Emily Hazell is a force. A dedicated member of the IrisBG community, we first came to know her from her incredible work as Head of Horticulture and Curation for Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Here, she built a team of students to aid in a significant plant audit, the first in a decade. To facilitate this project, she tenaciously advocated and raised funds for Birmingham's acquisition of the IrisBG database and Garden Explorer to record and share their plant collection with the community.
Emily's enthusiasm for her work is far from understated. She recently joined the team at Chelsea Physic Garden as Head of Plant Collections, With her proven track record of success, we are confident that she will make significant contributions to the Garden's plant collections. Emily shares a bit about her path to horticulture and a few of her proudest career moments in this interview.
How did you first get into horticulture? Growing up, I did not really know that horticulture was a career. I would spend hours making mud pies and arranging pots in the back garden. I wasn’t very good at mowing when I was younger, as my Grandpa would follow me around his lawn with scissors. As an adult, I started growing veggies with friends in a rental property and got an allotment when I moved out. Seeing my enthusiasm for my allotment, a friend suggested I do the RHS level 2 exams, which I did alongside other roles. At first, I worked in therapeutic horticulture. From there, I applied for the Kew diploma and haven’t looked back since. |
Can you share your proudest achievements during your time with Birmingham Botanical Garden (BBG)?
I am proud of our team's achievements at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, including improvements to the Cyclamen collection, the development of plant records, and the Planting Stories collaboration with Nottingham Trent University. When I interviewed for my new role [at Chelsea Physics Garden], they said, "You did all that in a year?" with a dubious face!
Cyclamen collection improvements
The Cyclamen celebration was held in February 2024. [BBG holds a Cyclamen national collection.] When I arrived at the gardens, the collection needed better cultivation and curation standards. In October 2023, we began working with the Cyclamen Society to fund a trainee from October, and by the following February, all the plants were double-labelled and in good enough health to display. I enjoyed seeing the trainee and the team grow and develop in their roles to deliver this mass display of the collection and the parallel engagement program of tours and talks.
Photo credit: Jon Benham Photography
Plant records development
After 18 months, significant improvements had been made to the plant collection records. We worked closely with the IrisBG team to migrate all of BBG's plant records to the new plant database. We audited all of the glass collections for the first time in 10 years. Since an equipment upgrade in May, we have started mapping the garden collections and launched Garden Explorer.
I have been lucky to have PhD placement students bring their skill sets to the plant records teams. Most recently, Jamie Burgess and I have developed a process and code/ R to digitise and integrate historic plant lists onto our IrisBG taxon list to inform curation and interpretation—something I hope the next curator finds useful. This was my favourite part because Jamie's coding skills meant he could do in a day what I thought was only possible in a month. I then had to beg the archivist, Salomea, to integrate any other historic plant lists. This is important because plant collection strategies are often focused on science or biodiversity conservation. However, botanic gardens are increasingly challenged to examine their heritage or history. This sort of data integration can assist in that process.
Lastly, I'm proud of all the garden best practices I have set up for Birmingham Botanic Garden to adopt in the future. Collating all the evidence of this has led to great results in the team's engagement, and it has also been recognised by BGCI, most recently, as we gained accreditation on July 27th!
Plants Beyond Empire: Planting Stories – Diversifying storytelling with Birmingham Botanical Gardens
I have also really enjoyed working with Charlie and Kat from Nottingham Trent University on the planting stories project at BBG. As a politics graduate interested in social justice and a professional horticulturist, working with them and artists like Max Khandola on the Plants Beyond Empire project has been exciting.
An excerpt from Plants Beyond Empire: Planting Stories:
"Birmingham Botanical Gardens was founded in 1832, originally as a site of botanical and horticultural research and later with a greater emphasis on leisure and well-being. As many Botanic Gardens its collection is linked to colonial expansion and trade. These links can be observed throughout the site, for example through the economic plants in the glass houses or the ornamental plants from China at the Wilson border, named after the ‘plant hunter’ Ernest Henry Wilson who brought plants over from China to the UK. Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding will look at how the garden is working with local communities and visitors to highlight some of these colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation. Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond." |
I am looking forward to my new role at Chelsea Physic Garden, to getting into the collections there, and to working with that team. I am interested in resolving how the conservation management plan gets transmuted by the realities of the microclimate crises impacting collections management. Lastly, I am eager to get my hands in the soil after a rewarding time behind the desk at Birmingham Botanical Gardens.
Emily is featured in a recent 2024 Gardener's World episode that covers the restoration of Birmingham Botanical Garden's four heritage Victorian glasshouses. These will be restored to their original form and adapted for contemporary horticultural use.
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