The Conservatory, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens

The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens were founded in 1818 as the Lieutenant-Governor's private garden on Hobart's Queens Domain, and are regarded as the second-oldest botanic garden in Australia after Sydney's. Public access was granted only on a limited basis between 1828 and 1834. In 1829 Sir George Arthur had a heated wall built there; Frederick William Newman became superintendent in 1845, and a comprehensive plan attributed to William Porden Kay, set in motion in 1856, laid out a parterre, promenade walks and an orchard.

The Conservatory was built in 1939. Its walls were raised with dressed sandstone blocks salvaged when parts of Hobart's old general hospital were demolished that same year, and its doors came from the Hobart store of Rundles the Jewellers: a building assembled from pieces of the city itself.

Management of the gardens passed to the state government in 1950; since 2002 they have been a state body governed by the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens Act. After more than eighty years of use, the conservatory closed for the first major restoration in its history, with reopening announced for spring 2026.

The single-storey building stands on walls of dressed sandstone blocks, a reused material that makes it read as a stone pavilion rather than a glass cage. Above the masonry runs a band of opaque, timber-framed windows. Painted timber trusses carry a hipped roof with a skillion section; before the current works it was clad in opaque polycarbonate sheeting. The doors, salvaged from the Rundles jewellery store, are another reused element.

The restoration under way includes a new roof and upgrades to the flooring, windows, doors, electrical systems and supporting structure. It is the first intervention on this scale since the building went up in 1939.

The conservatory holds 214 species, chosen from exotic plants that could not grow outdoors in Tasmania's cool climate. Its flower displays are changed with the seasons around a fountain, and the gardens present it as a quiet refuge for contemplation and relaxation; it is also a popular venue for weddings and other events.

It contrasts sharply with the Subantarctic Plant House, also in the gardens and described as the only one of its kind in the world. In that windowless concrete building, cold, fog and mist recreate the conditions of Macquarie Island for plants brought back from there, such as the fern Polystichum vestitum and Stilbocarpa polaris, the Macquarie Island cabbage, alongside cushion plants and mosses.

The conservatory stands in the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, which cover 14 hectares along Lower Domain Road on the Queens Domain. As its reopening after restoration was announced for spring 2026, it is wise to check on the gardens' website that it is accessible again. The conservatory itself takes little time, but the gardens deserve half a day.

A visit combines well with the Subantarctic Plant House, the Japanese Garden created in 1987, the French Memorial Fountain erected in 1972 and the heated wall built in 1829 under George Arthur, a survivor from the garden's first decades.