Colonial women plant collectors

Title: Colonial women plant collectors.

Subject: The women and girls in Baron von Mueller’s plant collecting network—exploring their contributions to Australian science.

Based at the Melbourne Botanic Garden and Herbarium, 1853–1896, Baron von Mueller set up an Australia-wide network of over one and a half thousand plant collectors. About 12% were women and girls, a greater percentage than in any comparable contemporary British network.

photograph, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria

‘Working in parallel with Mueller, the collectors, in various ways, used their relationships with him to promote Australian botany as an Australian undertaking—defining it in contrast not only to the imperial project of the Kew botanists but also against a backdrop of the dispossession of First Nations Peoples.’

Maroske, 2022.

‘The collectors embedded their new knowledge of native plants into the practices of everyday life, learning to identify species growing nearby, displaying, growing and selling native plants and seeds, and depicting local vegetation in the decorative and literary arts.’

Maroske, 2022.

‘The collectors embedded their new knowledge of native plants into the practices of everyday life, learning to identify species growing nearby, displaying, growing and selling native plants and seeds, and depicting local vegetation in the decorative and literary arts.’

Michelle Leber, poet and collage artist, Western Port Bay, Victoria

Libby Robin, Professor Emerita in Environmental History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT