Yesterday afternoon I was at the #ChristchurchBotanicGardens, with an undergrad student at #LincolnUniversityNZ who will be interning at the garden during the next teaching semester. Luke Martin, the curator of the native section of the garden, gave us a fascinating tour behind the scenes of the garden's native nursery, seed bank, and herbarium.

A lot of work is being done at the Gardens to learn about and safeguard Aotearoa New Zealand's botanical taonga. New natural history knowledge is being figured out about Canterbury's most threatened native plants so they can be kept safe in the seed bank and glasshouses, in case some of the Department of Conservation's valiant efforts in the wild fail.

Some of Canterbury's most threatened plant species only exist in the wild in patches of a few square metres in remnant vegetation on private farmland. The work Luke and colleagues are doing may prove exceptionally important for the survival of some of these species.

There's a lot more to the botanic gardens than a place to see pretty flowers.

#Christchurch#NZ #botany#ChristchurchBotanicGardens#BotanicGarden