If you want a garden with a rolled-gold pedigree, look no further than Castlemaine.

Registered on both the National Estate and the Victorian Heritage Register, the Castlemaine Botanical Gardens are home to several magnificent specimens, listed on the National Trust’s Register of Significant Trees.

One of these trees is an English Oak (Quercus robur). It  was planted on May 26, 1863 to celebrate the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, making it the oldest planted tree in the gardens.

Another, the Soledad Pine (Pinus torreyana) grows in only two small areas: on Santa Rosa Island and on the San Diego coast in the US.

The Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa bignonioides) is the largest example of its kind in Victoria and possibly in Australia.

Planted in the 1870s, the gardens’ group of Weeping Elms (Ulmus glabra ‘Camperdownii’) is believed to have been supplied by Thomas Lang, a Ballarat nurseryman whose passionate expertise in his field was legendary; in a 12 year period, he imported a million plants into the colony. 

There are more rare and beautiful trees, all of them listed on a notice board, with their positions shown on a map, near the imposing ironwork entrance gates.

While many of the plants and trees found in the gardens were grown from seeds and cuttings supplied by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller – botanical royalty of his day – some were supplied by the Sydney and the Geelong Botanic Gardens.

The first curator of the gardens, Philip Doran, once worked as an apprentice under Joseph Paxton in the gardens of Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, England. The designer of those gardeners was none other than Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Philip Doran’s vision for the gardens was along the same lines as those of Capability Brown’s: a designed landscape that included a sweeping drive, a peaceful lake, lavish plantings of oaks and elms and a variety of rare and beautiful trees.

When appointed by the Castlemaine Borough Council in 1866, Philip Doran had a hard row to hoe. Six years earlier, 25 hectares of land, next to Barkers Creek, had been set aside for the gardens. But this was no ordinary plot of dirt.

Having been ravaged by hoards of gold-hungry prospectors, the conversion of the destroyed landscape must have seemed an almost overwhelming task. With true Victorian grit, Philip Doran succeeded brilliantly.

Forty-seven years later Doran was still in the job when, at the age of 83, he died. The gardens’ design is essentially the same now as it was then.

Why the burghers of Castlemaine allowed an industrial area to spread around the beautiful gardens is beyond me. I can only guess that the far-sighted vision of Philip Doran and his contemporaries was not an attribute shared by subsequent generations.