What is tropicalia? It's a garden that looks tropical. Hawaiian landscape architect Richard C. Tongg explained in 1960, ‘developing gardens on the theme of “tropicalia”, [means] making gardens in the tropics look the part, instead of being pale copies of other styles’. So what makes a garden look tropical? Earlier in the 1930s, Richard Tongg with garden writer Loraine E. Kuck provided the first clues to defining tropical garden character – three essential characteristics. I have argued there are other telltales from my research into early Queensland garden history. A summary of the qualities that distinguish tropical garden or landscape character is offered here:

• • a lush jungle-like density of planting (‘massed, crowded effects’);

• • ‘the selection of large-leaved plants’ (macrophyll-type leaves typical in rainforests);

• • ‘the enveloping growth of great-leaved creepers scrambling up tree trunks’;

• • components of the ‘Exotic Aspect’ (especially tropical-flavour plants and materials with visually striking (unusual) forms, and the use of bold, bright colours) including:

  • ‐ certain iconic tropical species such as palms, bamboo, tropical fig trees, epiphytes (staghorn ferns, orchids, bird's nest ferns, etc.), and rainforest vines (lianes);

  • ‐ combining traditionally ecologically disparate species (e.g. pines and palms);

  • ‐ plant types that provide masses of colourful flowers and/or foliage (e.g. poinciana, jacaranda, acalypha, croton, etc.);

  • ‐ bold colour combinations (e.g. orange, hot pink and bluey-purple as in the flower of Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia reginae);

  • ‐ typical tropical shade gardening practices such as verandah, bush-house and fernery gardening; and,

• • possible components of the ‘Bizarre Aspect’ as found in Queensland, included garden ornaments such as rustic constructions using giant clamshells and/or coral-stone, whalebones as giant arches, and found objects (especially seaside flotsam/jetsam, such as glass buoys).

Brisbane has been relentlessly cleared since the first British soldiers and convicts set up at Redcliffe and then moved to the site we know as Brisbane today. As in other Australian colonies the new settlers were keen to grow crops and to exploit the timber both as a building material and later as a rich source of export income. While early explorers and botanists recorded the richness of the vegetation most new settlers saw the landscape as a resource to be exploited, not a pristine environment to be treated with respect.

The Acclimatisation Society Gardens are lost but there are surviving fragments in the present day Bowen Park and the old Exhibition Building gardens. There are some photos and Society records which survive in archives, but there are many tantalising, yet missing parts to the story. This paper attempts to reconstruct the story of an important aspect of early Brisbane's cultural history.

The bunya pine has a special meaning for Queenslanders, being endemic to the Bunya Mountains and Blackall Ranges in the South-East corner of the state, with a small stand in North Queensland. The bunya holds particular significance for local Indigenous peoples. They are bound to the tree through custodial rights and obligations and systems of traditional environmental knowledge that incorporate ‘classification …empirical observations of the local environment… [and] self-management that governs resource use’, built up through generations of interaction with the bunya forests. Indigenous groups celebrated their spiritual links to the bunya pine in large seasonal gatherings where they feasted on its edible nuts and performed ceremonies, adjudicated disputes and traded goods. The bunya's majestic height, striking unique silhouette, dark green foliage, unique botanical features and Indigenous associations held a fascination for colonial artists, natural scientists, entrepreneurs and gardeners. Over the years they assumed custodianship of the bunya pine, assimilating it into Western scientific, economic, legal, horticultural, environmental and symbolic systems, which replaced Indigenous custodial rights, obligations and knowledge. The spectacular bunya gatherings were mythologised in colonial writings as mystical, primeval ceremonies and barbaric rituals. Despite ‘fierce and actively hostile tribal resistance’ to colonisation of their lands, Indigenous groups were progressively driven out of the bunya forests. Empty landscapes left by the retreating forests – victims of timber felling and land clearing – came to symbolise the vanishing ceremonies and dwindling Aboriginal populations of South-East Queensland. While surviving Indigenous groups were swept into centralised reserves and settlements from the late nineteenth century, so too the bunya trees were cordoned off in 1908, for their own protection, in Queensland's second national park at the Bunya Mountains, where they stood ‘like the spirits of the departed original Queenslanders, mourning over the days which are forever gone’.

I am connected to a family nursery business that has been running for four generations. My links go back to the early 1890s when my great grandfather had a nursery at Upper Mt Gravatt. He then shifted to South Brisbane where he moved into floristry. The business, however, was destroyed in the flood of 1893. His daughter, my grandmother, married Tom Perrott who had started in a nursery business with a well known nurseryman in Brisbane called T. H. Woods. They established the shop in George Street. They were also in the florist business and, in 1919, they decided to buy a nursery at Herston, near Ballymore Park and the Royal Brisbane Hospital, which ran until 1963. In the meantime, they had bought another nursery at Enoggera in 1936 (which I now own), and ran the two nurseries simultaneously. At that time, the main part of the business was still floristry and they did quite well in the depression years. The nursery at Enoggera was a 20 acre dairy farm that had been purchased mainly for the purpose of growing flowers for the floral trade. We used to grow rows and rows of different annuals and creepers and anything we could plant to flower, including many camellias which are still there today. A team of women would arrive at 6 o'clock every morning to pick these flowers and prepare them for packaging and transporting to the floral room at Herston.

On 16 June 2002 a remarkable Australian, Harry Oakman, died. The author of thirteen books on tropical and subtropical gardening, he remains the most widely read gardener in Queensland and probably Australia. He was one of the early public horticulturalists, parks department manager, landscaper, planner with probably more public open space and recreation areas designed by him in the cities of Newcastle, Brisbane and Canberra than any other parks administrator.

