Golson, Toby   (1965 - )

Legal name: Simon Golson, (used on collecting permits)

Born on 16 May, 1965, in Canberra, ACT;

Graduated with a Diploma of Horticulture, Canberra CIT Weston, ACT in 2000.

He commenced as a horticulturalist at ANBG in April 2000 and was handed custodianship of the rainforest living collections whose development was the primary focus under the then current plan of management.

In June 2001, with collections officer Stuart Donaldson, he set out for a fortnight trip targeting windfalls of Dendrobium falcorostrum in the higher altitude areas of the NSW north coast: Barrington Tops, Willi Willi, New England and Border Ranges National Parks. This initial expedition was further supplemented in 2003, 2004 and 2005. Another focus of collecting was the Cambewarra Range to the west of Nowra.

With the loss of the collections officer position in 2008, field collection went into a hiatus for several years but was revived in 2011 with a focus moving to rare and endangered taxa of the NSW south and central coasts. A genetically rich collection of the restricted Illawarra rainforest endemic Daphnandra johnsonii was amassed and associated wild collections were made of almost all NSW rainforest species at their southern limits.

In 2014, half-funded by the Friends of the ANBG, he made a shift to pursuing material of the listed Cadellia pentastylis at its southern limit in the Gunnedah area and this led to an influx of sympatric dry rainforest species into the collection as the trip continued up the west of the divide to Gladstone in Queensland.

He took part in a Bush Blitz expedition to Oxley Wild Rivers N.P. in 2015.

In 2019 he had the opportunity to collect in the cloud forests of the Wet Tropics as part of the Tromps project to secure climate change threatened flora in ex situ botanic garden collections.

In 2023 he gained a BGANZ professional development grant to spend time in Bulburin N.P. looking at the listed endemic Macadamia jansenii and subsequently on to more dry rainforest in the Mary River Valley.

In 2024, he returned to some of the old collecting haunts from previous years en route to a conference in Ballina.

Note: He collected as 'Golson, T.' but collecting permits were under his legal name 'Simon Golson'

Collections
While a search on 'Golson, T.' in the ANBG collection records shows 1,134 collections, many of these were live material, cuttings or seeds, mostly not vouchered in the field. These are usually vouchered once established as living plants when fertile material is available (thus a different 'Collector').
Toby's actual field-collected herbarium specimens in 2024 only numbered 126 collections.

Source: Extracted from: Pers.Comm. Toby Golson (2024)
Portrait Photo: 2024, M.Fagg

Herbarium specimen collecting localities for 'Golson, T.' from AVH (2024)

Data from 126 herbarium specimens