Botanic Gardens

Botanic Gardens

Botany Bootcamp: a public program to combat plant blindness

By Dr. Megan Hirst and Georgia Warren

Botany Bootcamp helps put some spring in the step to give plant blindness the boot, and the mind and body a boost as participants power walk between the lush living plant collections at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

A global collection of Gondwanan flora in Tasmania

By Dr Tonia Cochran

The Inala Jurassic Garden is a privately-owned botanic garden located on South Bruny Island, south-eastern Tasmania. Its relatively remote location, on an ‘island off an island off an island’, is rather a fitting place for a garden which features living plant families whose ancestors thrived on the ancient Gondwana supercontinent before it split to form today’s southern land masses – quite the Jurassic Park, with its plant equivalent of dinosaurs that are still with us today.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

Introducing the Tasmanian Flora Entry Zone

By Chris Lang

The Tasmanian Native Section and adjacent areas have undergone substantial change in accordance with long held plans to redevelop Tasmanian flora displays through the northern region of the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. A significant landscaping effort, which commenced during September 2020, has resulted in the establishment of the Tasmanian Flora Entry Zone.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

Preventing plant pandemics

By Dr Brett Summerell

Plants, like us, are constantly challenged by a rapidly evolving array of disease-causing organisms that are spread around the world with increasing speed and frequency. Newly arrived pathogens can have devastating impacts on naïve plant species and can even dictate what plants can be grown, where plants can be grown and even if visitors can be allowed into an area.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

World class conservatory for the nation’s capital

By Peter Byron

The Ian Potter National Conservatory (Conservatory) is the first major development from the Australian National Botanic Gardens’ (ANBG) 20-year Master Plan, announced by the Australian Government in June 2015. The Conservatory will be a national and international showcase of some of Australia’s most beautiful and unusual tropical native flora.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

Wardian Cases, an Adelaide and South Australian perspective

By John Sandham

In the British summer of 1829, while undertaking the collection of a moth pupa into a sealed glass vial, Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868) observed that fern spores and grass seed, captured within the closed environment, could germinate and grow without any outside assistance.Continue reading

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Botanic Gardens

Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens showcases the life of ferns

By Dale Arvidsson –

Long before today’s online world created an insatiable desire for exotic and unusual indoor plants, pteridomania, a Victorian craze between the 1840s and 1890s, saw the desire to collect ferns in Britain and its colonies. Glass houses, conservatories and ‘stumparies’, naturalistic displays of felled trees and exposed roots often shrouded by hardy ferns, allowed the wealthy insatiable collectors to display ferns collected from around the globe.Continue reading

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