At the Botanic Garden of South Australia, Adelaide, with Michael Harvey

In the heart of Adelaide, we are at the South Australian Botanic Gardens with Michael Harvey, its director. 

We walk through the garden paths and behind the scenes of an institution that thinks differently about the city by putting science at the service of conservation, exhibiting art to inspire wonder, and deploying climate education to move from anxiety to action. 

Here, the seasons renew the experience, night-time installations transform the night, and augmented reality reveals invisible works without touching the ground. 

We talk about urbanity, accessibility, and the intimate connection between a park and its cultural neighborhood, with the museum, the zoo, and soon an Aboriginal art and culture centre. Rather than pitting places against each other, Michael advocates for fruitful cooperation where each success fuels the desire for culture.

We also explore the very real challenges of living things: caring for a growing collection, irrigating sparingly in an area that experiences heat peaks of over about 45°C, choosing resilient species, and telling the story of the soil, insects, and fungi to make the entire ecosystem understandable.

The Mediterranean garden becomes a showcase for water-efficient and climate-smart gardening that can be replicated in every courtyard and on every balcony.

Behind the scenes, solar panels on the roofs, new watering practices and energy transparency provide a credible path for reducing the carbon footprint and inspiring action across the city.

If you like places that challenge preconceived ideas, you will find a generous vision here: a botanical garden as a refuge, school, laboratory and artistic stage. 

Michael Harvey is Director of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium of South Australia.

https://www.botanicgardens.sa.gov.au/

En plein cœur d’Adélaïde nous sommes au jardin botanique d'Australie méridionale avec Michael Harvey, son directeur. 

Nous parcourons les allées du jardin et les coulisses d’une institution qui pense la ville autrement en mettant la science au service de la conservation, en exposant l'art pour susciter l’émerveillement, et déployant une pédagogie climatique pour passer de l’anxiété à l’action. 

Ici, les saisons renouvellent l’expérience, les installations nocturnes transforment la nuit, et la réalité augmentée révèle des œuvres invisibles sans toucher au sol. 

On parle urbanité, accessibilité, et de ce lien intime entre un parc et son voisinage culturel avec le musée, le zoo, et bientôt un centre d’art et de culture aborigènes. Plutôt que d’opposer les lieux, Michael défend une coopération féconde où chaque succès nourrit l’envie de culture.

Nous explorons aussi les défis très concrets du vivant : prendre soin d'une collection qui pousse, irriguer avec parcimonie dans une zone qui connaît des pics de chaleur à plus de 45°C, choisir des espèces résilientes, raconter les sols, les insectes et les champignons pour rendre lisible l’écosystème entier.

Le jardin méditerranéen devient un démonstrateur de jardinage économe en eau et climatiquement intelligent, transposable dans chaque cour et balcon.

Côté coulisses, panneaux solaires sur les toits, nouvelles pratiques d’arrosage et transparence énergétique donnent un cap crédible pour réduire l’empreinte et inspirer des gestes à l’échelle de la ville.

Si vous aimez les lieux qui bousculent les idées reçues, vous trouverez ici une vision généreuse : un jardin botanique comme refuge, école, laboratoire et scène artistique. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Cap sur Adélaïde et son jardin botanique
• 2:30 Collections scientifiques et liens universitaires
• 5:30 Art dans le jardin et expositions
• 8:30 Un parc au coeur de la ville
• 11:00 Parcours de Michael et gestion muséale
• 15:30 Saisons, entretien et défis du vivant
• 18:30 Après l’hôpital: reconquérir le public
• 22:30 Réalité augmentée et nouveaux publics
• 26:30 Partenariats créatifs et effet durable
• 30:00 Synergies de quartier et de voisinages
• 34:00 Coopération plutôt que concurrence

Transcript

[Michael] So I thought it might be useful to do a very quick walk around, see some of the key things in the garden.

And in some ways this building here is one of the most important. And this is the state herbarium. So it's a former Trambarn building, but it now houses over a million herbarium specimens. So we won't go inside today. But in this area we have effectively the scientific arm of the garden and the preserved plant collections. 

