Botanic Gardens ‘Month of May’

We 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.

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.

We’d like to personally thank the people behind the scenes who helped us 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.

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!

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, 167 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.

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 bottom of this page.

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 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.

Photos from garden events that we couldn’t fit in The Botanic Gardener Issue 60 Winter 2023!

Lismore Regional Botanic Gardens

Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens

Gold Coast Regional Botanic Gardens

Credit for all photos to Nikki Murphy.

North Coast Regional Botanic Gardens