By the St Andrew Botanic Garden team

The team at St Andrews Botanic Garden are currently writing a policy document for the garden which is going to do a similar job to a Collections Policy. We’re calling it our Biodiversity Plan, to emphasise that it includes not just the plants that we define as part of the collection, but all of those plants that appear without our intervention, or sometimes even in spite of it! This document should not only help us with all kinds of day-to-day decisions about what we are growing, how we are growing it, and most importantly, why we are growing it, but also give a strategic basis for our education programme and garden investment across three business plan cycles.

As a core part of our research, we would like to establish a set of plants which are the focus of in-depth, long-term monitoring. By focusing on a limited number of plants, we should be able to build up a really detailed picture of a range of features, such phenology, functional traits, demographics and response to varying environmental conditions. This will give us a strong baseline, and we can then start using our data to answer questions involving plant adaptation, invasion debt, range shifting and plasticity.

Working with partners in different places will mean that we can compare the effect of different growing conditions, and we’re hoping to build a network both here in the UK and further afield. This could be really important for helping us to forecast how plants will behave under different climate breakdown scenarios, for example. Have you ever noticed a plant in the garden and thought: “hmm…. with a couple of degrees extra warmth, that will be away”? Being able to make that kind of prediction could help us avoid future invasive problems before it’s too late.

In order to get a really robust data set, we’ll need to measure the same things in the same way at every site. The data we gather will be freely accessible, either through established databases such as Compadre or TRY, or through our own website. Making data available quickly will be important so that near term ecological forecasts are possible, and so it can be more useful to partners and land managers.

Of course, the tricky part will be to narrow down the list of plants, since there are so many fascinating ones to chose from…. We’d love to hear about which plants you think are interesting, perhaps they are doing things in a way we don’t yet understand, or moving about in ways we didn’t expect….. If there are any plants you are growing that you think should be in the mix, please get in touch and let us know. And if you are already doing something similar, we’d love to hear about it.

Please do get in touch with us to share the plants you think are interesting or if you would like to join in with this project. Contact St Andrews Botanic Garden Curator, Beccy Middleton: bmiddleton@standrewsbotanic.org.