[Cedric] Yes.(...) Which is not well known by the public. 

[Michael] No. And obviously in a botanic garden, it's the living collection that people see and that they think of. But like a museum where you have your exhibitions front of house and then a significant scientific collection back of house, botanic gardens are often the same. 

And so this is the state herbarium. As I say, it's a huge amount of historical collections, but that are continually being built on. And obviously the fundamental research on plant systematics that underpins a lot of scientific and conservation based research across the state and indeed with connections globally.

[Cedric] And what are the link of the botanic garden with universities? 

[Michael] So we work with university researchers, multiple universities, but we've got probably a closest relationship with the University of Adelaide.

Our chief botanist, for example, has a joint role between ourselves and the university.

So we work with the botany school there. But we would certainly work with a range of universities

to carry out our (…) and as I say, our collection supports scientific research by a whole range of governments, university organizations. 

[Cedric] Because it's a state herbarium. 

[Michael] Correct. See, one of the things about botanic gardens is the mix of the botanical and the artistic. So we have artworks on display in the gardens, such as this fountain with the glass art, which originally was, I think, came to Australia and was created for the World Exhibition in Brisbane and wound up here in Adelaide at the Botanic Gardens as a beautiful artwork.

But we actually do artistic exhibitions as part of our work here. So we have a couple of art exhibitions on-- you were asking about exhibitions earlier. We do put on exhibitions. Some of them outdoors, some of them indoors.

And it's a way of adding a new dimension to the visitor experience in the gardens.

[Cedric] But the garden, for people who are listening to us, the garden is surrounded by park.

[Michael] It's part of the Adelaide Parklands. So the city of Adelaide is surrounded by a ring of parklands, of which the Botanic Gardens is probably one of the biggest single parks.

And yes, so we're very close to the Central Business District of Adelaide. It's one of the lovely things about the Adelaide Botanic Garden is we're about a 15-minute walk from the center of the city. It's a very accessible, a very easy place to get to. And so it feels like the gardens is very much a part of the life of the city, which I think is really part of our character. And beyond the Botanic Gardens here, which is, in many ways, a classic Botanic Gardens with a highly curated collection, we also have Botanic Park, (...) which is a more open parkland space. But it's owned by the Botanic Gardens. That houses an arboretum, a tree collection. And then it connects us with Adelaide Zoo. So we're really the living collections end of Adelaide. 

[Cedric] Yes, all of this area is accessible by feet. So it's very easy. 

[Michael] Yeah, that's exactly right.

[Cedric] Michael, you were at several positions in several museums? 

Yes, I've been lucky enough to have worked at a range of museums. In fact, this is the first Botanic Gardens I've worked in. I've worked in museums both in Australia and in the UK. And in many ways, the Botanic Gardens is a living natural history museum. So it felt like a very natural progression to move to Botanic Gardens. (...) But yes, I've worked at the Questacon National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Natural History Museum in London, and Sydney's Australian National Maritime Museum. So I've been very lucky to have worked at some wonderful places. Yes.

[Gardener] Hi.

[Michael] Hi.

[Cedric] And what is common to other professional? What do you find?

[Michael] Good question. 

[Cedric] So sometimes in museums, we talk about specialty. Everything is special, different quantity of collections and thematics. (...) 

[Cedric] Yeah, so what I've found between Botanic Gardens and museums, and particularly from a museum organization management and leadership point of view, actually, there's a lot of similarities. You are managing a scientific collection. You're managing a visitor site. So you're having to ensure that your site is continually ready for visitors and is putting on a new experience for visitors on a regular basis. You're dealing with the commercial side of running an organization. Because although we're government funded, there is an expectation that we will find some of our funding ourselves. And that's also true in certainly museums in Australia.

And I think globally is not uncommon either. So you need to think commercially. You need to manage people. You need to deal with the fact that you've got very distinct skill sets and even worldviews in the organization. You've got people who come from a very scientific and academic background. You have people who might be working in the creative sector, designing your exhibitions or putting on your public programs. Then you're dealing with the various issues around governance and the management of the site. So there's actually a lot of these things are common to both. Probably a couple of major differences. I'll pause while we go past the truck.

