You are cordially invited to a press conference on the occasion of the 215th anniversary of the Botanical Garden on Friday 11 July at 11:00 at the Botanical Garden of the University of Ljubljana, Primula Teahouse.

Another year has come and gone and we have been quite active again in the past year. The past year has been marked above all by the expansion of our international cooperation. The exchange of plants between continents is becoming more and more difficult due to different conventions, so we are trying to establish direct contacts with individual distant countries in order to acquire new interesting plant species.

For example, last year we made contact with the Malaysian Embassy and in the spring we received two large packages of very interesting tropical species that we did not have before. We have also established cooperation with the Indian Embassy, with whom we have jointly prepared a permanent exhibition on Ayurvedic plants. Similarly, we have started a cooperation with the Brazilian Embassy, through which we also hope to exchange tropical plant species in the future. 

Cooperation with the Sydney Botanic Garden and BGCI continues, with the very interesting international Wollemi Pine Metacollection project, where we are regularly monitoring six Wollemi plants that are progressing very well in our Botanic Garden.  In honour of this collaboration, we have published an e-book with some more interesting facts about the 30th anniversary of the description of this species, and for the first time we have also published our interview with one of the researchers involved in the discovery and description of Wolleemia, Wyn Jons.

We also have a long-standing collaboration with Sun Yat-sen University of Tiawan, which has been running since 2014. This year, we had four professors from the university visit us. We are still well-known worldwide for our research on bluebells, which has led to the establishment of contacts with the Osnabruck Botanic Garden, with whom we will be researching bluebell populations in relation to their pollinators in the future. Together with the Alpine Garden Society from England and the Zagreb Botanic Garden, we started in June the project Seed conservation in the Dinaric Alps.

The importance of such contacts is also demonstrated by the history of the garden and the book published this year on the collaboration between N.T. Host and Franco Hladnik. It is an account of the collaboration between Vienna and Ljubljana that gave birth to two native flora gardens.


*The press conference will be held in all weathers, in case of rain we will provide an alternative venue.