Plants in place with clear purposes

Originally published as ‘Sydney’s Botanic Gardens – Places with Clear Purposes’ by Hatherly, Janelle & Alistair Hay appeared in the Australasian Parks and Leisure journal Vol.6 No. 4 Summer 2003.

This followed a presentation at the National Parks and Leisure Conference in Perth in October 2003. It also contributed to research undertaken May-July 2004 by the Australian Research Institute in Education for Sustainability (ARIES) for the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Heritage.

A National Review of Environmental Education and its Contribution to Sustainability on Australia: Community Education Volume 3.

Janelle Hatherly 2021

Introduction

When it comes to interpretive planning very few of us have the luxury of starting from scratch, of working with a clean slate. If we work in national parks, museums, heritage buildings, botanic gardens or other types of cultural institution we face the challenge of implementing a range of interpretive strategies to convey a contemporary organisational mission using long-established and revered collections. We make the most of collections that were assembled and arranged for a different purpose to the one demanded by modern-day audiences who have modern-day educational expectations and priorities for their leisure time.

However, as good interpreters we can interpret anything! We just work out what it is we really want to communicate and then look for elements in the surroundings that support our case. With all the tools in our toolkits we create effective signage and inspirational public programs to get our very important messages across, albeit in a piecemeal fashion. The idea of embarking on holistic thematic planning and changing or rearranging the collections for a common outcome just seems too hard. But when we see an organisation, such as the Eden Project in England ‘start from scratch’ and achieve greatness (that is, measured in popularity and the focus of stimulating debate), we become understandably envious and wonder how we might redevelop our own institutions.

The Eden Project

The Eden Project was Britain’s most exciting Millennium Project and began life with a clear mandate to showcase global biodiversity and human dependence on plants. It is a dramatic global garden the size of thirty football fields nestled in an old china clay pit overlooking St Austell Bay in Cornwall.

Its 50-metre-deep crater is home to thousands of important and beautiful plants and three of the world’s climate zones have been chosen for interpretation. The Humid Tropics and the Warm Temperate regions are contained within the two giant geodesic conservatories and plants from Cool Temperate zones, along with important crop plants, thrive outdoors in the Cornwall climate.

Eden’s elements of success can be summarised as follows:

it is aesthetically appealing with great architecture,
the displays are themed with big, bold interpretive elements incorporated into the landscape,
public programs complement the exhibits and everything clearly conveys important educational messages, and
it was built with organisational partners and significant community involvement.

The Eden Project has a mission that many botanic gardens could certainly adopt. It is so relevant to our modern society that it attracts visitors from around the globe. Every staff member and visitor knows that it is about global biodiversity and human dependence on plants. It is transparently obvious that Eden promotes sustainable living and that we can all make a difference by the way we choose to live. Initial planning anticipated 200,000 visitors annually but Eden averages 1.8 million visitors per year. So how can our long-established institutions reinvent themselves to meet current community expectations and compete for some of the popularity that ‘newness attracts?’

Being relevant to a contemporary world and ‘inspiring an appreciation and conservation of plants’ is what the Royal Botanic Garden & Domain Trust (Trust) in Sydney is currently all about. The new corporate strategy is holistically revisiting the roles and themes of all the Trust’s estates to determine what value they can and do have for the community at large. Thematic planning, collections management and interpretation are being discussed and debated as one, and the managers believe that getting the messages right must come first.

The Royal Botanic Trust, Sydney

The Trust has stewardship of three public garden estates: The Royal Botanic Gardens located in the city centre on magnificent Sydney Harbour; Mount Annan Botanic Garden, a 419ha Australian native garden 90 kms away from the CBD in southwest Sydney; and Mount Tomah Botanic Garden, a cool climate garden located in the Blue Mountains. The Royal Botanic Gardens date back to 1816 and are on the site of the first ever European Farm in Australia, while Mount Annan and Mount Tomah gardens are bicentennial projects and are only 25 years old. All three estates were originally designed with different priorities to today.

The Trust’s traditional role was to amass, take care of, study and display a valuable collection of plants. But today’s society demands that the botanic gardens belong to the people and those who work in them are stewards of cultural and natural heritage belonging to and enriching the community, but nonetheless with a mandate to influence it. Visitors want to experience peace and tranquillity in a parklike setting but surveys show that they also expect their botanic gardens to be more than a park and to fulfil an educative role.

The focus of living collections has shifted from the collection as an end in itself, to the collection as a basis and medium for programs that actualise the organisation’s vision and mission. That is, a fantastically diverse botanical collection is now primarily a tool to promote species conservation, education about environmental protection issues and sustainable horticultural practices.

How does a complex long-standing organisation like the Trust go about articulating what its three botanic gardens stand for? There is a clearly articulated mission but what exactly are our messages? As a multifaceted organisation there is a rich set of possible causes we can align ourselves to. How do we prioritise these and then translate and interpret them to the public through plants in the ground? And will visitors understand them?

A colleague at Mount Tomah Botanic Garden remarked recently: “Our visitors are happy with what they see but they aren’t sure what it means.” We know our visitors, but are we meeting their needs? We have fantastic collections but are we making the most of them and managing them effectively with finite resources, today and with future generations in mind?