I think we go around to the right.

As you can hear, we're a busy site with a lot going on. Yes. So a lot of renewals. Yes, we have. We've got some rebuilding happening at the moment. We're putting in new toilet blocks and some new signage for visitors. So these are things which are really important to the visitor experience. (...) They may seem somewhat unglamorous, but they're a really fundamental part of being able to run an effective site.

But yes, coming back to the commonalities, the differences in a botanic garden are interesting. In a museum, you have to work hard to continually renew your offer through the year so that there's something new. Whereas in a botanic garden, nature does that for you. The gardens are very seasonal. So the plants look completely different in autumn or in spring than they do in winter or in summer. And so you've got this evolution of the gardens over the course of the seasons as your collection grows and changes.

And so you don't kind of need the same turnover of your galleries that you do in a museum. But of course, the other side of the coin is because it's a living collection, it also takes a lot of looking after. (...) We've got a quite substantial team of horticulturalists who are continually managing the collection and ensuring that it's looking neat, that it's healthy with a museum collection. If you put the collection in a cupboard and lock the door, and you can come back in six months and assuming your collection storage is in good shape, it will still be there. If you ignore a garden for six months, it's not a good garden anymore.

[Cedric] So it's a kind of permanent temporary exhibition. 

[Michael] That's exactly right, yes.

[Cedric] And so what you discover when you arrived as the director of the Botanic Garden, you talk about all the similarities. But have you been surprised by the fact that it's a living thing? 

[Michael] Yes. Interestingly, there are some very particular things we needed to work on when we started. So in fact, next to where we're walking here, there's a major redevelopment project going on in the city. So we were previously adjacent to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which has now been demolished and moved to the other end of the city. And so that had a significant impact on the number of visitors in the gardens, because the hospital itself had a substantial population, a lot of people coming into the gardens, either as patients or staff or visitors. They would use the garden as a place to go and relax and meet.

And so when the hospital was replaced with a building site, it had the effect of taking away a whole bunch of visitors, but also somewhat cutting us off from the rest of the city. So we've needed to work very hard over the last couple of years to rebuild our visitor numbers and really get the gardens back in the front of people's minds in the city. And so there was a process of essentially finding ways to make connections between the gardens and the city. And we may have had to work a little bit harder to do that than might have been the case in the past.

[Michael, to a gardener] Good, thank you. How are you going?

And so that's been a project over the last-- in fact, it began before I started in the gardens with my predecessor, working with city festivals and artistic companies to create a sense of activity and activation in the gardens that brings people into the gardens.

And I think we do-- and this is true of museums and gardens-- we compete for people's time and attention. We're a free entry site. So we're not competing for money. But for people to spend time in our gardens as opposed to in a shopping centre or on media or whatever, (...) you do have to work hard to keep reintroducing the gardens to visitors if you want to maintain and indeed grow your audience. And that's something that's really important to us as a public site. We are set up as a gardens that's true of a museum as well to engage the public. And so we need to make sure that we are not standing still in this space, that we're continually thinking of new ways to bring the public in and engage them in what is an absolutely magnificent site. And sometimes it's a temptation to let the beauty of the site do the work for you. But it won't. You still need to work hard to keep people's attention.

[Cedric] And do you know how many visitors?

[Michael] We do. Well, it is difficult. I would say we know how many visits. We don't know how many visitors because as a free entry site, people come many times. So at the Botanic Gardens last year, we got nearly 900,000 visits to the gardens over the course of the year. And so some of those will be regular visitors. Some of them will be somebody visiting once it varies.

Actually, I can share with you an interesting thing. (...) I talked about exhibitions. One of the things we are doing is we're hosting an augmented reality exhibition. Seeing the Invisible from the Botanic Gardens of Jerusalem. So this exhibition exists on an app.

