Nature Hop

John Muir, the father of America's national parks, visited the wooded hills of South Australia more than a century ago. Tony Perrottet retraces bis botanical journey.

- Tony Perrottet

IN 1903, THE AMERICAN conservationist John Muir-legendary nature writer, founder of the Sierra Club, lover of sequoias, camping buddy of Teddy Roosevelt-set off on a botanical world tour or, as he called it, a "tree hunt." Then, as today, Australia was a dream destination for nature lovers. Muir's steamer paused at Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia, for only one day. But with his usual prodigious energy, the 65-year-old Muir who sported a long white beard and exuded an impish sense of humor-dashed to the city's Botanic Gardens, which was bursting with otherworldly Aussie flora. Muir was in raptures. From there, he wrote of gazing up at the thickly wooded Adelaide Hills to the city's east. "Wish I could have spent a week in them," he wrote wistfully.

Had he done so, Muir would have been astonished to discover three Californian sequoias growing on a regal private estate. The saplings had been planted a half-century earlier by an obsessive tree lover, Arthur Hardy, as part of an informal botanical exchange between the United States and Australia. In 2021, some 120 years after Muir's visit, a luxurious guesthouse opened next to the Hardys' mansion in the hills and was named Sequoia Lodge in honor of the Californian trio on its grounds.

As an Australian expat living in New York, I became fascinated by this eccentric tale. I wanted to make the trip that Muir couldn't and spend as much time as possible in the hills and wild countryside he'd glimpsed back in 1903. But rather than abide by Muir's notorious austerity (he was famous for his spartan diet), I would revel in the region's famed dining scene, mapping out a road trip that would combine gastronomy and even a little art with an outdoor regimen of bushwalking and roo-watching.