The large-scale operation cultivating rare plants | Australian native plants | Gardening Australia

Millie visits the Royal Botanic Gardens in Cranbourne, to go behind the scenes and learn how they are bringing rare and threatened wild species into cultivation. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
This is one of Australia’s premier horticultural destinations.  It’s the Australian Garden in Cranbourne and it’s part of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. It is 15 hectares of incredible landscapes and cultivated gardens that celebrate Australian flora. Botanic Gardens like this one allow us to revel in the beauty of plants and they’re also centres of plant research. They are also places that are conserving and cultivating rare and threatened species for their future survival.
Today Millie meets the Manager of Horticulture here - John Arnott - to learn a bit more about this new role that’s being taken on by botanic gardens. John says this work falls under the banner of “conservation horticulture”.  He says that “if we just think about the Victorian context, a third of the Victorian flora is afforded with some level of conservation significance so it just means that there’s a role for botanic gardens in conservation, the preservation to keep this flora intact. We’re custodians.  Victorian, Australian botanic gardens are positioned beautifully to make a contribution to the conservation of their local floras.”
This means they’re collecting plants and bringing them into gardens to grow in the cultivated collections. While the display gardens feature a number of rare species, the real magic is happening behind the scenes.
We see the Cranbourne gardens’ glasshouse and nursery. It’s really the engine room of the botanic garden's operations.  It’s where they do all their propagating, and amongst this material, there are some really rare and threatened plant species - some on the brink. Many of these plants have never been propagated before, so learning is a process of trial and error. They’ve found that propagating the plants immediately, in the field, makes for better results.
One particular example is Olearia Astroloba, the marble daisy bush. A single population was discovered in 1988 at the site of a marble mine. “When they did the environmental effects statement they discovered this little plant and it actually stopped the mine from going ahead. You know we’re talking about a powerful little daisy here…It’s got great potential as a garden plant, it really does, it’s highly ornamental. “
Of course, there are many reasons plants are rare - some, like the Olearia Astroloba are just inherently rare - they only occupy a tiny ecological niche. Then there’s habit loss through agriculture and urbanisation - as well as pests, pathogens, our changing climate and bushfire.
While John and the horticulture team cultivate and care for these rare and endangered species - botanist Andre Messina works to identify plants at risk and goes out and collect them. He’s led field trips with expert teams to recover seeds and cuttings after the devastating Black Summer bushfires.
What do Andre and the team hope to achieve for the rare plants of Victoria? “I guess what we’re really hoping for is to have as much coverage of the rare and threatened species in ex-situ conservation as possible, but also to have coverage across a species to have that range of sites so we’ve got a genetically diverse collection,” says Andre.
John says the ultimate point is the plants ready to go into the ground in the nursery. “Some of the material that we’re propagating will end up in the conservation collection here in the Australian Garden. We’ve got a really lovely multi-site conservation program called Care for the Rare and we’re distributing rare and threatened plants to regional botanic gardens across the state.”
Featured Plants:
MARBLE DAISY-BUSH - Olearia astroloba
SNOW PRATIA - Lobelia gelida
SNOWY RIVER WESTRINGIA - Westringia cremnophila
- Callistemon kenmorrisonii
FORRESTER’S BOTTLEBRUSH - Callistemon forresterae
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