Pollinating great ideas
Trans-Tasman teamwork Kate Roud, Team Leader Main Gardens, Wellington Botanic Garden, Aotearoa New Zealand
A BGANZ Professional Development Award 2021 Report ‘Life’, as John Lennon so aptly put it, ‘is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.’ At the height of the global pandemic in 2021 while curator of the Aotearoa New Zealand
Kate Roud
(ANZ) collection at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, (RBGV) Melbourne, I applied for a BGANZ professional development award. At this time I had been curator since 2014 and through scholarship trips, attending conferences and visiting botanic gardens in New Zealand, I had built an extensive and valued network of curators and other colleagues. As a target of its Landscape Succession Strategy, RBGV is working to increase the number of wild‑collected taxa across all living collections. Peter Symes, then RBGV Melbourne curator horticulture, and I had targeted Auckland, and regions to the north, as having a comparable climate to Melbourne, and I was keen to establish a seed-collecting ‘hub’ in New Zealand to assist us with managing imports. Therefore, it was the perfect fit to work with Emma Simpkins, then botanical records and conservation specialist at Auckland Botanic Gardens (ABG), on a trans-Tasman partnership. We were mindful, however, of the need to build relationships with iwi (Māori tribes) local to the Auckland region to ensure that any collection of seed from their land was respectful and adhered to the Wai 262 Treaty protocols regarding indigenous flora. In April 2021 we held a Zoom meeting with Emma and discussed the following: • organising a joint seed-collecting trip to Auckland and surrounds in March 2022 • establishing ABG as a hub for the collection of seed from private donors and botanic gardens. ABG would assist with the process of seed testing at approved laboratories and sending certified seed material on to the RBGV • establishing initial and ongoing contact between ABG/RBGV Melbourne and seed-testing facility AsureQuality to enable and embed future seed importation pathways • establishing monitoring programs at RBGV Melbourne for New Zealand plants on behalf of ABG and sharing information • establishing a seed exchange to assist living collections at ABG • hosting students and other professionals from ABG at Melbourne, and vice versa, on mutually beneficial exchanges and projects.
THE BOTANIC GARDENer | ISS 61 Summer 2023
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