City Botanic Gardens

The City Botanic Gardens at Gardens Point are defined by their mature, dense avenues of weeping figs and bunya pines, which cast long shadows over walking paths that stretch toward the Brisbane River. This site began in eighteen twenty-five as a hard-labor penal farm where convicts grew corn and vegetables to keep the Moreton Bay prison colony from starving. Three years later, colonial botanist Charles Fraser selected the river bend for a public garden, setting into motion a continuous history of cultivation that has endured through floods and city growth for nearly two centuries.