FEATURE INTERVIEW
A champion of collaboration and conservation Rebecca Harcourt interviews John Arnott, Manager Horticulture at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria Cranbourne Gardens
John has been involved in public botanic gardens as a horticulturalist since 1980, is a founding member of BGANZ and is heavily involved with the Care for the Rare program. John Arnott. Credit: Amy Akers.
John, where does your passion for plants come from? Vegetable gardening as a kid! When I was five, we moved to Melbourne from Scotland and grew veggies like everyone else in 1960s Australia. I recall digging potatoes and marvelling at their magnificence coming out of the sandy soil. We lived in an old farmer’s cottage in suburban Frankston, with a huge garden with mature Morton Bay figs, gingkos and lemon scented gums. It was almost like an arboretum. I had an inherent curiosity about nature and then there was this rich physical environment. I think this is where my passion for plants and gardening comes from.
You started your career in a zoo. How did this affect your views on plants and horticulture? I started at the Melbourne Zoo in 1980 as a young apprentice gardener. It was an environmentally barren place, with pits, concrete bars and cages. It was barbaric, however, Melbourne Zoo and zoos around the world were re-imagining the zoo experience through the advent of naturalistic enclosures where the resident animals are displayed in curated exhibits that aim to both provide environmental enrichment opportunities alongside the creation of immersive ‘natural’ settings. By the late 1980s a whole new horticultural discipline emerged, called zoological horticulture. Previously horticulture and animal husbandry had been two separate units. Horticulture was about ornamentation, gardens and floral beds, lawns and amenity, while animal husbandry was about animals in cages. This zoological horticulture movement brought those two things together. In 1985, for the first time at the Melbourne Zoo, and possibly for the first time globally, the success of a zoo exhibit – the butterfly house − was contingent on horticulturists. 6
THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 57 SUMMER 2021
