The Ornamental Plant Conservation Association of Australia

The OPCA has an extra A now:

The OPCAA (Ornamental Plant Conservation Association of Australia, Inc.) was formed about 14 ago by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, after they carried out a survey of plant cultivars growing in Victoria.

As part of the survey a list was made of tree and shrub cultivars from Victorian nursery catalogues since 1855. This list contained dramatically more plants than are now available. Reasons for the decline include changes in fashion, difficulty of propagation, difficulty of cultivation and disappearance of poor cultivars. However, a major factor is the loss of plants when a nursery closes down, a plant collector moves or dies or a garden changes hands. This haphazard selection of our current range of cultivated plants is unsatisfactory.

In England the NCCPG (National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens) started the national collections movement to bring together comprehensive reference collections of important groups of plants in order to conserve the wealth of cultivated plant material in existence and to make decisions about priorities for plant preservation.

Concerned about the loss of significant cultivated plants in Victoria, the Royal Botanic Gardens established an Ornamental Plants Collections Committee.

From these humble beginnnings OPCAA boasts a broad membership in most states of Australia. OPCAA encourages collection holders to obtain all species within the genera of their interest.

The OPCAA works closely with Botanic gardens within Australia and around the world trying to increase the gene pool of cultivated plants.

This is a voluntary organisation, under the auspices of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. From an original six collections, it has now grown to nearly 70 of both native and introduced genera. We are particularly looking for possible geophytic materials for our collections.

Currently, alpines are poorly represented on our registry. To become a collection holder one does not need all within the genera, but one needs to be earnestly, and vigorously, working towards collecting the entire genera.

OPCAA, with its network of global growing contacts, helps collection holders reach this aim! OPCAA is working towards becoming fully online at which time we will have our own web page.

When this occurs I will notify Gary's readers.

Some of the people within the OPCAA who you may know are Rodger Elliot, well-known writer of Australian gardening books and a radio personality.