A Canberra researcher who has devoted more than 25 years to the study of orchids has been recognised by the Royal Horticultural Society in London.
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The Westonbirt Orchid Medal is awarded to individuals for "scientific, literary or any other outstanding personal achievement in connection with orchids".
"I'm quite chuffed, to use an English word, about it," Dr Mark Clements said.
In his office at the CSIRO's Australian National Herbarium before leaving for London last week, Dr Clements signed a copy of his book, The Allure of Orchids, for a budding botanist and university student.
All of this seems a long way from potting his father's orchids in Adelaide.
Dr Clements was a wool classer on some of the world's biggest stations before moving to the ACT as a gardener and turning his attention to orchids.
He studied at Canberra University and ANU, earning a PhD in plant cell biology. He's now a research scientist for the Department of the Environment.
In the 1980s, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew on the outskirts of London called on Dr Clements for help saving the lady's slipper orchid - of which there was one remaining plant.
"That one plant had been the one plant left in England for nearly 30 years and the Nature Conservancy Council used to keep a guard on it 24 hours a day, for the whole time it was flowering each year," Dr Clements said.
He found a way of convincing the "notoriously difficult" plant to germinate.
"There are now, I think it's 14 or 16, populations of seedings of that species back in the wild in England. They grew hundreds of them," he said.
Closer to home, Dr Clements advises the government on the listing of threatened species, or on infrastructure projects where orchids are affected.
The Bulahdelah Bypass road project, for example, cut through the terrain of three threatened species, including one "very strange, underground" orchid.
Dr Clements and a team worked on the project for more than five years, moving orchids from the road's path.
The orchids he works with are quite different from the "fluffy" ones you would buy at Bunnings, he said, which are mass produced in Taiwan.
He said people wouldn't recognise most orchids, which often have small botanical flowers, or are tiny, or wrapped around another plant.
He reckons people became fascinated with orchids when early explorers started bringing back specimens from all over the world.
"The aristocracy liked orchids because they're big, showy things, so they would often fund people to go out and collect them," he said.
But orchids are an interesting group of plants from a scientific point of view, in Australia too, which has about 1300 species so far documented.
"All other flowering plants on Earth have what's called double fertilisation. In orchids that doesn't happen," Dr Clements said.
"The whole family, even the most primitive orchids, have that feature, the evolutionary step that orchids made to separate them from other plants.
"That was about 85 million years ago."
