Ryan Newett is responsible for the propagation and nurturing of the Garden’s Living Collection, contract growing of some of the state's threatened plant species and maintaining potted collections in the nursery.
Ryan's specific skills and areas of expertise include plant husbandry, identifying and monitoring the best growing environment, and providing modifications or remedies for a vast number of species. A typical day for Ryan involves working with an expert team of plant propagators to perpetuate and develop the gardens’ living collection, and securing some of Australia’s rare and threatened species.
He will always remember the day he walked into the nursery at the Blue Mountains Botanic Garden Mount Tomah and saw the abundance of rare Wollemi pine plants and seedlings growing. He had heard about them and read the stories, but the realisation he would be working with these plants left him awestruck.
Ryan's passion for plants started at a young age, when he would eagerly anticipate the arrival of his father's Australian Geographic magazine, reading it twice before anyone else knew it had been delivered. His childhood dream of becoming a naturalist eventually led him to study Environmental and Urban Horticulture at the University of Technology Sydney and earning a Diploma in Horticulture specialising in landscape design at Ryde School of Horticulture. Before joining Botanic Gardens of Sydney in 2017, Ryan spent over two decades employed at some of Australia's leading retail, wholesale, and production nurseries.
He has a keen interest in the interaction plants have with pests and diseases, and the beneficial relationships between species. He is continually amazed at the unique physiology of each plant, admiring them for some facet, be it beauty, habitat, association, size, smell, appearance, feel or totipotence (the ability of a cell to give rise to unlike cells leading to the development a new organism or part).
