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Plant Collections - Current Practices

Latterly, as with other older botanic gardens worldwide, the RTBG has been reassessing its relevance in the context of the need to manage an important and sensitive cultural heritage site in conjunction with the need to meet the multi-faceted demands of today. These demands include the need to clearly communicate our role through more focused educational and interpretive programs linked to the collections. We still pay homage to the traditional approaches such as with the establishment in 1996 of a provenanced Chinese Collection from Yunnan Province.

RTBG's strategic focus has changed recently to concentrate on plant collections with valid regional connections. The newer collections all have strong thematic interpretive and educational potential. This approach is exemplified by the Tasmanian Collections, The Subantarctic Plant House (containing plants from Macquarie Island), and The Greater Hobart collection. The RTBG's Strategic Plan 2003 - 2007 has been drawn up to reinforce this approach.

All botanic gardens are dynamic environments and despite the slow pace of change in the past this change is now accelerating in these Gardens. There is a now a pressing need to anticipate future changes and to plan for them. The RTBG is actively seeking funding to enable it to develop a Strategic Master Plan, a component of which will be a Thematic Plan. This will define the direction of the RTBG's plant collections into the future. Integral to this document will be BGCI's global agenda; the RTBG will work to develop strategies to meet these criteria locally.