Author Archives: Jürgen

New artwork created in the Herbarium

This is a first look at artwork created by Lisa Waters inspired by her research on Jessie L. Hussey.

Lisa Waters is a Technical Officer at the State Herbarium, although her background is as a visual artist and scientific illustrator. She has created artwork for various botanical publications and exhibitions.

Jessie L. Hussey lived from 1862–1899 in Port Elliot. Her passion for botany helped her to make a significant and pioneering contribution to the knowledge of South Australia’s terrestrial and marine flora during the 1890s. She became a respected collaborator of many leading national and international botanists and phycologists.

Lisa says

…through the slow simple process of letters and parcels sent by ship, Jessie collaborated on a global scale with scientists abroad. This image is of a ship made of actual algal specimens that she sent to Prof. Jacob Agardh in Lund, Sweden.

Since 2008 Lisa has been researching the life and work of Jessie L. Hussey. In 2012 she travelled to Europe on a Churchill Fellowship, to visit herbaria in Sweden, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland, where specimens collected by Jessie L. Hussey are held. The project is ongoing and she aims to publish a book about Jessie, which will be illustrated by artwork inspired by the research and Jessie’s life. Lisa has also given presentations on her research.

Please keep following this blog to see more of Lisa’s artwork in the future.

Kangaroo Island Fungi and Art

It’s All About the Plants
Tuesday, 2 September 2014, 10:00–12:00
Ground Floor Meeting & Lunch Room, Tram Barn

by Pam Catcheside
Honorary Research Associate, State Herbarium of South Australia

Pam will explore the theme of fungi and art as it pertains to the KI fungi.

Kangaroo Island’s large area of remnant vegetation houses a very rich diversity of fungi. New species of fungi have been found there as well as many new records of fungi for South Australia, together with species of rare fungi. Fungi are not only essential for life on earth, but their variety, importance, beauty and strangeness make them members of an intriguing and often elusive kingdom.

Kangaroo Island artists demonstrate an involvement, empathy and ability to show different aspects of their environment. They will be illustrating the fungal kingdom in next year’s SALA art exhibition at the National Wine Centre, organised by Fleur and Fred Peters of Fine Art KI.

All Herbarium staff, honoraries, volunteers and students are welcome.
Morning tea provided.

Award-winning photo of Crepidotus sp. by David Catcheside

New Journal article, Aug. 2014

Rhododendron dissilistellatum

Today, the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens published an article (700kb PDF) by Lyn Craven describing three new species of Rhododendron from Sulawesi and New Guinea, and new combinations for six other taxa. This is one of the last papers by this author, who submitted the final manuscript three weeks before he passed away in mid-July 2014.

Lyn Craven was for many years a research botanist at the Australian National Herbarium, Canberra (CANB), and during the last few years an Honorary Research Fellow at this institution. His research focused on several groups, including Myrtaceae (non-eucalypt genera, especially Syzygium, Eugenia and Melaleuca incl. Callistemon), Malvaceae (Gossypium, Hibiscus), Ericaceae (Rhododendron), Fabaceae (Glycine), Boraginaceae (Heliotropium) and other plants from Australia, Malesia and the Pacific. In collaboration with Brendan Lepschi, he also authored the treatment for several genera of Myrtaceae for the new edition of Flora of South Australia, which will be published later this year. More information on Lyn’s life and work will be published in a forthcoming article in the Australasian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter.

To access content of all volumes of the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens since 1976, please visit the journal’s web-site at flora.sa.gov.au/jabg.

Life in the pond: Bloomin’ algae

Patches of Vaucheria frigida at the margin of the Botanic Gardens pond

State Herbarium staff member Carolyn Ricci and Hon. Research Associate Bob Baldock from the Algae Unit report on algae found in the new Botanic Gardens stormwater recycling ponds: this time on a species of Vaucheria…

Vaucheria frigida mat (AD-A96476)

A dark green, velvety patch about 1.5 m across has appeared on the banks of the northernmost wetland storage pond. It stands out in texture and colour from the extensive band of grass-green mosses now growing there. Under the microscope, snake-like, twisted threads full of disc-shaped chloroplasts reveal it is a remarkable alga — Vaucheria frigida — and not a moss. This is the first time that this species has been recorded for the Southern Lofty (SL) region.

Vaucheria belongs to the yellow-green algae group, the Xanthophyceae. This is not a green alga or common “pond slime”. Its microscopic threads are generally not partitioned into separate cells. With no cross walls, the whole mass we see at the pond could theoretically be a single plant originating from a single spore.

This group of alga stores oil rather than starch and reproduction is even more remarkable. Male and female structures share the same stalk in this species: the female (oogonium) is a thick-walled globe of chloroplasts and oil droplets, the male (antheridium) a twisted or coiled little cylinder developing numerous sperms each with two whiplashes, enabling them to swim, then gain entrance through an opening in a small beak of the female structure. Vaucheria can spread also by releasing swollen blobs of cell contents that have a surface of numerous paired whiplashes, propelling the blob (zoospore) through water.

Twisted threads without cross walls

This algae can inhabit fresh or slightly saline water, or live on moist soil, as has happened in the Botanic Gardens pond population. Five species of Vaucheria associated with marine situations (but not this one) are recorded in the late Prof. Womersley’s Marine benthic flora of south-eastern Australia.

We hope you agree that the blooming of the small and unusual in and around the ponds deserves a closer look—perhaps a student might one day take up the challenge?

Globe-shaped female and twisted male structure (the latter empty of contents)

Herbarium in the news

The recent issue of SA Life magazine featured an article on the State Herbarium of South Australia and its collections. Michelle Waycott (Chief Botanist) & Peter Canty (State Herbarium manager) were interviewed about our work and presented highlights from the herbarium’s collections.

In the Old Tram Barn on the eastern fringe of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, there is a daisy collected by Joseph Banks at Bustard Bay in Queensland on May 23, 1770 […] Nearby is a leek orchid found by Matthew Flinders’s botanist Robert Brown at Port Lincoln in 1803 […] These are not paintings or prints or sketches. These are the very plants collected by Banks, Brown […] up to 244 years ago.

Campbell, L. & Lewis, T. (2014). Rich pickings: A link with Captain Cook is in our midst, at a little-known place that is celebrating 60 years of keeping a close eye on everything that grows in SA. SA Life 11(8): 92-94.