Endangered Seeds at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens

We get to help with some cool stuff, but this past week was really special as an interesting project came together.

The Adelaide Botanical Gardens Foundation are having their Spring dinner, with a focus on their refreshed Seed Conservation centre. With such work they need to raise funds, so at the dinner an auction was to be held and we were called in by Lindl Lawton (good friend via Tony Kearney), to help make something auction-worthy.

Together we came up with this idea; highlight the rarest of seeds by using the photographs the scientist create in cataloging them. We would print them small on the finest materials, sell them as a grid of framed works, with each having a personalised note from the botanists involved and a photo of the plant in bloom in an envelope attached to the back.

I’d love to see these grow as collector items. The walls of homes should be filled with local treasures!

The launch event was swish, with wonderful gin and canapés, perfect weather, a hand shake with Tim Jarvis (freshly minted South Australian of the Year, and ADVENTURER), and some great talks from the director Michael Harvey and involved botanists.

We also worked with Alex Frayne to print and frame a beautiful image of his for the auction, I’ll add a picture of this when I can grab one.

Unfortunately I had to duck out to speak with an evening class at the CCP, but was thrilled to be asked to attend by Emily Drewniak of the Foundation.