AfterDark Delicious tours at Canberra's Botanic Gardens are a bush treat

Canberra's long summer evenings are perfect for an outdoor meal and a little walk through the garden. And that's what the Australian National Botanic Gardens wants people to get out and do this season. They also want them to try a taste of Australia's bush herbs and spices.

The gardens are hosting a series of AfterDark events – a night-time tour of the gardens through the rainforest gully and the lawns, and a dinner that features native flavours such as the pepperberry, the quandong and lemon myrtle. They're all paired with sparkling, white and red wines from Gallagher Wines, outside Hall.

It's a very pleasant way to spend an evening, out on the deck of the gardens' cafe with kangaroos feeding on the lawns below. Platters of food emerge regularly from the kitchen and winemaker Greg Gallagher gets up to talk about each of the four wines he's chosen for the evening. Outside, the hustle of a warm Friday night in Canberra is in full swing but the garden, blessed with its own microclimate, is breezy and cool.

The man behind the dinner is transplanted Irishman Harry Stevenson, the executive chef at the Hellenic Club, which runs the catering for the dinners. "I take a lot of traditional dishes and we pair them up with bush food that works," he says. One of the dishes on the menu – which is served canape style – is a spring roll filled with prawns and drizzled with a relish with Illawarra plums. "It's a really small plum but it's very tart, it's very bitter, so what you do with it is then you make a chutney so you're adding some standard plums, and then your vinegars and your sugars and the spices," he says. "It's a really light dish and that goes well with the sparkling white."

The second dish is gazpacho, with a bit of tabasco and vodka and the bush tomato. "On its own, to eat the bush tomato, I'm sorry but it's really, really disgusting," Stevenson says. "It's a tiny, tiny bush tomato but again, you combine it with fat and sugar and try to bring out the natural sugar."

So how does he work out what dishes go best with the bush foods? Stevenson says he draws heavily on the knowledge gained from 30 years as a chef. "You just pool every experience, every job," he says. "That, and Google." Stevenson remembers his first taste of a quandong. "Oh, no, no, no," he remembers, shaking his head in disgust. "You bite into a peach and it's sweet and the juice is running down your chin. You bite into one of these and it's chewy, they're dense, they're tart. But once you start cooking them, you make a sugar syrup, you infuse it with a vanilla pod and you drop it in like a dried fig, you infuse it and it starts taking on a different flavour. Once you've done that you can actually eat it on its own."

Each of the native flavours needs a little help to coax it out, or to settle it down. So for the quandong, one of Australia's best known native peaches, he's made a dipping sauce that's at once astringent and floral. It accompanies a set of simple rice paper rolls filled with shredded pork and vegetables. A tray of salmon en croute involves slices of baked baguette topped with thick rosettes of fish and a warm, spicy chilli jam. It's all sprinkled with a bush dukkah with pepperberry, dried thyme, lemon myrtle and sesame.

The dishes are also matched to wines chosen by Greg Gallagher. The sparkling duet, a mix of pinot noir and chardonnay, is clean and soft. The merlot, which is fairly heavy on cherry characters, is matched to squares of dense fruit bread topped with whipped goat's cheese and a jam made with pepperberry.

Afterwards, diners are parcelled up into groups and taken away on a tour through the gardens, beginning in the temperate rainforest gully, cleverly lit in gold, turquoise and peacock green and filled with ferns and lush greenery. In the last rays of sunset, the gardens are a particularly quiet oasis. The walk is gentle, barely taxing if you're in sensible shoes, and the sight of grazing roos and flocks of rabbits in the darkness is charming. It ends in the red centre garden, where trays of Lindsay and Edmunds chocolates are handed round with tiny plastic cups of a semillon botrytis. A pleasant evening all round.

Natasha Rudra was a guest of the Australian National Botanic Gardens.