Robyn Williams: I wonder whether that's how Alan Carle and his wife Susan started over 35 years ago in far northern Queensland? Let's leap across Australia to the tropics where Alan and Peter Hadfield are waiting at the Botanical Ark.
Alan Carle: I'm the creator of the Botanical Ark which is a private ethnobotanical garden in tropical north Queensland. Our boundary is the Daintree National Park. This is the best place to grow tropical plants.
Peter Hadfield: When did you set this up and what was your objective when you started?
Alan Carle: We bought the property in 1982, and our goal there was to raise our family in a healthy lifestyle and have as minimal an impact on the planet as we could, but it has since grown into more of an educational aspect. So we've been on journeys, more than 100 trips to rainforest countries all around the world, and subsequently got interested in their medicinal plants, their fibres, dyes, oils, resins, waxes, all the useful plants that indigenous people mainly grow or harvest in the rain forests around the world.
Peter Hadfield: Was there any problem getting that through customs? They are very strict on what can be brought in.
Alan Carle: To the best of my knowledge, we have the only government registered quarantine plant introduction premise in the north of Brisbane, in the whole country. And so it's a very onerous and costly exercise that we engage in, but we take quarantine extremely seriously.
I guess one of our taglines is 'plants and people, conservation through understanding'. If you can't relate conservation to people, you've missed the point and you've lost 95% of the people or even more. And so our garden, with its useful plants that people can relate to, is our tool to provide them with a greater understanding, because most people don't realise they have direct connections with the rainforest every day of their lives.
Peter Hadfield: There is such a variety here. We are walking along the path and the variety of different plants is quite amazing.
Alan Carle: Okay, well, 25 years ago the half-an-acre we are standing in had six rows of fruit trees. And so we used our original six rows of fruit trees to provide the wind and shade detection to start our rainforest off. And so here we are now, we are in trees which are up to 25 metres high, some of them are quite big, and we've just learned so much from it. And so whether there were six species of plants in half an acre, there is now over 250 species. Every one of them has at least one use for us as humans. Some produce beautiful fruits, but the sap from the young leaves cures skin fungal diseases, great cabinet timbers, it just goes on and on. So we have schoolchildren who come here.
Peter Hadfield: Now, to look at it, this is very, very lush. What sorts of trees are these here because they look very well-established.