And there are a series of artworks that exist in augmented reality in the garden. So from our gardens team, it's the easiest exhibition to manage because it has no impact on the gardens at all.

But here we have an artwork, a virtual reality artwork. So as we start the exhibition on our app, you can see the work is marked here.

Let's see if we can locate it.

So somewhere here we have our... there we are.

And there we have our artwork of a piano sitting in the gardens playing music.

[Cedric] OK.

[Michael] And it's funny to observe, you see people walking around using their phones and finding these artworks. But the trail itself is about a kilometre through the gardens. So in setting up this trail of augmented reality artworks, we're also quietly taking visitors on a very nice tour around the gardens and showing them different areas of the gardens. It's a way to rediscover maybe the garden. Exactly right. And in a similar vein, one of the biggest projects we've been involved with the last couple of years is there's a light festival in Adelaide called Illuminate Adelaide, which in the winter, there's a range of light art projects in the city, but one of the biggest of those is in the gardens. So for the last two years, we've had a program called Light Cycles, which creates an absolutely beautiful set of artworks involving light and music using modern lighting technology, everything from searchlights to lasers, and interacting with our plants and interacting with our buildings and creating a completely different view of the gardens.

And what we found is that that again brought a new audience to the gardens. We had, I think, 100,000 people through that exhibition over the course of a month, which was spectacular. And I would go and walk through it with the audience, and I would be overhearing people saying to each other, "I haven't been to the gardens for so long, we must come back."

And that was happening, that we actually saw our visitor numbers actually were higher after the exhibition was closed.

And so I think quite clearly, when you get involved in big projects like that and working in partnership with the creative industries, you're both creating an opportunity for them to do something really special using your site, but you're also giving yourself a longer-term jump in audience and in attention, which then gives you an opportunity to engage that audience with some of the projects you're doing. So I think there's a really nice opportunity in partnering with organisations with complementary skills, and I think that's something that in the Botanic Gardens, since I've started here and in my past in museums, actually these are ideal sites to work in partnership with people whose skills might be different from what you have in-house, but enable you to create something really special. And these projects are genuinely collaborative, so the artists worked with our horticultural team to identify bits of the gardens that would work best and how they might best be presented. And that's really what a successful project looks like. 

[Cedric] And about partnerships on North Terrace, there are several horticultural institutions. So does it help to have this proximity?

[Michael] I think it does. I think having a cultural precinct, which people can walk easily from one to the other, and there's a sense that you can very happily spend a couple of days on North Terrace visiting the gardens, the gallery, the museum, the Mod Discovery Centre, the jam factory. There's a whole range of these cultural institutions that allow you to kind of create a mixed experience. But also for locals, for Adelaideans, there's this sense that, yes, if you go into the city, depending on the weather conditions or depending on the exhibitions that are on at a given time, you've got that critical mass of interest. You've got that sense of there will always be something that's worth your time, that's worth coming in and having a look at. And I think that's fabulous. (...) 

[Cedric] And you were talking about this question about audiences and maybe a kind of competition about the visitors to use their leisure time. Yes. (...) How do you deal with the advantages of partnerships with their institution? And is there a kind or so of competition?

Yeah, I don't see other cultural institutions as really being competitors. I think the cultural sector is in 

But I think a visitor that is a regular museum visitor or a regular gallery visitor will also be a gardens visitor. So I think over the course of a year, actually by doing partnership projects with other cultural institutions, we create more opportunities for all of us.(...) So I don't think that's really when we think about competition. I don't think we're in competition with the museum or the gallery for people's time. I think there is a broader competition for that sense of am I going to be culturally active? Am I going to be visiting these places? So I think if the museum is successful, we will be successful because more people are out and about visiting cultural institutions and engaging with culture. And in fact, over the last year, that's what we've seen, that where we've had good increases in visitation, so has the museum and so has the gallery. So I think off the back of the pandemic and the opening up of people's time and people's capacity to get out and about again, there is a real desire to do that and a real desire to re-engage with cultural institutions. So I think, yeah, I don't feel a sense of competition.

[Cedric] And so the more propositions there are for visitors, more visitors will come, in fact. 

