SHAPING GARDEN COLLECTIONS FOR FUTURE CLIMATES

All great cities of Australia, by an instinct as artistic as it is wise, have made excellent provision for botanic gardens. Collecting: the quest to name and know For almost 200 years museums and botanic gardens in Australia have been collecting and preserving physical evidence of the natural world. Sydney was host to the first botanic garden in the Australian colonies, which opened to the public in 1816. It also established the first museum, which opened in 1827. These were the local institutions that began the project to collect, name and know the biota of the Australian continent. They were supported by imperial gardens and museums in Europe and elsewhere. In 1787, Rules for Collecting and Preserving Seeds from Botany Bay were laid out by the enterprising London nurseryman James Lee, 2 promoting his Hammersmith nursery, the Vineyard, to wealthy private collectors in England. The Australian flora was first known to western science by Europeans as exotica traded and transplanted to the northern hemisphere for ex situ collections, both botanic and private.3.