Meet Aleisha Balzer | Botanic Gardens of Sydney

As a Living Collections and Records Officer for the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, Aleisha divides her time among three prestigious sites:

• Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, Australia’s oldest scientific institution.
• Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan, the center of the Australian Institute of Botanical Science.
• Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah, Australia’s highest cool-climate botanic garden.

While reading this article, you will find that Aleisha has several great tips on how IrisBG facilitates her role as a botanical record keeper. We have included links to relevant IrisBG Knowledge Library tutorials to help you adopt a similar workflow. 

Aleisha begins her maternity leave this month, and we wish her the very best as she welcomes her new little one to the world!

When did you know you wanted a career in Horticulture? As a child, I spent most weekends following my grandparents around their garden — eating herbs, popping impatiens seeds, sucking nectar from honeysuckle flowers, and forever picking flowers. This inspired a love of plants and gardens that lead me into floristry years later. Subsequently, I was lucky enough to gain an apprenticeship with a Horticultural Therapy Garden and Nursery.

 Image courtesy of Aleisha Balzer

Once I started my Horticulture studies and began to develop practical skills, I was hooked! I've been fortunate in my career to work across multiple horticultural fields: horticulture therapy, wholesale nursery production, amenity horticulture, conservation, and now as a Living Collections and Records Officer.

What's the best thing about your current position at Botanic Gardens of Sydney? The diversity of my role. I’m involved in stocktaking, mapping, records management, training, reporting, label production, and more. No two days are the same! My position extends across our three Botanic Gardens of Sydney sites. This allows me to experience a plethora of unique collections, climates, and passionate team-mates.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                Image courtesy of Sydney Botanic Garden

Which garden tool/aid could you not live without? Our Carrot! When in the field stocktaking our garden beds, I am always armed with our bright orange hand-held metal detector, aka 'The Carrot’. It makes finding our accession tags so much easier, especially when it seems the Hort team have been feeling creative when attaching tags! For our older tags, it gives an indication of where to start digging, and it has a simple calibration system that allows you to stop detecting other metal items that might be present in the garden, and target your search for the tag.

Using a variety of custom reports, the Plant Records Team at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney has successfully produced data-from taxa level all the way down to item history. The result: Our 20-year vision for the development, curation and use of the Living Collections is underpinned by up-to-date, accurate collections data. [If you have yet to see the strategic plan the Botanic Garden of Sydney published in 2023, we highly recommend it!]

What is your favorite IrisBG function to use? Tasks is my favourite function; I love the ability to group random accessions or items together for specific data projects and then report on or manage the data in one action. I find it especially useful to have a list of accessions to work through methodically when I am recording and rectifying historical data mistakes. With the ability to leave comments, it’s also an effective way for our Hort. team to request tags and labels.

Do you have a recommendation? Perhaps a favourite book? I am an avid reader of romance, and my favourite book of all time is the Bronze Horseman by Paulina Simons.