These are the challenges the Trust is currently grappling with and we’re attacking them from all sides! The Botanic Gardens and Public Programs staff are working on different challenges simultaneously. It has not been easy and we are not about to hand the task over to external consultants to produce master plans that must then be followed prescriptively. One desired outcome is to instil respect in the staff for the needs of the public it serves, and to develop a learning culture that is not averse to taking risks. In an open and safe learning environment we’re experimenting, seeing what works, testing it with our audiences and modifying elements in the light of evaluation. We are looking for examples of best practice and applying strategies, that appear to work in one context, to novel situations. We are encouraging all our stakeholders to join us for the ride and contribute to making a difference to New South Wales’ premier botanic gardens and what they stand for. We are challenging ourselves and growing an organisational culture as a result of it.

New approaches

What is emerging is that interpretation is driving the process and that there are guiding principles that work for us. For example, a tired, abstruse display of plant species arranged in family groups within a phylogenetic theme at Mount Annan is being explored as the place for a new display, provisionally named the Connections Garden, showing the interconnectedness of humans with the natural world.

The guiding principles outlined for the proposal are:

Our messages will be powerfully and simply presented
The renewed garden should motivate visitors to action
The renewed garden should offer variety and a sense of discovery
We will involve staff and community throughout the process
The renewed garden will be horticulturally viable
What works currently will not be thrown out
Each garden bed should be themed
Our messages need to be told primarily through plants.

Similar guiding principles underpinned the development of the Cadi Jam Ora – First Encounters Garden (Cadi) which received an Interpretation Australia Association award of excellence last year. By incorporating a bicentenary display about the First Farm of 1788 and bulldozing three old morphology beds we’ve created Eden newness on the oldest cultivated part of Sydney.

When we compare Cadi with Eden’s elements of success, we find many similarities:

Cadi is aesthetically appealing – it has great architectural form and is a great place to visit. There are unified themes with big, bold interpretive elements incorporated into the landscape. Public programs complement the exhibits and everything clearly conveys important educational messages. It is easy to see and learn what Cadi is about. The aim is to redress the imbalance of the gardens’ Eurocentric cultural heritage and present an Indigenous perspective. The outcome is that visitors and the Indigenous community know about and acknowledge that these gardens have a multicultural heritage.

Evaluation studies have shown that visitors can articulate many of its objectives, which are:

to create an experience of what happened here, on this very spot, at the time of European settlement/invasion.
to convey Aboriginal people’s prior use of this site, its significance to them and their understanding of plants.
to represent the differing environmental perspectives of Aboriginal and European cultures.
to work closely with local Aboriginal people to foster Reconciliation and show that Sydney has a continuing Aboriginal culture.

Building Cadi involved teams of people and had significant Indigenous community support. From this came sustainable partnerships that continue to deliver complementary public programs. Developing Cadi gave rise to a stepped process which can be applied to interpretive planning on a bigger scale.

Articulate the aim: what issue needs addressing?
Establish objectives: what exactly needs to be conveyed?
Consult widely with key stakeholders for input and endorsement
Form a project team and itemise all jobs
Engage experts to draw together a design plan and interpretive elements
Get approvals and community support
Do it! and be prepared to modify it in light of evaluation.

We are currently in the process of exploring the role of the Royal Botanic Gardens in the 21st century. All staff have been invited to take part in debates but it is the staff on the ground – principally the horticulturists – who are empowered to work up the individual components.

It is emerging that the Royal Botanic Gardens are about:

Health – a culturally and aesthetically rich place for recreation in a unique setting,
Influence –an inspiring place to learn about plants, gardening, the environment and Sydney’s heritage,
Knowledge –a place which generates, manages and disseminates information about plants and biodiversity, and
Stewardship –utilising and demonstrating sustainable management and conservation of living and cultural heritage.

The overarching message from a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens estate is becoming ‘sustaining ourselves by sustaining cultural heritage and the environment’.

As part of the process the Royal Botanic Gardens was divided up into manageable chunks called Precincts which reflect both differentiated usage and meaningful landscape elements. Teams were then formed to work out specific aims and objectives for each of these precincts. In this way we are slowly developing a shared vision for the role of the whole estate.

We have been holding stakeholder workshops to increase our understanding of visitor needs and to refine the purposes of the various components of the garden and collections. It has been useful to form a Trust Botanic Gardens Committee, an authoritative, expert and impartial reference group to present milestones to and to give the approvals necessary to move processes on to the next step.

A similar project is underway at Mount Tomah Botanic Garden. We are revisiting the 25-year-old thematic plan and have held similar workshops with staff and external stakeholders. The operational staff has identified the strengths and weaknesses of the existing collections and displays and are working out what makes the Tomah gardens unique. We have debated and reached consensus as what should be kept and what really should be removed.

The Tomah staff is developing an understanding that visitors expect a destination experience but are also mindful that this spectacular collection of largely non-indigenous plants sits within a World Heritage area. It is becoming evident that the Mount Tomah Botanic Garden is uniquely placed to provide information and practical advice on how the community can create their own fantastic gardens, improve the designed or degraded environment and value, marvel at and preserve the natural environment, both locally and globally.

Conclusion

In conclusion, whether the Trust staff are tackling how to interpret an individual garden bed or redeveloping a thematic plan for a whole estate, we are all learning from the process. We are openly questioning and challenging long held beliefs of what a botanic garden is for, and we are keeping the needs of today’s (and tomorrow’s) visitor and the general community top of mind. It is becoming increasingly clear that contemporary botanic gardens are more about debating biocomplexity than simply displaying biodiversity and that by interpreting the interrelationships in nature and encouraging all aspects of sustainable gardening we can all do something positive for the environment.