This is the ground of the colony's first farm, and the crop failed: nine acres of corn reported in June 1788, planted in the wrong season, in poor soil, and eaten by rats. The garden that followed in 1816 is the oldest in Australia — a claim Tasmania's own botanical gardens concede by describing themselves as the second. Two things older accounts promise are no longer there. The flying-foxes were deliberately driven out of the trees in June 2012 and have not come back, and the Tropical Centre's pyramid glasshouse was demolished in 2015.
Cadi, and the farm that failed
The land is Cadi, and the Gadigal are its Traditional Custodians — the name means the people of Cadi, and Cadi itself is taken from the grass tree, whose shafts and resin made spears. The Gadigal are part of the wider Eora, and the garden's own account estimates about a hundred Gadigal people among twenty-nine communities around Sydney at the time of colonisation.
What the British did with the ground is the garden's best fact and no older account of it mentions it. Governor Phillip set this land aside for the first European farm in Australia. By June 1788 he reported nine acres of corn; by that September twenty acres had been cleared, taking out eucalypts, angophora and banksia that had stood for centuries. The crop failed — the wrong season, poor soil, and rats.
The First Nations precinct named Cadi Jam Ora, "I am in Cadi", opened in 2001, and in 2026 it was renewed as a Gadigal Story Journey, co-designed with Traditional Descendants, Elders and knowledge holders and guided by Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor and Uncle Dean Kelly, under a state revitalisation programme.
1816, and the oldest in Australia
The garden dates from 1816, the day traditionally observed being 13 June, and it calls itself Australia's oldest botanic garden and oldest living scientific institution.
That claim is unusually well supported, because the obvious rival concedes it: the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, founded in 1818, describes itself on its own government's pages as the second oldest botanical gardens in Australia, the older being this one. A rival state agency giving way is worth more than any amount of self-description.
Its bicentenary fell in 2016, and The Calyx was opened to mark it.
What it is called, and what runs it
The name is singular: the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. The organisation around it operates as Botanic Gardens of Sydney, which is a registered business name rather than a new body — the legal entity remains the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, constituted under the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust Act 1980. No statutory renaming has taken place, and the amending bill of 2024 renamed nothing; it dealt with land vesting and with lease and licence terms. The date the operating name was adopted is not published anywhere.
The Trust runs four places: this garden, The Domain Sydney, the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan and the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah, together with the Australian Institute of Botanical Science. Centennial Parklands is not among them, despite being frequently lumped in.
The garden is 30 hectares and The Domain 34; the heritage register gives the garden as 29. The Domain is a separate place in the same Trust and the same heritage listing — the register item is "The Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain", database number 5045297, and it is on the State Heritage Register, the usually cited entry being item 01070 from April 1999.
The chief executive is Simon Duffy AM, who began on 3 June 2024 after twenty-seven years at Taronga, succeeding Denise Ora. There are seven trustees, appointed by the Governor on the minister's recommendation, chaired by Richard Nunn. Note that the Act as originally made provided for five.
The flying-foxes, which are gone
Older accounts send visitors to look for grey-headed flying-foxes hanging in the trees by the lake. They are not there, and their removal was deliberate.
The dispersal began on 4 June 2012, using noise and lights before dawn and at sunset, and the main relocation was complete within ten days. Passive measures have continued ever since to stop the camp re-establishing, the last recorded use being August 2024, and the garden's most recent statutory compliance report records no flying-fox observations at all in its reporting period and no new colonies. The work is done under a Commonwealth approval effective from 13 May 2010 and a state licence issued in March 2019, both running to 2039, with compliance reported annually.
Press accounts giving 2013 as the year they left disagree with the garden's own reports, which should be preferred. Where the animals went is not published.
The Tropical Centre, which is also gone
The Tropical Centre was two glasshouses, and the name has been retired.
