When the Botanical Gardens Reserve was proclaimed in June 1870, it covered a hundred acres and had a frankly commercial purpose. This was an acclimatisation garden, a kind of agricultural laboratory where exotic species were planted to test what the tropics could yield. The early ground held cocoa, coffee, breadfruit, African oil palms, mangoes, even an acre of grape vines, alongside timber trees like mahogany, red cedar, and hoop pine. The hope was that some of these crops might seed whole industries. Most never did. But the testing left a remarkable legacy: a number of the hoop pines and black beans put in the ground in those first years are still standing, and may be the oldest cultivated specimens anywhere on the continent.

Running the place was a thankless job. The town council put up little funding and the gardens languished until trustees were appointed by the Queensland government. The first curator, William Anderson, took up the post in 1878 and lived on site in a cottage built for him, staying until he retired in 1934, fifty-six years later. He was given a garden to make but neither the money to buy plants nor much help to grow them. Anderson begged and bartered, accepting stock from sister gardens in Brisbane, Rockhampton, Melbourne, and Darwin, and from renowned plant collectors elsewhere in Queensland. He even charged the public for picnics and concerts to scrape together funds. Slowly, against the odds, a working botanic garden took shape on the dry plain.

A hundred acres proved impossible to defend in a growing city. Piece by piece the reserve was carved away for a cricket pitch, a grammar school, a gaol reserve, a bowling club, sports grounds and houses. By 1915 the gardens were down to thirty-five acres; by 1948, to ten, which is roughly what survives today. What remained, though, was the heart of it. In 1959 the council brought in landscape designer Alan Wilson to remake the grounds as a formal recreational park, and the gardens were renamed Queens Gardens in honour of Queen Elizabeth II. Wilson's layout, with its long axial path framing the view to Castle Hill, has been kept almost unchanged ever since, even after cyclones Althea and Yasi tore through and forced careful regrowth.

The garden's quietest century had one loud interruption. During the Second World War, when Townsville swelled into a vast Allied base, Queens Park served as a military camp for both Australian and American units. A transport and movements office, a company of American military police, and a stockade occupied the grounds from 1942 to 1945, the men first under canvas and later in demountable huts. Through it all the order went out to protect the great old trees, and they came through the war intact. That instinct, to shelter the living specimens even amid a global conflict, says something about how the place was valued. Today the gardens host weddings and festivals beneath those same trees, a banyan and a rain tree and the long black bean avenue, shade thrown by an experiment that outlived everyone who planted it.