[Michael] That's exactly right. Yeah, we collectively create a sense that actually going out and engaging with your local cultural institutions becomes a more natural part of life. It's what you do. And so I think if, as I say, if the museum and the gallery have a fantastic public offer, that will lead to more visitors for us because visitors will be coming out and engaging more. And in a similar vein, if we are doing fantastic programming in the gardens, I will see the other North Terrace institutions benefiting from that. (...) And the zoo as well as an outdoor site.(...) I think it's not uncommon thing for people to spend half a day in the Botanic Gardens and half a day at the zoo. And that's their day out. (...) 

You hear a new amenities block being built. So as you will have heard from all of the noise going on, we are living in a combination of gardens and buildings ourselves at the moment. But it will be very good when these are finished and we're able to have them open.

[Cedric] Would like to add something?

[Michael] Well, one of the things I was going to say was the other thing as having had a background in natural history and natural history museums, of course, when you look at a garden, you're also not just looking at a plant collection, you're looking at an ecosystem. So we're seeing and hearing a multitude of bird species. We have a whole range of the plants don't function without the soil organisms, without the insects, without the fungi.

And so actually, when I said earlier that a botanic gardens is a living natural history museum, I mean that in its truest sense, that you have every type of life here and we're a real biodiversity hotspot. So we're exactly right. So among all of the parklands around Adelaide, of course, as a botanic garden, we've probably got the greatest level of diversity, both of plants, but also of wildlife. So I say it's a natural history museum brought to life in the truest possible sense.

Because one of the challenges of the natural history museum is to talk about life with dead things. 

So one of the things we've started doing is as well as providing interpretation on the plants. We've actually started to talk about the ecosystems as a whole. So we've put up some information for the public about the bird life in the gardens. We're starting to run programs that look holistically about the role of plants in ecosystems more broadly. And some of our artistic program, we actually have contemporary artists coming in and working with our collections, both our living collections and our preserved collections, to create art exhibitions that explore themes around natural history, around conservation, (...) around sustainability in a broader sense. So I think it's the garden's collection as a whole and the site as a whole really gives a community of an artistic community, a creative community, an opportunity to do things that they wouldn't be able to do elsewhere. And I think that's one of the exciting things about being at a place like this.

[Cedric] And so gardens, the garden is moving from a bit of classification area to a more holistic and introducing also several approaches. 

[Michael] That's right. (...) And that's something that's happening across the botanic garden sector as a whole.

They, you know, we are seeing that gardens are taking an active role in going beyond, you know, work with plants is the core of what we do. And when we talk about our scientific work, it's very often about plant conservation. It's about understanding plants and, as I say, supporting bigger conservation projects. But in our public engagement, we're often seeing a broader range of topics able to be able to be explored.

You think we've got to give you an example. Here is our school holiday program for the April school holidays, which is just going through its rehearsals now. And as you can see, we're going a little bit beyond plants.

[Cedric] We can see dinosaurs. 

[Michael] Yes, we can.

So, yes, for these school holidays, we are we are releasing dinosaurs into the gardens and again talking about ways of getting people's attention and engaging new audiences.

I think one of the things I've always had a view in museums and I carry through into gardens that I think engaging a family audience and a new generation and a younger generation is a hugely important part of what we do, because in doing so, we're creating generations of people that will see museums and gardens as places to go for. 

[Cedric] To entertain, in fact, and to learn something. 

[Michael] Exactly right. Yeah. (...) And I know there is significant research in the museum sector that says that if you are taken to museums as a child and to gardens, you'll have a comfort with visiting them. They become familiar. They don't. They're therefore never threatening places to visit. They're comfortable places to visit. And so in in pursuing projects which attract a family audience and give people reasons to bring their children to museums, galleries and gardens, we're actually creating lifelong museum gallery and garden visitors. And I think that's again, we talk about competition. That's actually investment in our whole sector. That's something that helps all of us, which I think is a really important part of what we do. 

[Cedric] Maybe also to make visitors feel comfortable museums, gardens, everyone. (...) 

