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Contents
President’s chat;
Plants for the New Year;
IPHA Committee members and vacancies;
Introducing New Committee Member;
Bush Fruit Field Day. Mapleton, Qld;
Cyanotype Botanical Workshop;
IPHA field day at Yarrawa hall report;
Persoonia conservation and the power of community;
Yarning Garden Project Update;
Turning Pineapple Leaves into Beautiful Fabric;
Grassroots Botany for Herbalists report;
Food and Medicine Sovereignty – Groups Making a Difference;
Visit to West Woombye
Excerpt
Persoonia conservation and the power of community
In the lower Hunter Valley, a new nature reserve has become a sanctuary for one of Australia’s rarest plants, with scientists, First Nations leaders and the local community collaborating…
In autumn this year a contingent of people,… descended on Tiraki Nature Reserve bearing shovels and chatter, to create two new populations of the North Rothbury Persoonia. The planting event was led by Katie Elsley from the NSW Saving our Species program and Riley McGee from NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Although this was the fifth planting to occur, something new was underway. Each plant had a unique identification number and was clustered in a specifically selected group. Dr Samantha Yap, one of the planters, is also the geneticist from the Research Centre for Ecosystem Resilience (ReCER) at the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, who used genetic data to design these new plantings.
“Persoonia pauciflora occurs in such a highly fragmented and small geographic area that, when we create a new conservation population, we want to make sure we are representing as much of the wild genetic diversity as possible,” Dr Yap says. “Using genetics, we designed the planting clusters so that each individual is a unique genotype, or unrelated to another. That way we capture all the wild diversity and simultaneously encourage visiting bees to cross-pollinate plants, which we hope will produce genetically diverse seedlings”…
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Indigenous Plants for Health, Inc. 