The pyramid — built in 1970 and 1971, opened in 1972, and described in the heritage record as the first of its kind in the world — was demolished in 2015. The arc, by Ken Woolley and completed in the late 1980s, was kept and refurbished, and The Calyx was grafted onto its base.
The Calyx opened in June 2016 for the bicentenary and is the garden's horticultural display house, open daily from ten to four with entry by donation. Its nearest gate is Morshead Fountain, or the Woolloomooloo and Government House gates for accessible entry.
The Fernery, which is still there
Built in 1993 from recycled sandstone of the 1820s under a slatted roof, and holding more than 350 species of ferns, mosses, club mosses and their relatives — among them the giant fern Angiopteris evecta, whose fronds reach six metres, staghorns, understorey orchids and begonias, a purple butterwort, a nurse log and a hidden pond.
Three buildings, and what they are actually for
All three named in older accounts are now hire venues rather than displays, which changes what a visitor should expect of them.
Palm House dates from 1876 and the garden calls it the oldest glasshouse in New South Wales, which is its own claim and not independently confirmed. The qualification older accounts miss is that little of it is 1876 fabric: a new superstructure by George McRae was completed in 1912, and the building was reconstructed to its 1912 form in 1992 and 1993. It takes up to a hundred and twenty people, hired empty. Its nearest lavatories are about a hundred metres away.
Lion Gate Lodge — singular Lion, not Lions — is a Victorian sandstone building of 1878, upgraded along with three other lodges in 2017. It has a private cottage garden, a permanent awning and a paved courtyard; it does not house a landscaped garden for visitors to wander into.
The Maiden Theatre is indoors, entered from Mrs Macquaries Road — a Victorian-era room with heritage floors, polished timber and presentation screens, in a building the garden dates to the turn of the twentieth century and since restored. It seats up to a hundred and twenty and is used mostly for daytime business events. There is no train to take there, and the turn-of-the-century date belongs to the building rather than to a courtyard. Whether it is named for the botanist Joseph Henry Maiden, once a director here, is not stated by any official source, and there is a separate Maiden Pavilion elsewhere in the garden.
On the subject of the train: a trackless tourist train did once run, and it appears nowhere on the garden's current pages — no date for its ending could be found. What exists instead is a charged private buggy tour on selected Fridays, a complimentary buggy for visitors with accessibility needs at The Calyx, daily guided walks, a native plants walk on Mondays, a twilight tour on selected Wednesdays and a glasshouse tour twice a month. One trap: "Garden Explorer" is not a vehicle — it is the garden's online plant-collection map and self-guided walking tool.
The titan arum
The garden's own wording is the correct one, and it is not the one in circulation. Amorphophallus titanum produces the largest unbranched inflorescence of any plant in the world — an inflorescence, with a spadix and a spathe, not a single flower. The garden never calls it the largest flower.
It has several. "Putricia" formed a flower in late December 2024 and bloomed in January 2025, passing 170 centimetres by the middle of the month, and tens of thousands of people queued to see it. Two clones, named Baby Stink and Stinkerella, bloomed later in 2025; they belong to a collection of four, and seeds from a Belgian specimen have partly sprouted. Putricia is now in leaf, over five metres tall, and will stay in that cycle until she flowers again.
Growth of up to ten centimetres a day is right. The flowering lasts twenty-four to forty-eight hours, or up to about four days if it is not pollinated. Two figures in older accounts are unsupported and should go: the seven years before flowering, where the garden says only that a corm takes several years to store enough energy; and the tuber being three hundred times the size of a potato, for which there is no source at all. The old line that a growth rate of ten centimetres a day means a shorter wait is also a non-sequitur, since the rate has nothing to do with years to maturity.
The Wollemi pine
Discovered in 1994 by David Noble, an off-duty national parks officer canyoning in Wollemi National Park. Wollemia nobilis had been known only from fossils, which is what lies behind the "dinosaur tree" framing.
The population figure in older accounts is wrong, and low. There are 46 adults and 43 juveniles — eighty-nine trees — in four closely grouped stands, which is the entire known wild population. It is critically endangered.
