56 How Does Your Garden Grow?

As you tend your garden this summer, spare a thought for Alison Vaughan, responsible for no less than 1.5 million precious botanical specimens. As collections manager at the National Herbarium of Victoria, which dates back to 1853, Alison stewards a vast archive of past and present biodiversity that illuminates our social and ecological history and provides tools to build a better future. Why did a 500-year-old aquatic moss from Switzerland end up in drawer in Naarm/Melbourne? How is the Herbarium at once a colonial institution and a resource to remedy environmental ills of colonisation? What does repatriation mean in the context of botanical archives? And whose are the hidden hands that built this continent’s oldest settler scientific institution?

You can listen to 56 How Does Your Garden Grow? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

56 How Does Your Garden Grow? is an episode from Archive Fever by Clare Wright and Yves Rees.

This episode is 39:58 long.

This episode was published on Dec 19, 2025.

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