The City Botanic Gardens (formerly the Brisbane Botanic Gardens) is a heritage-listed botanic garden on Alice Street, Brisbane City, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was also known as Queen's Park. It is located on Gardens Point in the Brisbane CBD and is bordered by the Brisbane River, Alice Street, George Street, Parliament House and Queensland University of Technology's Gardens Point campus. It was established in 1825 as a farm for the Moreton Bay penal settlement. The Gardens include Brisbane's most mature gardens, with many rare and unusual botanic species. In particular the Gardens feature a special collection of cycads, palms, figs and bamboo. The City Botanic Gardens was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 3 February 1997. The Queensland Heritage Register describes the Gardens as "the most significant, non-Aboriginal cultural landscape in Queensland, having a continuous horticultural history since 1828, without any significant loss of land area or change in use over that time. It remains the premier public park and recreational facility for the capital of Queensland, which role it has performed since the early 1840s." History Much of the present-day Botanic Gardens was surveyed and selected as the site for a public garden in 1828 by the NSW Colonial Botanist Charles Fraser, three years after the establishment of the Moreton Bay penal settlement at nearby North Quay, Brisbane. Originally the gardens were planted by convicts in 1825 with food crops to feed the prison colony. In 1855 a portion of several acres was declared a Botanic Reserve. In the same year Walter Hill was appointed as curator of the Botanic Reserve, a position he held until 1881. He began an active planting and experimental program. Some of the older trees planted in the Gardens were the first of their species to be planted in Australia, due to Hill's experiments to acclimatise plants. The experiments served practical outcomes. Plants with potential commercial value were tested in the gardens, first to see if they were viable, to determine what they needed for growth and if a profit could be made. Hill introduced mango, pawpaw, ginger, tamarind, mahogany, poinciana and jacaranda trees as well as tobacco, sugar, grape vines, wheat, tropical fruits, tea, coffee, spices and textile plants. He encouraged the work of the sugar pioneer John Buhot which culminated in the first production of granulated sugar in Queensland in April 1862. A cairn was erected at the site