[Michael] Exactly. Don't be afraid to come. Exactly right. (...) And I think there is also something about some surprise and playfulness that these should be places that continually surprise you that your expectations are set so that when you come to the gardens, you think, oh, what will I see today? You know, there is there is no assumption about what you might see. And I think that's a wonderful thing to establish that a site like a gardens or museums leaves people going, let's go and find out what's on. Let's let's explore. And that spirit of exploration is is a lovely thing to be able to create.

[Cedric] Because it's kind of fitting as the stability of museums where they have to keep heritage, etc. I think visitors can have the feeling those institutions are not moving institutions. (...) So I saw one two years ago. Nobody moves. Nothing moves.

What do you think about the question? (...) Everyone now is or should be concerned about climate change and the environment issues?

What do you think of the role of such an institution?

[Michael] Yeah, I think it's hugely important. It's important that the Tannic Gardens and Natural History Museums are actually able to help people both understand the challenges of climate change, understand the urgency of the problem, but also see the potential solutions in that and to do so in ways which are familiar and speak directly to them. So interestingly, for the Botanic Gardens, climate change will be a problem for us. We will find particular species of plants harder to maintain in the gardens in a changing climate. We will have to change the way we manage the gardens. And so we can do that in a way which actually showcases things that visitors can do themselves to garden more sustainably or to. So, for example, we're currently renovating our Mediterranean garden and Adelaide is a Mediterranean climate. And so we're using this renovation as a way of demonstrating climate sensitive gardening and water sensitive gardening, which is something that actually we're all going to have to be aware of so we can actually use our project as a showcase for how visitors who are managing their own gardens in Adelaide can use native plants and can use plants that are highly suitable and pre adapted to this environment as climate changes to actually garden in a more sustainable way.(...) So it's something that I think should be an integral part of what we do.(...) And in the same vein, when we're talking about the whole ecosystem in a garden, we can then extrapolate out to the whole ecosystem more generally. And so talking about the complexity and fragility of an ecosystem and the interconnectedness of it so that you can actually really explain if climate impacts on particular species or group of species. What are the broader effects of that on a whole ecosystem and plants are fundamental to that. There are many times more endangered species of plants in Australia than there are endangered animals, but they don't always get that attention. So there's a chance in our programming to flag issues like that and to showcase our work directly in the conservation space and in in managing issues around climates and sustainability.

And it's a challenge for museums and gardens as well, because by our nature, we're actually potentially very energy hungry organizations. Museums have heritage spaces that have to be air conditioned that you need to be kept comfortable for visitors. You need to be able to manage the collection. (...) And so it's the same with us. We have the Botanic Gardens can be very hungry of water and energy. And so one of the things we need to do over the next several years is continually review our own processes and make sure that we ourselves can be a more sustainable organization year on year. So at the moment, we have a big solar panel project going on the roof of the Trambarn to try and improve our energy circumstance. We're using this wetland here to change the mix of water we use to irrigate the gardens. So we've got less reliance on the more energy intensive town water. And so for us, there are things we can do directly. And of course, in doing that, we can showcase examples of this is where actually the community in general can look at opportunities to improve the uses of energy, water and waste. (...) OK, because it's a challenge for the institution where we talk about exactly right to be kind of model. Yeah, correct. And so again, I think an opportunity for the sector. I've seen there are many museums that are doing this really well, that they're actually making   their energy use and their energy profile visible and public and talking about how they're taking steps to improve their energy and carbon footprint, which serves as a great example of a success story, because I think when you're talking about climate change and you're talking about the scale of economic changes that would need to be put in place over the coming years. To address climate change, talking about examples where this can be successfully achieved helps you make the problem not feel so big and so hopeless, if that makes sense.

[Cedric] And it's kind of a pragmatic way to approach not to be very theoretical or moral.

[Michael] Exactly right. Yeah. To be part of it. Yeah, exactly.

[Cedric] Thank you, Michael. It was great.

[Michael] No problem. Excellent. I hope that's what you need.