Tokai Arboretum
Colonial-era timber trial ground with pines, redwoods and eucalyptus from five continents.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Tokai Arboretum traces it back to 1885, when Joseph Storr Lister, the Cape Colony's Conservator of Forests, began planting over a thousand trees from India, Mexico, Australia, Algeria and California, not as a garden but as a trial balance sheet for the colony's timber-starved railways and mines. It follows convict labourers digging plot after plot, testing which foreign species could turn poor Cape Flats sand into profit, and Lister's later career founding a forestry school on this same ground. You'll hear which species won on this soil and which never paid their way. Look up at the redwoods towering over the path as you walk it.
This audio guide was created using AI.