Royal Botanic Garden Sydney
Historic harbourside garden on the site of the colony's first farm, home to a living fossil tree once thought extinct.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney traces the 1994 discovery of the Wollemi Pine, a tree species known only from sixty-million-year-old fossils, found alive by a park ranger in a hidden Blue Mountains gorge whose exact location is still kept secret. It follows how cuttings were brought here, to a garden that began as a failed 1788 colonial farm before Governor Macquarie set it aside in 1816, and planted as the first Wollemi Pine ever grown by human hands. Somewhere nearby stands a tree whose lineage predates this harbour by sixty million years.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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