New digs for the National Herbarium of NSW

The National Herbarium of New South Wales has officially relocated from its long-time home in the Royal Botanic Garden (RBG) Sydney to the Australian Botanic Garden in Mount Annan, marking a new chapter in its 169-year history.

Established in 1853, the herbarium has grown from an initial collection of around 1800 native plant specimens to over 1 million today. With more than 8000 new specimens being added to the collection every year, the Sydney facility was running low on space and also experiencing problems with mould and insects. Thus, the momentous decision was made to move the entire collection to a brand new facility in Mount Annan, located around 60 km south-west of the Sydney CBD.

The Australian Botanic Garden was in many ways an obvious fit for the herbarium’s new home. As one of three gardens owned by the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust estate (the others being RBG Sydney and the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden in Mount Tomah), it meant the collection would stay on the estate’s land. The garden also sits on a massive 416 ha site, providing ample space for the purpose-built facility — appropriately inspired by a waratah seed pod — to store the collection now and as it expands in future. Furthermore, the garden is already home to the Australian PlantBank, which has since 2013 served as the largest native plant conservation seed bank in the country and played a key part in helping to restore certain species to the wild following the devastating Black Summer bushfires.

The relocation of the herbarium’s collection has been no mean feat. As noted by Dr Brett Summerell, Chief Botanist and Director of Research at the Australian Institute of Botanical Science, “You can imagine moving 1 million specimens — and knowing at every point in the transportation process exactly where each particular specimen is, because we can’t afford to get them mixed up.” This resulted in the decision to digitise the whole collection, photographing each specimen at very high resolution — “almost as good as looking down the microscope”, according to Dr Summerell.

Furthermore, these images will be publicly accessible to researchers all around the world, meaning the specimens in many cases will not need to be shipped to other institutions as they have been in the past — minimising the potential for damage en route and saving researchers from waiting months or even years for the specimens to come to them. And with a collection that includes both rare and historic specimens, that’s a big advantage.

“The oldest specimen in the collection is from 1769 — we have a few specimens collected from Banks and Solander in Botany Bay,” Dr Summerell said. “And then specimens collected by Leichhardt, by Cunningham, by Robert Brown on Matthew Flinders’ voyage — all of the great exploratory trips in the early days of the colony usually included a naturalist/botanist. And 88–89% of the flora is endemic to the country and not seen anywhere else.”

In instances where new specimens are added to the collection, these go through a strict quarantine process to make sure they don’t bring any pests with them — a process which incorporates both drying and freezing to kill adult pests as well as any potential eggs. In the very unlikely event that any pests make it through the seven-day quarantine period unscathed, the collection is housed across six separate vaults, so any infestations will be contained.

So what exactly do you do with over 1 million specimens? Dr Summerell explained that the facility’s team of nearly 100 scientists, acting on behalf of the Australian Institute of Botanical Science, carries out a lot of work in terms of molecular understanding of plant groups and how various processes happen.

“It all comes down to DNA analysis — extraction of DNA from plant samples, looking at using DNA to be able to understand relationships between different species, how they might be related, whether they’re unique, and also looking at that to understand the processes that have happened from the fossil record through to the future in terms of understanding how plants may have adapted or changed as a result of historical and prehistoric changes in climate, and maybe being able to use that to predict what might happen in the future given current trends,” he said.

“So as well as looking at the historical facts, it’s very much forward looking, using all the latest cutting-edge tools. In fact, a lot of the molecular work that happens in groups like plants or fungi are ways in which we can test different technologies and techniques so that we can actually start to look at them in mammals and in humans.”

The herbarium also has a Botanical Identification Service that enables people to send in their own specimens to have them identified, or even to come in themselves to use the facilities. Dr Summerell said, “We get specimens sent in from a whole variety of different sources, whether it’s for environmental assessments; weed identifications; where livestock get poisoned and they want to know the particular plant causing problems; even forensic botany, where there might be a piece of plant material or flower or whatever associated with a corpse.”

Furthermore, it is not unusual for the herbarium to identify a species that is new to science, with Marco Duretto, Manager of Plant Diversity, saying, “We’re one of those megadiverse countries where we have 26,000 different species of flowering plant, and we’re describing a couple of hundred a year at least. And our institution does a good whack of that.”

Indeed, back in 1994 the herbarium was the institute that identified the Wollemi pine, previously only known through fossil records. Now endangered, Wollemi specimens are being grown in the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan’s nursery — which was recently relocated within the garden in order to make room for the herbarium — with the aim of finding ways to futureproof those that still exist in the wild.

The Wollemi is not the only species the nursery is helping to conserve, with some of its other specimens including the pink flannel flower from the Blue Mountains, which germinates under very specific post-bushfire conditions; Polystichum moorei, an endangered fern that can only be found in the wild on Lord Howe Island; and Lenwebbia, which is currently under threat due to myrtle rust — a fungal disease that has wiped out a range of Australian Myrtaceae species since it was first detected in 2010. Saving species from myrtle rust is a key initiative of the nursery as well as the Australian PlantBank, with the latter conserving affected specimens via novels methods including tissue culture and cryo preservation.

The herbarium thus appears to be in good company, surrounded in its new home by other facilities that are doing their bit to preserve Australia’s precious biodiversity. With their powers combined, the future of our plant life looks to be in safe hands.

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