Meet Ben Durrington | Plant Records Coordinator, Fort Worth Botanic Garden

For this month’s Community Spotlight, we head to Fort Worth Botanic Garden, where curiosity about plants stretches from ancient cycads to delicate fern sporophytes.

With a deep appreciation for plant evolution, biodiversity, and interpretation, Ben Durrington brings both scientific insight and creativity to plant records work. His reflections highlight how plant records can strengthen conservation, storytelling, and visitors’ understanding of the connections between plants, people, and place.

In this Spotlight, Ben shares the mentors and experiences that shaped his path, and why understanding where a plant comes from remains one of the most meaningful pieces of information we can preserve.

What plant, place or experience first sparked your interest in plants?

One of the first groups that captured my interest was the cycads, starting with the humble Cycas revoluta (Sago palm). I was first attracted by its striking geometric form, glossy dark green leaves and rusty tomentum. Since then I have made an effort to see many cycad species in habitat. 

Cycads are a great group to illustrate the different strategies employed by plants over the millennia. Despite emerging in the late Paleozoic era, modern diversity is partly the result of much more recent cooling and drying. Cycads have made an impact on ecosystems all across the earth, including Antarctica when it was unfrozen. And, they are intimately associated with other forms of life like cyanobacteria and beetles, and with natural processes like fire. Finally, some of their modern distributions have been shaped by people, who used them for their starch. I’m always looking forward to learning more about cycads and the traits that have enabled them to persist and adapt all this time.

Did you have a mentor who influenced your path in botany or horticulture?

Yes, my undergrad professor, Dr. C, has had a huge influence in my life. I loved plants before meeting her, but after that first plant morphology class, I was really hooked. What I learned in that class contextualized the plant kingdom for me, placing its diversity in the story of the whole world, on a scale of hundreds of millions of years.

As humans, we are so lucky to live alongside countless other lineages and unearth the stories of countless more. With Dr. C, I discovered plant axes and fungi in thin sections of Rhynie chert, rare thistles on a coastal alvar, and the wonders of electron microscopy. I will always be grateful for her and for my first introduction to the botanical community.

What IrisBG function do you rely on most in your work?

Customizable reports. IrisBG makes it easy to get a lot of data in, and a lot of data out. The correspondence between reports and imports makes creating new import templates that much simpler. I enjoy my everyday workflows, in no small part because of this IrisBG functionality.

I also can’t leave out ArcGIS-IrisBG Mobile! This feature allows me to collect a variety of data types opportunistically during inventories, from presence/absence to label fields and images.

What’s a project you’re especially proud of?

I have rolled out a new, smaller label type over the past year. It is packed with information, and I think it is going to level up our curation and interpretation.

Also, starting in 2025 and continuing to the present, I have had the opportunity to dabble in fern propagation, and I haven’t been able to get enough. After sowing some lonely spore packets with Fort Worth Botanic Garden’s own fern expert, Dr. Alejandra Vasco, I am happy to report that we are currently caring for an array of young sporophytes of tropical and arid taxa. I love seeing the changes in leaf morphology from one new leaf to the next, as they gradually display adult characteristics.

What’s one piece of information you always try to capture in your records?

Where a plant (taxon) came from. I record this information on the taxon screen, whether it is the origin of a cultivar or the native range of a species. That way it is available for interpretation on signage and in [Fort Worth's] Garden Explorer: it reinforces that every plant came from somewhere. That is one of the primary messages that I want to communicate to garden patrons. This simple message illustrates the richness of biodiversity and the interconnectedness of human and plant stories, and serves as a jumping-off point for those who want to learn more.

Which IrisBG report or feature do you find most useful?

Probably the label reports in Item Management.

What excites you most about the future of public gardens or plant collections?

I think today we are rethinking what botanic gardens can provide for our communities and culture as a whole. Botanic gardens have the great responsibility and opportunity to influence their surroundings through display and interpretation. I am excited about the current movement to embrace the local and regional context – part of this is a shift in focus towards gardening with native plants and emulating native communities in our planted spaces. I think maintaining this focus while engaging with the architecture and garden design of one’s area will lead to compelling displays and hopefully evolve into more thoughtful regional vernaculars.

At the same time, botanic gardens are leveraging their combined resources to conserve genetic diversity of as many plants as possible, notably through seed banking and living plant collections. It is exciting to see gardens moving towards more coordinated and open strategies for developing these safeguards – both because it is more effective and because it strengthens our network.

Is there a skill you’re currently learning or hoping to develop next?

I’m hoping to continue to improve my skills in GIS. Mapping is an integral part of our plant records, improving monitoring, reporting, planning and interpretation. It has empowered me to be more effective in side projects, including field work and inventorying external collections.

Do you have a book, podcast, or resource you’d recommend to others in the field?

One of my favorite parts about the job is being able to deep dive into different taxonomic groups. Carrying on the fern theme, I recommend Oaxaca Journal by Oliver Sacks, A Natural History of Ferns by Robbin Moran, and The Ferns and Lycophytes of Texas by George Diggs and Barney Lipscomb.