4 minute read
First Person Meet Mitchell Carle, Senior Horticulturalist and avid collector
MITCHELL CARLE
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What are your key responsibilities? I am usually the horticulturist in charge of the Brunet Garden. Over the past three and a half years, I have been developing the daffodil display in the Brunet Meadow, have created a new woodland garden at the bottom of the Garden and have been expanding and caring for the puya display. At the moment I am the senior horticulturist in the nursery, where I have been working with our potted rare camellia collection, improving on the nursery’s infrastructure and safety, as well as propagating important accessions from our collection.
What first got you interested in plants and how did it lead to a career in the field? I was lucky enough to grow up with parents who were plant collectors. My dad is an ex-staff member of the Blue Mountain Botanic Garden, my mum has always had a green thumb, and I started gardening when I was 10. My first real plant collection comprised sempervivums, and I amassed a potted collection of hundreds of the plants when I was in my teens. Once I knew I had a love of these plants, applying for an apprenticeship at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden was the only thing I wanted to do.
Tell us about your career prior to your current role? Since I left school in 1999 I’ve worked in a range of roles across the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Domain and Blue Mountains Botanic Garden. As a result, I have a broad skill set and a wide knowledge base, and thanks to my varied experience I find it easy to adapt to different horticultural settings − from my work in the nursery to networking with other plant experts. On a recent trip to northern New South Wales collecting rare tropical camellias, I ran into a botanist who specialises in rare tropical trees and found myself discussing our shared love of plants such as Tabebuia and Campomanesia.
What has been the highlight of your work? After I finished my apprenticeship, I did a secondment at Kew Gardens in the hardy display/alpine unit. I was the bulb assistant, working with the largest potted bulb collection in the world. I was at Kew for a year and a half, and during that time I worked with some of the rarest potted collections in the world, and with authorities focused on such species as woodland plants and alpine desert plants. The secondment opened the door to a whole host of amazing experiences such as sitting in on Royal Horticultural Society plant selection panels and being an ambassador for Kew at other botanic gardens and institutes across Europe. I still use the skills and impart the knowledge I gained in this role on colleagues.
What is your favourite plant or section in the Garden? What makes it so special? My favourite plants would have to be our potted camellia collection in the nursery glasshouses. I appreciate their beautiful scarlet new-foliage, unusual shaped and yellow flowers, and their rarity in the horticultural world.
When you are not working, what do you like to do? I collect camellias, predominantly from the humid rainforest areas of Vietnam, and have been establishing them in the rainforest section behind my house. I also collect unusual species of fruit trees, which grow very well where I live. These include things like Pouteria lucuma, Duguetia lanceolata and Eugenia victoriana, which are extremely rare in cultivation in Australia and have striking foliage, and in some cases large colourful fruit. Duguetia, in particular, has a scarlet-red, large, custard-applelike fruit that tastes like sweet carrot. I also collect botanical etchings and lithographs, and I’m a mineral collector with a specific interest in Broken Hill localities. One of my favourite mineral groups to collect is pseudomorphs* and the pride and joy of my collection is an array of famous Goethite coating Cerussite after Anglesite. In my life I’ve also collected Australian native scorpions, Australian native soft-billed birds, and cichlids (a freshwater fish) from Lake Tanganyika, which lived in a purposebuilt aquarium in a shed at my parents’ place. Currently I’m focused on tropical yellow-flowering camellias and putting together a collection of Higo camellias.
How does your partner feel about your collections? My partner Rebecca is a keen gardener, so the camellias are something for us to enjoy together, but she thinks the minerals are funny because they all look the same. It is a bit of a niche collection because the value and interest is in the transformation the mineral has undergone over its lifetime, not necessarily what it looks like. Many are one-off occurrences in the mines from which they came, and only a certain number of specimens were ever recovered and scientifically described from these small pockets alone.
*minerals formed by one substance chemically or structurally changing into another, while still retaining their original external shape.
