Professional Networks
Moving to Hortis: Cairns Botanic Garden shares their experience Dr Waheed Arshad, Botanical Scientist and Havard Ostgaard, CEO, Botanical Software Last year, BGANZ selected Hortis as the records management system of choice for the region’s botanic gardens. The aim was to provide members with a robust, reliable, secure and accessible solution that is optimised to meet the current and future needs of regional botanic gardens. Since then, Hortis has onboarded several gardens from Victoria and is now open to members across the rest of Australia and New Zealand, including Cairns Botanic Garden. From the
Waheed Arshad
Gondwanan Evolutionary Garden to boardwalks through palms, this Queensland oasis is renowned as one of the best collections of tropical plants in Australia. As the Hortis team continues to work with more BGANZ members, Waheed caught up with Dr Charles Clarke, Curator at Cairns Botanic Garden, to learn about his experience since adopting Hortis in April 2022.
Could you tell us about the plant records at Cairns Botanic Garden? ‘The collection here is quite outstanding, but it was never a very carefully catalogued collection. We’ve recently had the first accessions book of the gardens from the 1800s professionally restored, which has some amazing old records in it. However, it wasn’t until about the 1960s that Cairns formalised accession numbers – our first documented accession is actually 1960-0002!’
What type of plant records system were you looking for? ‘For some time, we’ve been looking for a system that is more modern, more intuitive, more interactive, that takes away our reliance on hand-written documents – something also that is cloud‑based and that any of our staff can use. This was where Hortis came into the equation. We were really looking for something that is flexible, something that we can easily interrogate and get information out of whenever we need it – and without having to be software engineers in order to do it.’
THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 58 Winter 2022
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