Garden pyramid dedicated to cabbages and kings

Perhaps the apex isn’t precisely orientated to Earth’s north-south axis, or the base not proportional to its height, but somehow pyramid power eluded the intricate steel and glass greenhouse at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden

What was formerly the tropical centre at Sydney's Botanical Gardens ,including a Glass Pyramid,is closed for redevelopment.

Perhaps the apex isn’t precisely orientated to Earth’s north-south axis, or the base not proportional to its height, but somehow pyramid power eluded the intricate steel and glass greenhouse at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden.

Beset with issues since construction began in 1971, demolition of the garden’s pyramid will begin in the next two months. A curved $13 million biome will replace the pyramid on the lower terrace of an area cleared for a grand Garden Palace that housed the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, only to burn to the ground three years later.

The biome is scheduled to open by June, 2016, for the garden’s 200th anniversary.

Although it opened as the pseudo-scientific wonder of pyramid power — praised for preserving meat, keeping razor blades sharp, sweetening water and promoting plant growth — tropical plants housed in the garden pyramid failed to flourish without intensive care.

Criticised as allowing space for only one large plant surrounded by smaller specimens, the pyramid was difficult to heat, ventilate and cool.

Thought to be the only one of its kind when it opened as a temporary structure — though funds were raised to build two more pyramids nearby — the pyramid glasshouse does not comply with building regulations and was deemed unsafe.

Once displaying 500 species of tropical ferns, vines, ­orchids and bromeliads viewed from an elevated walkway, it was built from tinted glass toughened to withstand hail.

Now decorated with initials drawn on the grime-coated glass, pyramid exhibitions once included the suggestively titled Sex & Death: Orchids and Carnivorous Plants, hosted in March of 2009.

Launching a Great Pyramid Appeal in 1981 to raise $1 million, garden spokesman Ed Wilson described plans for two additional glasshouses, connected via an underground chamber. As Paris planned it’s own glasshouse above the Louvre Museum, Sydney’s glasshouse then housed “an enchanted forest of every shade and shape of green foliage. Splashes of brilliant colour from orchids and other tropical flowers fall from baskets, nestle in leaves, or rest beside a pool full of darting fish”.

Rising from the shores of Farm Cove, known as Woccanmagully to Eora people as First Fleet settlers struggled to establish a farm and vegetable patch in 1788, the 30ha Royal Botanic Garden displays more than a million plant specimens, some planted by newly arrived European colonists.

Governor Arthur Phillip planted the first European vegetables on land rising from a shallow bay between Bennelong Point and a point later named Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, for Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth. The garden’s foundation dates to the completion of Mrs Macquarie’s Rd, at 1pm on June 13, 1816, celebrated with five gallons of spirits provided to the overseer and his 10-man gang.

Three weeks later, Macquarie ordered punishment be “inflicted on some idle and profligate persons” using the garden, but added the orders were not meant to prohibit a “respectable class of inhabitants” from using the area.

Macquarie appointed Scots soldier Charles Fraser as colonial botanist and superintendent to create a “botanic garden” separate to the nearby governor’s kitchen garden.

Kew Gardens-trained botanist Allan Cunningham arrived from London in December, 1816, then in April 1817 joined John Oxley’s expedition to the Lachlan River marshes. Cunningham’s brother Richard served as garden superintendent from 1833 until he was clubbed to death on Thomas Mitchell’s expedition to the Bogan River in 1835.

Allan briefly accepted the post in 1837, resigning in ­disgust after complaining his job was chiefly “a mere cultivator of official cabbages and turnips” in the governor's kitchen garden.

The appointment of youthful Charles Moore in 1848, who remained in the post until 1896, heralded great changes for the garden.

After almost immediately imposing regulations to keep out “all persons of reputed bad character’’, Moore began a 30-year draining project to claim land in Farm Cove and he ­embraced plans to host an international exhibition.

The Sydney International Exhibition opened on September 17 in the sprawling Garden Palace, adjoining the Botanic Garden.

More than a million visitors passed through the 400m-long palace, which dominated the skyline with four towers and a spectacular wooden central dome.

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