By Carolyn Webb
Ruth Harris , Jenny Happell , Jayne Salmon and Judy Woodfull (left to right) who have each volunteered for 30 years as tour guides at the Royal Botanic Gardens.Credit: Jason South
As a Royal Botanic Gardens tour guide for 30 years, Jenny Happell has enjoyed meeting people from all walks of life. But she has had it with 14-year-olds.
She remembers leading a "ghastly" class of bored teens. "We got to the nymphea lily lake and the boys started throwing the girls' hats into the lake," she says. "Nobody was interested in the gardens."
Happily, that lot was a rarity. "People are so appreciative," Mrs Happell said on a glorious spring Monday afternoon.
Last week she hosted a group of botanists from Nanjing, China — who gave her a beautiful silk scarf. They hung on every word, and only left after three hours because they were due at Phillip Island.
Gardens chief executive Tim Entwisle thanked Mrs Happell and three other women – Jayne Salmon, Ruth Harris and Judy Woodfull – for each being volunteer guides for 30 years.
In their honour, he oversaw planting of a rare Melanesian kauri tree, Agathis vitiensis, in a garden bed on a Gardens' south side, challenging the four women to find out why it's called "vitiensis". "It's from Fiji," Mrs Happell shot back. Ensis meaning "from", and it was "from an island called Viti-something or other".
Later Mrs Happell said that if she doesn't know the answer to a visitor's question she will ask for their phone number or email, and find out for them.
The Gardens' tour guide program started in 1981 with volunteers showing around wives of delegates to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Melbourne.
Mrs Happell had a friend in the first volunteer intake and it sounded like fun. She loved plants but was "pretty ignorant" about them.
"The training in those days [1983] was basic. We were told that if we had older people we shouldn't take them up steep slopes." A gardener "pointed out a few trees", and they were told to study Richard Pescott's book on the history of the gardens.
Today, Mrs Happell is an expert in camellias, having helped identify 950 different types of them in the Gardens, and is confident expounding on plants to people of all ages and backgrounds.
Fellow volunteer Jayne Salmon drives from her Geelong home once a fortnight to lead tours.
Mrs Salmon was nervous before her first tour – with a woman who, it turned out, was an Age journalist. "I remember thinking, 'is my knowledge good enough?' And 'are they going to ask questions that I don't know'?"
Today, she loves "talking to people and sharing my passion". "I think I do know a bit about the plants. You build up all this knowledge over time. But there's still a lot to learn, the gardens keep changing. They uncovered Guilfoyle's volcano [an early stone irrigation system], they're just about to put a boardwalk through the fern gully. There's always something exciting going on."
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