Category Archives: News

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.

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.

JABG and JSTOR

Recently, Michelle Waycott, Chief Botanist of the State Herbarium of South Australia, signed an agreement with the not-for-profit organisation JSTOR on behalf of the Board of the Botanic Gardens & State Herbarium: The Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens (JABG) will soon be available through the JSTOR shared digital library of scholarly content, to which the majority of Australian and overseas university and institutional libraries subscribe. This is in addition to free access through the Journal’s web-page, and strengthens the Journal’s presence in libraries worldwide.

This week, a complete set of back issues was couriered to JSTORs scanning facility in India, where the journal issues are scanned, OCRed and the final PDFs created. Hardcopy journals will be stored in perpetuity in JSTORs secure storage facility in the United States.

The Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens is a peer-reviewed open-access journal, publishing papers in plant systematics, evolution, biogeography, taxonomy, nomenclature and related botanical fields, with a focus on Australia and the region. It is one of five botanical journals published by Australian herbaria and botanic gardens. Articles are published online and in hardcopy; all back issues are available on the Journal’s web-page.

In addition, the State Herbarium of South Australia is also a partner of JSTOR Global Plants, contributing very high resolution images of herbarium type specimens as part of the Global Plants Initiative (GPI). This initiative aims to digitise and make available plant type specimens from around the world, together with other botanical resources, for research purposes.

AVH milestone achieved

The State Herbarium of South Australia holds approx. 1,036,000 specimens, over two-thirds of which are databased (mainly Australian vascular plants). This specimen data is available online through

the State Herbarium’s eFloraSA web-site (Plant distribution mapper tool and google map function in the Census of SA plants, algae and fungi)
Australia’s Virtual Herbarium (AVH), with the data also being projected on the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

This week, AVH has achieved the milestone of over 5,000,000 herbarium records from Australian herbaria being available online. This includes over 660,000 records from the State Herbarium, the majority of which (c. 477,000 records) are of South Australian plants. Other interstate herbaria contribute over 120,000 records of specimens collected in South Australia. Though this collaborative effort, it is now possible to provide a more detailed picture of the distribution of plants in South Australia and nationwide.