[Intro] Sonic Snippets: from the Sonica Botanica archive

[Tim Entwisle]: There's always been a tension in Botanic Gardens between I suppose, the people that love Gardens just as a place to picnic or walk through – so a beautiful place – and those who see it as a place of learning.  
I actually think it's a bit of a false tension. Even looking at our first Directors, Ferdinand von Mueller and William Guilfoyle: one is a scientist, one is a landscape designer. That's a false tension, I think they both love plants. 
This tension that we sometimes see between picnicking or sitting under a tree and writing a poem versus reading the plant label or having a close look at the acorns and the hairs on a leaf or something, to me that's all part of that experience, I actually think it's what makes the Garden not just a regular garden in a way. A botanic garden has those many layers and often a person is drawn in – or somebody like myself – is drawn in because of the beauty initially. Then you start to see the stories behind the trees. So, I actually think it's something that makes botanic gardens very, very special and very different to any other place, possibly on earth: we’re different to a museum; different to a gallery; different to a park; different to a nature reserve.
You have all those elements together, so that cultural element, the scientific element, the sense of being in nature. You bring all that together in a Botanic Garden, and when it's buzzing, when you get that all right, that's actually more than the sum of the parts.