The "locked away" story is a garbling of something real. It is the wild site that is secret, not the garden's specimens — a secluded canyon within the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, declared an asset of intergenerational significance, kept quiet chiefly because visitors risk introducing disease. The garden's own role is a genetically diverse living collection at Mount Annan, seed banking, a back-up collection planted at Mount Tomah on the thirtieth anniversary in 2024, trees distributed to gardens in Britain, Ireland, Europe and the United States, and two translocated populations established in Wollemi National Park in 2019, now totalling over 835 saplings.
The herbarium, which moved out
The National Herbarium of New South Wales is no longer here. After almost a hundred and seventy years on this ground it moved to the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan, where a new building was unveiled on 6 April 2022, on the first anniversary of the Australian Institute of Botanical Science. It holds over a million specimens with about eight thousand added a year, and the move involved photographing every specimen at high resolution — described as the largest herbarium imaging project in the southern hemisphere — on a state investment of sixty million dollars announced in 2018. Its form was drawn from the waratah seed pod.
In the garden, the Robert Brown Building, put up in 1982 as the herbarium, no longer serves that purpose. The earlier herbarium buildings were a single-storey structure of 1878 and 1879 and a replacement of 1899 to which Walter Liberty Vernon added a second storey, the National Herbarium opening formally in 1901.
How many plants, and which birds
The figure of seven thousand species is not one the garden publishes, and its own numbers do not agree with each other. The front-of-house figure is more than 27,000 plants; the most recent annual report gives more than 4,500 species; a third page offers a count across all four sites that contradicts itself. The first two can be relied on, with attribution; the third cannot.
On birds there is a trap worth naming. The figure of about a hundred and ninety bird species, and the long annotated bird lists, belong to Mount Annan and not to this garden. For this garden the only official list is a wildlife reporting form, framed around nuisance rather than delight, and it names the Australian white ibis, kookaburra, Australian magpie, masked lapwing, noisy miner, Indian myna, brush turkey and eastern water dragon. Neither cockatoos nor rainbow lorikeets appear in anything official for this garden, so older accounts promising them are borrowing from somewhere else.
Visiting and access
Entry is free, bar specific ticketed events, and The Calyx is by donation. It opens every day of the year at seven in the morning and closes at sunset, which in practice means eight at night from November to February, half past seven in October, half past six in March, six in April and September, half past five in May and August, and five in June and July. It may close early in extreme weather.
Most areas are reachable by wheelchair or walker. A free wheelchair can be collected from reception on Mrs Macquaries Road on weekdays between ten and four, bookable by telephone, and the garden publishes an accessible pathways map for itself and The Domain. Mobility parking is near the Woolloomooloo Gate and outside the art gallery, and with a valid permit any available bay may be used at no charge, including on Mrs Macquaries Road and Hospital Road. Eight gates are accessible: Morshead Fountain, Woolloomooloo, Victoria Lodge, Yurong, Opera House, Queen Elizabeth II, Conservatorium and Government House. Accessible lavatories are at the visitor centre, Mare and Foal Lawn and The Calyx, with others at Rathborne Lodge, Lion Gate Lodge, the restaurant and the Palace Rose Garden — but the Maiden Theatre has none, and Palm House's are a hundred metres off. Assistance dogs are welcome; pets are not.
What is coming
One dated item, and it is a first. The Domain Gateway — a heritage precinct of former gatekeeper's cottage and horticultural workshop, including Domain Lodge, a sandstone cottage dating from 1835 — is to open to the public for the first time as a hospitality venue under a twenty-five-year agreement, made possible by the 2024 amendments to the Act and announced in January 2026. Works were to begin in 2026 and no opening date has been announced.
Otherwise the lawns of the Phillip Precinct in The Domain were relaid between May and late June 2026 with six weeks of turf establishment after, and nothing at all is announced for 2027 or 2028 — no anniversary, no works, no exhibition.
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