8th Botanic Gardens Day 2023 –Inspirational Plants and People

8th Botanic Gardens Day 2023 –Inspirational Plants and People

Rebecca Harcourt, Admin and Comms Officer, BGANZ

Botanic Gardens ‘Month of May’

I hope you enjoyed the month as much as we did! Huge thanks to all the gardens, staff and volunteers who obviously put a lot of effort into this year’s events, both online and onsite. What an inspirational group of people you are!

A special thanks goes to our Botanic Gardens Day Ambassador Costa Georgiadis, who again hosted our four webinars every Thursday evening, visited Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens on their 20th birthday and phoned in to chat on the radio early on a Sunday morning! His passion and enthusiasm for botanic gardens is truly inspiring – as is his energy.

Costa Georgiadis and the gardens' architect Lawrie Smith at Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens.

Credit: Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens

We’d also like to thank our volunteers, Emma Simpkins, Kimberley Blythe, Helen McHugh and Karen Zeng, who helped us monitor our social media throughout the month.

I’d like to personally thank the people behind the scenes who helped me pull everything together for the month: John Arnott, Amalia McLaren-Brown, Helen McHugh, Brenden Moore, Alison Morgan and Tim Uebergang.

4th Botanic Gardens Seasol Plant Challenge

We are delighted to announce this year’s winners in the following three categories:

1. A year’s supply of Seasol for regional member gardens (including Friends groups) for their fantastic efforts onsite and/or online during the month of May goes to:

• Friends of Lismore Rainforest Botanic Gardens, NSW

• Friends of Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens, QLD

• Hunter Region Botanic Gardens, NSW

• Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens, QLD

• Pangarinda Botanic Gardens, SA

• Shoalhaven Heads Native Botanic Gardens, NSW

• Tondoon Botanic Gardens, QLD.

2. The mini prize pack winners, who answered Costa’s curly questions correctly at the end of the webinars, are:

• Leanne Terrington from Cockatoo, VIC

• Alexis Bardebes from Ormeau, QLD

• Jon Kingston from Stanmore, NSW

• Breanna Hill from Christchurch, New Zealand.

3. The winners of the $50 Seasol hampers for the best #plantchallenge individual (public) entries are:

• Belinda Burns, Stanhope, NSW

• Glenn Smith, Glen Alpine, NSW

• Yaz Boussoualim, Hilton, WA.

Glenn writes: This unusual flower from Western Australia is from Hakea petiolaris – Sea Urchin Hakea in the Australian Botanic gardens, Mount Annan. The flowers are just a little larger than a golf ball and grown directly on the stems between the leaves.

Credit: Glenn Smith

Belinda writes: Living in western Sydney suburbia, it’s nice to provide food for our native birds after vigorous land clearing. They look amazing styled in a contemporary garden. What the honeyeaters and lorikeets when in bloom enjoy a feast. You can’t go past Grevillea Excelsior.

Credit: Belinda Burns

Yaz writes: Did you know that there are over 360 species of grevillea? How many species you’ve seen so far?

Credit: Yaz Boussoualim

Webinars

Webinars hosted by Costa Georgiadis

We are hugely grateful to our webinar presenters and host, Costa Georgiadis. The webinars were very popular and the feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive.

To give you an idea of how popular they were, here are some numbers from Costa’s FaceBook page as we went to print!

Webinar 1. Bushfire recovery: through community, conservation and collaborations 4.7K views.

Webinar 2. The Ian Potter National Conservatory: a national showcase for tropical Australian native flora. 8.4K views.

Webinar 3. A botanical banquet – exploring our plant palate. 4K views.

Webinar 4. Healing and medicine using indigenous plants and knowledge. 5.9K views.

You can watch all these webinars on our YouTube channel here.

Webinars for industry professionals

A very successful online workshop was hosted by BCARM, the BGANZ Collections and Records Management group, It’s all about the plants! Botanic gardens and their plant collections. There were 57 attendees and so far, 148 people have watched it via our YouTube channel.

The Botanic Gardens Engagement Network (BGEN) also hosted an excellent webinar for those specialising in this area, Zippy’s Bush Kindy Kings Park – Big adventures for little nature lovers aged 3-5 years. This niche topic was reflected in the number of attendees (16).

You can watch both these webinars on our YouTube channel here.

Botanic Gardens Day on the radio!

