Steve Hopper

I managed Kings Park and Botanic Garden for 12 years before going to Kew.

That's in Perth.

That's in Perth.

And it was a regional garden focused on the local flora and conservation.

And the director, then director of Kew, Peter Crane, liked what he saw we were doing.

And Kew was after someone experienced in conservation.

So, you know, for my sins, I was...

I was invited to take on the role.

And the beauty of Kew is it's, I call it the United Nations of Botany.

It's a global collection, one of the biggest collections of living and herbarium specimen plants in the world.

At the time I joined, it had 800 staff.

250 were scientists.

And it was in collaboration with countries around the world, about 100 different countries.

So as an opportunity for me to see if this new body of theory I'd cooked up might have relevance beyond Australia, it was just a superb opportunity from that point of view.

The other thing that sold it to me and my wife was that we rented the director's house.

which is right on the boundary of Kew.

Until the gates opened to the public at 10 o'clock, we had 300 acres of this tremendous diversity of plants and great history in botany to ourselves.

Absolutely, only seven miles from the heart of the city.

We just reveled in it.

You could walk and see different things every day because the collections were so rich.