From a backyard in childhood where curiosity bloomed, to the frontlines of plant conservation at Auckland Botanic Gardens, Ella Rawcliffe's path in horticulture has been rooted in curiosity, community, and creative problem-solving. A first plant, Tibouchina chosen at age five, sparked a lifelong connection to the living world.
Along the way, time spent learning in the Auckland Museum Herbarium, hands-on field experiences, and a deep respect for the relationship between people and plants have shaped a career dedicated to both the practical and the poetic sides of horticulture. Today, Ella blends technical expertise with cultural collaboration, ensuring that threatened species, from the majestic rātā moehau to the most ephemeral native plants, have a place in our gardens, our stories, and our shared future.
What is the plant that started it all for you? I was given a lot of unsupervised outdoor exploration in our backyard at home, so I often had fingers in the dirt as a kid. My mother could answer all my questions about everything living and is a whizz in the garden.
If I had to pick one event, it’s at around five years old when she told me if I were very good at the garden centre, I’d could pick my very own plant for the garden at home. (I chose a Tibouchina, if you're wondering). I still haven’t decided what I want to be when I grow up, but plants and nature have been a strong thread in all of my decision.
Which garden tool could you not live without? Good sharp propagation scissors! I’ve also recently borrowed a handheld “carrot” metal detector as recommended by Aleisha Balzer in a past IrisBG Community Spotlight and think I might have to commit to purchasing one. It was so handy for finding our plant tags under countless layers of mulch!
Tell us your favorite IrisBG report. It’s hard to pick just one, I’m always customizing reports depending on the situation. I find that flexibility of the output the most useful thing.
Do you have a mentor in the botany or horticulture field? I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the Auckland Museum Herbarium (AK). The team there of staff and volunteers were so generous with their time and effort in training (and gently correcting!) me. I’m a huge fan of on-the-job learning and I couldn’t have started in a better place for it. I had many roles in my time at the Museum, from Volcanoes educator to cataloguing the wet spider collection. It gave me a solid natural history education and some lifelong friends.
What have you found as the most handy IrisBG function to use? I always get excited to show to new users is the map view. It can turn searches that seem obscure into intuitive quite easily and really help new users relate the database to the plants they work with.
Is there a particular tree or plant or horticulture-related event that you have learned a valuable lesson from or about?
Auckland Botanic Gardens has been working with Ngāti Kuri on the conservation of the critically endangered rātā moehau / Metrosideros bartlettii for a decade now. A few years ago, I was invited to visit one of the last wild sites with them. That experience was extremely grounding. I am motivated by the connection between people and nature and how botanic gardens can support in-situ conservation with our ex-situ work while maintaining these vital, meaningful connections.
The rātā moehau project has turned out to be slightly atypical for our conservation work at ABG however – it’s a very charismatic story of a large, long-lived tree, while most threatened plants in the Auckland region are early successional, “weedy”, ephemeral… all slightly challenging for traditional botanic garden management. We’re driven to find creative solutions for maintaining collections of these threatened plants in ways that are sustainable for us as a garden and help us tell their stories to our visitors.
[Learn more about the work Auckland Botanic Gardens are doing with the threatened Rātā Moehau, including cross pollination, in the article, Pollinating Rātā Moehau.]
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.