This city botanic garden tour is eye-opening and mouth-watering

Tjimari Sanderson-Milera stops by the banksia plant. “The needle inside was used to sew kangaroo skins into a coat,” he says. “They’d use tendons to sew it together.”

Ordinarily, a stroll around the Adelaide Botanic Garden is pleasant. It’s a delightfully sprawly, but well-maintained, idyll off the city centre’s north-eastern corner. Tjimari’s job is to make that stroll genuinely fascinating, explaining what South Australia’s Indigenous people have used the plants and trees for over the centuries.

To an ignoramus who is ordinarily content to just look at the pretty gardens, Bookabee Australia’s Indigenous-slanted tour is a relentlessly interesting eye-opener. Yakka tree bark put into a fire creates a clean smoke that helps clear sinuses. Holes in the ribbon gums have been dug out by a witchetty – they have a “nutty, chicken-like taste”. And the leaves of the native ginger tree are good for wrapping up food.

One aspect that’s consistently surprising is that plants that are not edible can be used to get food anyway. The parapara tree, for instance, has no nutritional value. But it does have sticky pods that can be put in a bowl to lure in hungry reptiles and birds. The resin gets stuck in the bird’s wings, making it temporarily unable to fly and much easier to attack with a club.

“There’s an urban myth that this is where the person who invented the Post-It note got their inspiration,” says Tjimari. “In my head, it makes sense.”

There are also, apparently, two versions of the native pepperberry tree. The rounded leaf one is fine to use for flavouring, but the narrow leaf incarnation is poisonous. So it would be put in a water source from where animals are known to drink. “It makes the kangaroo dopey and easier to chase,” says Tjimari.

Using the plants of the Adelaide Botanic Garden shouldn’t be seen as a solely historic thing, however.

Restaurant Botanic inside the old rotunda is fully embracing its licence to forage in the garden. Since coming under new ownership in July 2021, Restaurant Botanic has aimed for the global top tier and succeeded. It was named Gourmet Traveller’s Australian restaurant of the year in September 2022, and the ingredients provided by the garden are critical to both its ethos and achievements.