by The Field Collection at Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens contains cacti from around the world, a passion project for a local plant enthusiast, and an adventurous German botanist.
The story starts with Robert Blossfeld.
Born in 1882, Blossfeld was a German botanist who settled in Potsdam. A collector of exotic plants, he gradually turned his hobby into a successful mail order business.
Blossfeld published catalogues listing plants and seeds he had available, orders would come in from around the world. His customers were varied: other plant enthusiasts, academics, and commercial cultivators.
Blossfeld’s particular interests were cacti and succulents, and he endeavoured to track down the rarest specimens. A typical catalogue would list hundreds of species.
Blossfeld’s son, Harry, was born in 1913. Growing up surrounded by exotic plants, from an early age he determined to follow his father’s path.
Harry studied botany at Humboldt University in Berlin, after graduation he joined the family business. He would work in the field, hunting for new plant species, while his father catalogued the finds and filled the orders.
They were not alone.
Interest in the natural sciences boomed in the late 19th century. Technological advances allowed breakthroughs in a number of fields, the development of mass media meant these could be shared with a wider audience.
New forms of travel opened up areas of the world previously out of reach.
Botany was one area to receive a boost, and collecting plants became a common hobby. Plant dealers like the Blossfelds allowed people to experience some of the wider world, through the plants they supplied.
It was also highly competitive. Plant dealers competed with each other to obtain the most unusual varieties, to tempt their customers.
In the early 1930s, Harry Blossfeld set his sights on South America. Large parts of the continent were still not well explored by Europeans, it was likely to be a treasure trove of unknown plants.
An expedition from Europe was a large undertaking, so the Blossfelds came up with a novel means to fundraise. They advertised for subscribers, offering a cache of plants at the expedition’s conclusion in exchange for money upfront.
They called their offer, ‘cactus shares’.
Advertisements appeared in many countries. One of the people to reply, was Ralph Field.
Born in 1896, Ralph Field grew up on a property in Leongatha, in rural Victoria. His father was an avid gardener and collector of plants, in the family garden was a cactus called Opuntia, or ‘Prickly Pear’.
A hardy, lime green plant with flat, paddle-like leaves, Prickly Pear is a common species, found throughout the world.
When he was 12, Field read an article in ‘Boys Own’ magazine, describing how to grow a new cactus from a cutting. He tried this himself with the family Prickly Pear, and was thrilled when the experiment was successful: a new plant grew from his cutting.
This spurred an interest in cacti, that would grow into a passion.
On Christmas Day 1908, Field’s father brought him to Melbourne to visit the Royal Botanic Gardens. Nestled close to the city, on 38 hectares, the gardens are a haven for nature lovers and plant buffs.
Although at the turn of the century, its collection of cacti was modest.
Field was delighted anyway. During the visit he met the cacti garden’s curator, who, impressed by the young man’s enthusiasm, offered to let the Field’s take cuttings of any plants they were interested in.
Field’s father called one of his brothers, who shortly appeared with a truck. They returned home with thirty new plant samples.
As an adult, Field established himself on a farm near Tennyson, in the north of the state. Like his own father he had an extensive garden, and continued to collect plants.
Field borrowed a book on cacti from the Victorian State Library, this led him to private plant dealers selling the species he read about. He signed up for several plant catalogues, including the one produced by the Blossfelds.
In 1934 he saw the advertisement for their upcoming South American expedition. Excited by the thought of obtaining previously unknown species, Field bought £200 worth of shares.
Blossfeld’s first South American trip commenced in 1935, and would visit Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
Traveling with fellow collector Oreste Marsoner, their finds were plentiful. During the journey they gathered a number of new species, which Blossfeld sent back to his father in Germany.
He also documented his work in the journal ‘Kakteenkunde’, published by the German Cactus Society
A second expedition in 1936–37, again with Marsoner, yielded his most famous discovery: a tiny cactus native to northern Argentina, that was later determined to be the world’s smallest species. In 1937, it was named Blossfeldia liliputana in his honour.
This expedition also uncovered Espostoa blossfeldiorum from Peru and Ecuador, later introduced into horticulture.
In 1940, Blossfeld shifted his focus to orchids, travelling to Peru in search of rare species. One of his objectives was to collect samples of the Cattleya rex orchid; already highly prized, samples were rare due to its remote habitat.
Despite major transport challenges, and substantial losses of plants during shipping, Blossfeld successfully brought hundreds of Cattleya rex orchids back to São Paulo.
He sold these and other plants to the American Orchid Society, helping introduce new species to North America.
Blossfeld’s expeditions were curtailed by the Second World War. But having travelled more than 6 000 kilometres in the previous five years, he had identified dozens of new species; a genus of cacti would be named for him, to recognise his efforts.
After his father passed away, Blossfeld established a nursery in Sao Paulo, and continued to cultivate and sell plants around the world. He also fulfilled the cactus shares of his financial supporters.
In the late 1930s, Ralph Field received return on his investment; a shipping container arrived in Melbourne from South America, containing around 1 000 cactus plants. Many of the species were new to Australia.
Field transported his haul back to his farm, and set up a dedicated cactus garden.
He would continue to add to this as the years passed, building it into one of Australia’s largest private plant collections. He also ran a nursery, and sold cacti to other collectors around the country.
‘Anyone in Australia with a sizeable collection of cacti, will have plants that had their origins in Ralph Field’s original collection.’
– Cactus Society of Australia
When Field died in 1987, he bequeathed his collection to his son, Robert. Robert shared his father’s passion, and continued to add new species.
The Field Collection eventually contained more than 3 000 plants.
In 2020, Robert Field decided to transfer the collection to the Royal Botanic Gardens. Now an elderly man himself, he found the upkeep on the plants too demanding.
He told the ABC it ‘would put a smile’ on his father’s face, for them to go the institution that helped ignite his lifelong hobby.
Transporting such a large collection was not easy. Collectively, the cacti weighed more than 300 kilograms, and many required careful packing in fabric to prevent damage.
Nineteen trucks were required to deliver them from Tennyson to Melbourne.
A purpose-built new area was built to display them. Landscape architect Andrew Laidlaw designed the new garden, based on the structure of an aloe plant.
About 1300 plants from 200 species are now there on display, three-quarters of them from the Field Collection.
To visit the Arid Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens is to take a trip into an alien landscape.
Here are tentacles and suckers, round spiky balls and towering stalks. One species is covered in what looks like cobwebs, one has tendrils that would not look out of place in a Marvel movie.
I can’t say I have previously been that interested in cacti, but here is something fascinating. The collected species are really beautiful to look at, and so unusual.
We live in Melbourne, a city of cloudy grey skies and erratic sun. Without the Field Collection, these plants would not be available here.
To one side of the Arid Garden is an information plaque, recording the history of the collection, and the efforts of Harry Blossfeld. There is one grainy black and white photo: a pick up truck, somewhere in a remote spot in South America.
The land is desolate, the weather looks hot. Blossfeld sits beside his truck, looking at the camera, surrounded by countless cactus plants.