Virginia Heywood, John Arnott and Clare Hart from Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, and Tex Moon from Dandenong Ranges Botanic Garden spent the morning of Botanic Gardens Day chatting to Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR on its Gardening Show.

L-R: Clare Hart, John Arnott, Virginia Heywood and Tex Moon at 3CR

They were joined by special guests Costa Georgiadis, Jill Grant from Friends of the Australian Botanic Gardens Shepparton, Tim Entwisle from Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and Kellee Reisinger from Geelong Botanic Gardens. It’s received some very nice feedback.

If you missed it live, you can listen to it here

Member garden events

Member gardens from every state and territory in Australia and from both islands in New Zealand celebrated Botanic Gardens Day in their own way, big and small – with events ranging from workshops to guided walks to forest bathing!

In some cases, the day serendipitously coincided with a garden’s birthday or anniversary. A selection of photos from the day are included at the end of this article. More photos from the day can be viewed on our website, https://www.bganz.org.au/

For those gardens whose events were not impacted by the weather (like Shepparton and Williamstown ☹), attendance was excellent. For example, Emerald Botanic Gardens, QLD, estimates it had around 1,000 visitors – not bad for its first Botanic Gardens Day celebration in a town of about 15,000 people!

Please email me at media@bganz.org.au with your estimate. This will help us promote the day to future potential partners.

Speaking of partners, a big thank you to our partner Seasol International for their fantastic support with the Botanic Gardens Seasol Plant Challenge 2023.

Lismore Regional Botanic Gardens

Local aboriginal elder Mick Roberts about to do his Welcome to Country on Botanic Gardens Day

Cutting the cake for the 10th anniversary of the Lismore Regional Botanic Gardens. From left: Life Member Rose Hand, who had the nursery in her own backyard for many years; Tracey Whitby, President Friends of Lismore Rainforest Botanic Gardens; Lismore City Mayor, Steve Krieg; Thelma James and Mick Roberts, Bundjalung elders; Life member Geoff Walker; Jenny Dowell, former Mayor of Lismore 10 years ago at the Official Opening and Friend LRBG for many years.

Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens

All credits to Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens

Gold Coast Regional Botanic Gardens

Credit all photos: Nikki Murphy

Cooktown Botanic Gardens

Botanic Gardens Day at Cooktown Botanic Gardens. Many family activities ranging from a botanical/plant information hunt and playing on the world’s only botanic garden cricket ground!

Credits: Peter Symes

Emerald Botanic Gardens

Credit: Central Highlands Regional Council

North Coast Regional Botanic Gardens

Thanks to Coffs Harbour Girl Guides for planting some beautiful swamp mahogany trees for our koalas! A very important part of our Botanic Gardens Day events, which included free rainforest tours, gold coin morning tea with a bush food flavour, tree plantings and exhibitions.

The lady in the photo on the left has the guide name “Banksia” and was involved in the early establishment of the garden as a young guide leader in the 1980s. This planting was one form of commemoration for the work of Alex and Cynthia Floyd, who were seminal in the establishment of the gardens.

Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens

Botanic Gardens Day was celebrated in style at the Maroochy Regional Bushland Botanic Gardens over the weekend with two guided walks on offer in the glorious sunshine, exploring the theme of ‘inspirational plants and people.’ On Saturday Malcolm shared the botanical stories associated with different eucalypt species, including the botanists who described them. Then on Sunday Elaine shifted the focus of these botanical stories towards banksias, macadamias, the bunya, and a number of other unique Australian plants. The walks were fully booked and attended by 17 people across the two days. Well done Malcolm and Elaine!

Credits: Mandy Botterell, Sunshine Coast Council

Hervey Bay Botanic Gardens

A super huge THANK YOU to everyone who came along to our recent BGANZ Botanic Gardens Day –was a wonderful day with over 1000 people visiting the Gardens

Tamborine Mountain Regional Botanic Gardens

The Potty Potters plant sale at Tamborine Mountain Regional Botanic Gardens.

Credit: Tamborine Mountain Regional Botanic Gardens

The weather was perfect for us. Not a cloud in the sky and little breeze. Our visitors on the day were very generous and we raised nearly $2,000 through plant sales as well as a couple of hundred from the sausage sizzle, which sold out before midday. We also raffled a beautiful painting offered by a gentlemen out of the blue! We were blessed with a local acapella choir singing in the gardens as well as a busker providing music.