Rockhampton is the principal city of Central Queensland. In the nineteenth century the city and the colony of Queensland were pursuing the policies of settlement, development and growth followed by the other colonies of Australia and in the British Empire.

The gardens at Gracemere homestead established by the Archer family in the mid nineteenth century represent an extant example of historical subtropical gardens in Queensland. They are, for this reason, highly significant gardens within the Queensland context. However, this paper sets out to describe and appreciate their form, not within this context, but as a unique statement of identity. The gardens at Gracemere can in one sense be seen as embodying a dialogue with the past – they are at this level a cultural artefact created consciously in emulation of the Archer family home, Tolderodden, in Norway, and consciously or unconsciously as an expression of nineteenth century European middle class notions of the genteel domestic garden. This proposition rests on notions theorized in the literature on landscape and memory/landscape and identity; that identity – personal, class, national – is often inextricably bound up with nostalgic memories or histories of a homeland landscape.

Ellis Rowan was Australia's most celebrated flower painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An emancipated woman far ahead of her time, she turned what her fellow Australian artists deemed a ‘genteel’ female pastime of flower painting into an adventurous and profitable career which took her all over the world. In a career spanning fifty years and ending with her death in 1922, she produced the phenomenal number of more than 3000 paintings, and succeeded in placing many of these in public collections. Rowan exhibited her work as far afield as London and New York and achieved acclaim at intercolonial and international exhibitions of art and industry (with the award of ten gold, fifteen silver and four bronze medals). Also a skilled writer and publicist, she recounted her travels in the popular press and in a book entitled A Flower-Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand, published in 1898. This paper focuses on the artist's work in Queensland, a favourite hunting ground, and on her association with the tropics which was an essential part of her mystique.

Paronella Park, near Innisfail in far north Queensland, is a 1930s pleasure garden of around five hectares on the old route of the Bruce Highway between Townsville and Cairns. The focus of the garden is the Mena Creek waterfalls close to the road crossing of Mena Creek. The garden stretches from the road eastwards along the north bank of the creek. The park is set in the sugarcane fields surrounding the South Johnstone Mill but the tropical planting within the garden has developed to a degree where this landscape setting in uniform cane fields is hard to believe.

My interest in The Oasis developed from research I have been pursuing into cultural icons in Brisbane: how they are defined and how they develop. I would suggest the development of ‘iconic’ status for any site is a construction of shared memory and is very much tied to place and identity. Over the fifty years of its existence, The Oasis, in the suburb of Sunnybank, was intimately integrated into the social fabric of Brisbane. It held its place in the affections of Brisbanites and of the many southern visitors who came to enjoy our winter sun. In these terms The Oasis and its tropical gardens became one of Brisbane's icons and, within the terms of our conference theme, an exemplar of ‘Tropical pleasures’.

The gardens of the two settlements in the Lamington National Park – Binna Burra and O'Reillys – are cultural landscapes in a much loved area of the Scenic Rim of Queensland's border with NSW. The concept of cultural landscapes in the World Heritage and national contexts was introduced at the 2002 Australian Garden History Society conference in Hobart. This paper examines the evolution of two gardens within a national park – one evolving from a farm and one designed to accompany a rainforest holiday centre – and the acceptance of cultural values in natural areas.

The myth of the ‘tropical garden’ probably originated with historical accounts of tropical rainforest. Charles Darwin, in 1822, described his first encounter with tropical rainforest thus: ‘Delight … is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest … the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration …’. About fifty years later, Isabella Bird wrote to her sister of her first impressions of Honolulu: ‘And beyond the reef and beyond the blue, nestling among cocoanut trees and bananas, umbrella trees and breadfruits, oranges, mangoes, hibiscus, algarroba [carob (Ceratonia siliqua)] and passion-flowers, almost hidden in the deep, dense greenery, was Honolulu’. These images of lushness, luxuriance, colour, warmth and the exotic carry on into the popular modern perception of the ‘tropical garden’.

The Queenslander garden is instantly recognisable both by those blessed with a Queensland birthright and by those who are newly arrived or perhaps making a brief visit to the state while on holiday. Since the proclamation of the State of Queensland in 1859 the Queensland domestic garden has undergone various and numerous changes. There have been changes in size, design and preferred plant species. There have been changes in the householder's perception, use and management of the garden. Importantly there has also been change in what constitutes the Queenslander house.

There are 450 accommodation facilities on the Gold Coast, including hotels, caravan parks, apartments, villas and resorts. This paper will focus on two distinctly different resorts – each has a distinct image and consequently the difference in the garden styles is vast. Palazzo Versace at Main Beach, on the northern end of the Gold Coast mainland tourist strip is the epitome of style. Palazzo Versace has been described as ‘a place of Renaissance splendour, elegance and ease – in a breathtaking location’. By contrast the eco-tourism resort of Couran Cove Island Resort, stretching from the ocean front to the Broadwater, is a gentle and relaxing kind of place, a haven from the energetic and glamorous, busy Gold Coast.

The Roma Street Parkland, completed in 2001, has already established itself as a destination venue for locals and visitors to Brisbane. It is the largest inner-city subtropical landscape project in a city centre to be developed in recent years. The Queensland Government's brief for the development of 16 hectares of inner-city land several minutes walk from the centre of the city, required that the Roma Street Parkland provides a high-level visitor attraction with the emphasis on horticulture and the environment.