula sits between the Garden Island peninsula to the east and Bennelong Point (where the Sydney Opera House resides) to the west. The chair itself faces north-east towards Fort Denison and the Pacific Ocean. The area around it on Mrs Macquarie's Point is a popular lookout position for the view to the north-west of the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge.