5 minute read
It’s a living thing Taking stock
TAKING STOCK OF A LIVING COLLECTION
THE GARDENS IS UNDERTAKING THE FIRST FULL AUDIT OF ITS LIVING COLLECTION AS IT SEEKS TO REVEAL THE SCALE, SIGNIFICANCE AND SHORTCOMINGS OF A PRICELESS GENETIC RESOURCE. DIRECTOR OF HORTICULTURE JOHN SIEMON REPORTS.
Advertisement
On 13 June 1816, coinciding with the completion of Mrs Macquaries Road, Governor Lachlan Macquarie officially founded the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Australia’s oldest Scientific Institution. Charles Fraser, the Government Botanist and the Garden’s first Superintendent, subsequently established a reputation for extensive travel for the purposes of acquisition and sharing of plant specimens around the world. And these initial assemblages ultimately formed the foundations of the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney’s Living Collection.
Living collections are, quite simply, the linchpin of any botanic garden. Records of living collections, especially when paired with pressed herbarium specimens, tell us an awful lot about the history and evolution of botanic gardens, trends in horticulture and conservation. We know from our own historical records, for example, that Fraser published a list of 17 varieties of grapes in the Botanic Gardens, and by 1833 “362 of these [specimens] were alive and for the most part healthy”. Ultimately the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney was instrumental in establishing the Australian wine industry, aside from its role in botany or testing other species of economic or ethnobotanical value, including olives,
The Gardens’ Living Collection is one of the world’s best ex situ plant conservation resources
pineapples, coffee, cotton, sugar cane and sorghum.
Each botanic garden across the globe is part of an international network of plant material holding genetic diversity of immense conservation value. Many species are now only alive on the planet due to the presence in botanic gardens of individual specimens that no longer exist in the wild. Given the criticality of living collections it is imperative that a Living Collections Policy and Strategy exists for every botanic garden. The last time our organisation reviewed its policy was in 2008 and a contemporary strategy is needed to govern the development, management, direction, protection and enhancement of the Living Collection.
To accelerate the Living Collections Policy and Strategy development, I recently appointed Dr Lucy Sutherland as a strategic consultant. Dr Sutherland is an Honorary Professor at the University of Adelaide and was previously the Director of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium in South Australia, as well as acting director of the Australian National Botanic Gardens and the national co-ordinator of the Australian Seed Bank Partnership. In addition, she has just been appointed as the new Director of the National Botanic Garden of Wales.
Dr Sutherland is now leading an extensive consultation process across all facets of our organisation.
It is fundamental to the success of any strategy that all streams of our organisation support and leverage the Living Collection – be it our science team integrating research, taxonomy or disease diagnostics, our asset team providing critical infrastructure such as irrigation, our education team engaging visitors, or our venues team activating our botanic landscapes. It is, however, our horticulturists that continue to nurture and sustain an ever-growing and at-risk Collection of diversity.
Our three botanic gardens and the Domain are collectively a living laboratory of documented, known provenanced species that are actively researched by our own teams of horticulturists and scientists as well as experts across the globe. Our Collection is used to improve outcomes for humanity and the environment including restoring biodiversity through restoration and translocation or through the production of therapeutic medicines. In the last few years alone our Living Collection has actively contributed to biosecurity surveillance, plant breeding (helping make Blueberries blue both on the inside and outside), COVID vaccine research, identification of chemical compounds and research trials of natural herbicides or myrtle rust resistance trials.
Spread across almost 750 hectares and three climatically and ecologically diverse landscapes, the Australian Institute of Botanical Science’s Living Collection comprises a staggering 17,000 taxa of living plants. The Institute’s Living Collection also includes all three of our Gardens’ conservation nurseries, where thousands of species are growing at any given time, as well
as seeds and plant parts stored within the Australian PlantBank. The New South Wales Seedbank, tissue culture laboratory and cryogenic store also store more than 20% of Australia’s seedbearing species and more than 70% of NSW’s threatened flora – collectively the Living Collection is one of the world’s best ex situ plant conservation resources.
While we have collections from all over the world (in fact, plant specimens from more than 77% of countries), our primary focus is on flora of the Asia Pacific, cool climate regions and, of course, Australian native flora. We hold collections of some of the rarest plants on the planet, including our iconic Wollemi Pine and 18 of the world’s rarest palm species. At an Australian level, we hold almost 40% of flora listed in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Importantly, we also hold species that are functionally extinct and no longer exist in the wild, such as the Easter Island’s, Sophora toromiro.
To better understand our plant inventory – and support the development of our Living Collections Policy and Strategy – we will shortly complete the first ever full stocktake of every specimen in our Collection, which will be georeferenced and publicly accessible via our Garden Explorer website. This will provide us with a full picture of the true scale and significance of our genetic resources. Crucially, it will also reveal gaps in our Collection and opportunities to diversify or exchange with other institutions the critically important specimens we have or should have, as well as those we must ensure are safeguarded at other institutions.
By late 2022 our new contemporary Living Collections Policy and Strategy will help focus and realise the vision of the Australian Institute of Botanical Science and lead to exceptional outcomes for plant biodiversity and conservation. Leveraging the support of our global botanic garden network will create real and lasting plant conservation outcomes to save plants, and the communities in which they live, from the brink of extinction.
Strategic consultant Dr Lucy Sutherland
