ADELAIDE BOTANIC GARDENS: Palm House, In the City of Adelaide, South Australia

As you wander through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens you come across a glass monument to earlier times, when the Gardens' managers viewed the new world around them through older European eyes. And although it remains a curious and striking oddity today it was a sign of things to come.

"The interesting thing about it is that the base walls here are purely cosmetic . . . the actual pillars are the only importance in the structure of it . . . and all the glass hangs from that structure . . . so that in other words it's the first example of curtain architecture . . . a lot of the modern buildings today have outside glass . . . which is hung on curtains . . . this is the first of its type . . . and it came across in a prefabricated form."

Designed by Gustav Runge in Bremen Germany the Glass House was transported to South Australia in kit form and then and assembled in 1876 .

It was the brain child of another German Dr Richard Shomburgk, the Gardens' second director, who was determined to start the garden's palm collection and was convinced palms would struggle in Adelaide's climate, unless grown under glass.

The palms at either end of the glass house are conclusive proof that he was wrong.

"Now was it a bit of a folly by the second Director.... that he did bring it out? Did he just totally . . . didn't understand the climate here?"

"Well I suppose the fact that you think of all the things they did in those days . . . the starched collars . . . the multi layers of clothing. . . they very much were sort of basing their lifestyle around Europe . . . and I think they did not understand the climate . . . and the fact that Adelaide doesn't have the cold days that perhaps they would have experienced in Bremen. The other thing is that all Botanic Gardens of that era had palm houses . . . so it might have been a status symbol as well."

And it remains a status symbol to this day . . . the second oldest glasshouse in Australia and the only remaining example of its type in the world.

But having failed as a palm house . . . the directors were left with a dilemma. What next?

And so it became a fernery. But soon . . . the humidity generated in this tropical glass house took it's toll.

"Over a period of years it started to rust and that's why in the mid nineteen eighties it was closed to the public."

Now it's entered its third incarnation as a haven for arid land plants from a country with a very distant connection to Australia. These rather treacherous looking botanical creations are from Madagascar, an island off the south-east coast of Africa. About one hundred and fifty million year ago it like Australia was part of the super continent known as Gondwana. And that explains why some of the plants found here may look a little familiar.

But others are unique to Madagascar.

"John I must say some of them look very hostile."

"They are . .. because they come from this very harsh atmosphere they have to protect themselves . . . so what they actually have done is developed two types of leaves . . . they developed the ones that look rather like cactaceae . . . but I have to say they are not cacti . . . they've actually evolved in Madagascar . . . that they're actually endemic there . . . in other words these families are found nowhere else in the world . . . only in that part of Madagascar."

So in a German Glass House, in an Adelaide Garden there are throwbacks to prehistoric times. Plants of ferocious appearance and also stunning beauty.

There at the Palm House at the western end of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. It's open from 10am until four and is free. If you have any further questions please email info@postcards.sa.com.au