Nowhere else in Canberra can you enjoy mild outdoor temperatures year-round and tread where David Attenborough, King Charles, Lady Gaga and even Costa have walked — the ambient rainforest gully at the Australian National Botanic Gardens.
The man who has dedicated 25 years to this oasis has just retired and horticulturalist Toby Golson has trialled hundreds of species to see what thrives and what doesn’t. It’s still a work-in-progress.
At 60, Toby’s calling it a day, and his legacy is a misty rainforest ecosystem that defies Canberra’s frosts and heatwaves — and Toby hasn’t used a single chemical.
When Toby took the rainforest on in 2000, there had been a succession of casual gardeners previously (apart from one gardener throughout the 70s/80s) because no-one wanted the job – there were no flowers, no diversity and the gully had steep, almost vertical, inclines.
But Toby, who had previously worked in tropical Papua New Guinea, happened to like it.
“They pointed me across the way and said, ‘Look after that,’” Toby said. “When I started, a lot of the things that were growing there were hardy plants that were planted because they grow in rainforests but are not exclusively rainforest plants. They’d done well but they crowded out everything else.”
So, for the first six years Toby was pruning and removing excess plants — no easy task when you’re amongst mud, leeches and ticks.
“The really steep bits of it I obviously have to use ladders to do pruning or weeding, you just have to be careful,” Toby said. “I’ve had a couple of slides where I’ve wondered where the bottom was. There’s actually not a lot of soil in that gully, it’s mainly conglomerate rock and it’s quite loose.”
Perhaps Toby’s most crucial role was maintaining the rainforest’s canopy, a vital shield against Canberra’s deadly frosts. The original canopy of eucalypts and acacias was either dying or falling over.
“That gave the rainforest the biggest boost because it took the frost away and it meant that we could grow a lot of things that people just didn’t think we were able to,” Toby said.
Some of the canopy trees will hopefully live for 200 or 300 years.
“It’s just starting out in many ways,” Toby said. “Some of the plants will only be tiny little plants when I die, that’s how slow they grow, so the timescales are really different to planning out your garden at home. One of the beauties of it is that it will never be finished and hopefully it’ll just keep getting added to as far as the richness of it goes.”
It’s not all toiling in mud though, Toby has had the dream job of collecting rare specimens from Norfolk Island and Queensland’s second-highest peak, Mount Bellenden Ker. Toby’s also established four threatened native macadamia species in the rainforest gully.
“If one of the legacies is to leave something of that ambience for visitors to appreciate, then I’ve done what I hoped I could achieve,” Toby said. “It’s certainly richer as far as species diversity, it’s a much more resilient system and hopefully that will continue. It’s still a young garden.”
When Toby started 25 years ago, his mentor said, “We’ll all be dust and this place will just be starting.”
“It gives you that humility to understand that you can’t control it, you can’t impose unrealistic expectations on it,” Toby said. “You’ve got to let nature do its thing and eventually, hopefully, it will.”
