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Australian National Botanic Gardens

The Main Path · 8 stops

Walk the path

Start at the Visitor Centre and climb. This is the walk in the order you would actually meet it — out of the arid beds, up through the gully, onto the open lawns under the gums. Read it before you come, or on the bench at stop four.

Begin at stop one See it on the map

A multi-stemmed snow gum on an exposed subalpine slope, its smooth pale bark streaked cream and grey, standing above low heath with mountains behind.
Snow gum at the treeline — the bark renews itself every summer. Photo Sterry2607, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Eucalypt Lawn

Snow Gum

Eucalyptus pauciflora

  • Its bark peels away in long ribbons each summer, leaving streaks of cream, olive and grey. The tree is repainting itself, not dying.
  • Snow Gums are the last trees standing as you climb into the Australian Alps. Above them, nothing else that counts as a tree will grow.
  • The leaves hang vertically rather than flat. Edge-on to the midday sun, they lose far less water than a leaf held out like a palm.
Myrtaceae Flowers Nov–Jan
A hillside of wattle in full flower, dozens of shrubs carrying dense masses of bright gold blossom between grey-green eucalypts.
Wattle in flower. The gold is stamens, not petals. Photo James St. John, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Main Path, near the Rock Garden

Golden Wattle

Acacia pycnantha

  • Australia’s national floral emblem, formally proclaimed in 1988. Wattle Day falls on 1 September, roughly when this one is at its loudest.
  • Look closely and no petals are doing the work. The gold is stamens — dozens of tiny flowers packed into every puff.
  • What look like leaves are phyllodes: flattened leaf stalks doing a leaf’s job. Wattle seedlings start with true feathery leaves and give them up as they grow.
Fabaceae Flowers Jul–Nov
Two views of a banksia flower spike side by side: on the left a green-gold cylinder of tightly packed unopened florets, on the right the same spike opened into a shaggy mass of hundreds of individual golden flowers.
One spike, before and after opening: hundreds of flowers, not one. Photo JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Banksia Garden

Silver Banksia

Banksia marginata

  • The ‘cone’ is not a cone. It is hundreds of spent flowers fused into one woody head, each holding a follicle with seed inside.
  • In many banksias those follicles stay shut for years and only crack open after fire. The seed drops into ash, which is exactly the plan.
  • The genus carries Joseph Banks’ name, from the plants he and Daniel Solander collected on the Endeavour voyage of 1770.
Proteaceae Flowers Feb–Jun
A single crimson waratah flower head in open eucalypt woodland, the one spot of red among grey trunks and pale grass, visible from a long way off.
Telopea — “seen from afar”, and this is why. Photo Ian Sutton from Collinsville and Oberon, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Proteaceae displays

Waratah

Telopea speciosissima

  • Telopea comes from the Greek for ‘seen from afar’ — an unusually honest botanical name. A flowering waratah is visible across a gully.
  • One head is up to 250 individual flowers, ringed by red bracts that are leaves pretending to be petals.
  • It is the floral emblem of New South Wales, and it depends on honeyeaters rather than insects to move its pollen.
Proteaceae Flowers Sep–Nov
A soft tree fern in wet forest, its wide arching fronds backlit by sunlight coming through the canopy above.
Tree ferns hold the wet gullies, and grow a few centimetres a year. Photo brewbooks from near Seattle, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rainforest Gully

Soft Tree Fern

Dicksonia antarctica

  • The trunk is not wood. It is a dense column of the fern’s own roots, grown around the stem year after year, which is why it feels fibrous rather than hard.
  • Growth is measured in centimetres a year, so a tree fern at head height has been standing here longer than most of the people walking past it.
  • This gully is engineered. A misting system installed in a dry fold of Black Mountain in 1970 turned it into rainforest, and it is still noticeably cooler than the car park.
Dicksoniaceae Spores, not flowers
Sturt's desert pea trailing flat across bare red desert soil, scarlet flowers scattered over grey-green divided leaves.
Scarlet on red sand — the contrast is the plant's whole strategy. Photo Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Red Centre Garden

Sturt’s Desert Pea

Swainsona formosa

  • Each flower carries a black boss at its centre, and the whole thing sits against red sand — one of the sharpest colour contrasts in Australian flora.
  • It is South Australia’s floral emblem, and it germinates after desert rain rather than on any calendar.
  • This bed was built on Black Mountain with sand and rock brought in, so an arid-zone plant could be seen growing in a cool-climate city.
Fabaceae Flowers Sep–Dec
A kurrajong seed pod hanging from a twig, split open to show seeds packed inside a fibrous rust-coloured lining.
The pod, split. The seeds sit in hairs that have to be cleaned off. Photo Jules Verne Times Two, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Aboriginal Plant Use Trail

Kurrajong

Brachychiton populneus

  • Ngunnawal people know this tree as Gurradjong, and the Gardens’ own trail records it as a source of food, fibre and water.
  • The bark yields a strong fibre that was worked into string and rope for nets, fishing lines and dilly bags.
  • Its seeds sit inside a boat-shaped pod, packed in fine hairs that irritate skin. The hairs have to be cleaned off before the seed is any use.
Malvaceae Ngunnawal plant use →
The trunk of a paperbark beside still water, its bark lifting away in broad curling cream-and-grey papery sheets.
Paperbark, doing the thing it is named for. Photo Ethel Aardvark, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Paperbark Treehouse & Garden

Snow-in-summer

Melaleuca linariifolia

  • Ngunnawal people know this paperbark as Mudda. It is one of the plants recorded on the Gardens’ Aboriginal Plant Use Trail.
  • The bark comes away in soft papery sheets, layer on layer — a tree that produces sheet material as a by-product of growing.
  • In flower it goes so thoroughly white that the common name stops being poetic and becomes a plain description.
Myrtaceae Ngunnawal plant use →

End of the walk

That was eight of four thousand three hundred

The collection holds more than 4,300 species, and this walk touched eight of them. The rest are waiting on the actual path, which is the point.

Plan a visit Identify something you saw