My morning class on Plant Collection Unit was with Lisa Burton at Botanic Garden Upper Garden Administration Building. It is tour by Curators of the Geographic Collection and Arboretum, followed by Camellia and Thematic Collection.
All the students gathered in and we start touring the Botanic Garden in the 6.2 hextares of 15.3 acres. Geographic collection is mainly species. He was emphasising on 6,643 indigenous plants in NZ, 2,253 are naturalised and 300 - 500 serious environmental weeds.
He also brings us starting from Australian collection and telling us about the history of collection. Australian collection is one of the largest of the geographic collection in term of area of beds. Then down to Mexican collection and then North American collection. Himalayan Collection are the tropical plants from the tropical lowlands to the hardy plants on the icy highlands.
Then Shanghai Collection its a vast collection which is connected to Shanghai Botanic garden to develop better relationship. The other part is North Asian, South American collection which has the same problems as the North American collection as it covers a huge range of climate zones from rain forests to dessert.
The other side was South African collection and finally to Mediterranean collection which was the newest collection. The rock wall constructed and all the rock was brought from quarry and started in November, 2009 and finished in November, 2010.
Apparently after the tea break at 10.30am we was guided by Curator Marianne Groothuis in Camellia and Thematic Collection. The Camellia have existing themes such as Plants for Fragrance, Evergreen Hedges, Foliage Colour, Autumn Colour, Winter and Spring Flowering and Dry Shade.
The purpose of Collection are for resources for apprentices, public and polytechnic students, plant life articles for the ODT, national conference and societies, garden shows tours and talks and slide shows. Marianne was showing all of us the various types of camellia and the history of BG, the mission, the collection and layout and future of the collection. Finally we finished the session at 11.30am.
In the afternoon section it was Plant Identification Unit with Lisa Short. She was guiding us on plant classification system and nomenclature and the division of plant classification. After the theory section she took us outdoor to shows samples on various kinds of weeds and trees at the opposite of L Block and behind of O Block Campus.
The weather was cloudy and temperature was 8 degrees Celsius and rain fall was 0.00mm. Humidity was 80%.
No comments:
Post a Comment