Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Botanical garden in Melbourne, Australia.

Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria is a botanical garden in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, covering 38 hectares on the south side of the Yarra River. It holds almost 50,000 individual plants of 8,500 species in thirty living collections, with trees, garden beds, lakes and lawns sloping down to the river. A low dark-metal bridge with closely spaced vertical balusters crosses a narrow water channel, and a white domed pavilion with smooth cylindrical columns stands behind dense foliage.

Charles La Trobe established these gardens in 1846 and transformed marshland into a scientific and recreational space for the growing colony of Melbourne. Over the following decades different directors shaped the site, with Ferdinand von Mueller expanding the botanical collection from 1857 and William Guilfoyle reshaping the terrain with curving paths and artificial mounds from 1873.

The gardens' cultural life includes the 1877 wedding of Sir Edmund Barton, Australia's first Prime Minister, to Jane Ross, held on the grounds. The State Botanical Collection, kept in the National Herbarium of Victoria, holds 1.5 million preserved plants, algae and fungi, the largest herbarium collection in Australia and wider Oceania, alongside Australia's most comprehensive botanical library.

Visitors can enter the grounds daily between 7:30 and 19:30 without an entrance fee, with several access points along Birdwood Avenue. Most paths are paved and suitable for wheelchairs, though some steeper sections and lawn areas are more difficult to navigate.

The grounds hold over 8,500 plant species, including rare specimens in specialized collections such as the Californian Garden and Guilfoyle's Volcano. The artificial volcano mound was built in the late 19th century and now serves as a viewpoint from which visitors can look across the entire site and parts of the Melbourne skyline.