Sankowsky, Garry   (fl. 1990s - 2020s)

Hometown: Bundaberg, Queensland

Garry Sankowsky has been studying and photographing Australian wildife for decades, and his immense knowledge and glorious images bring the subject to life.

In the summer of 1982 Garry & Nada Sankowsky moved from Mt Tamborine to North Queensland to set up a butterfly farm. They finally settled for a rural residential block of 5 acres (2.5 ha) with town water. It has deep basalt soil and is just outside the "Golden Triangle" agricultural region of the Atherton Tableland.

Because our initial aim was to breed butterflies, the types of plants that they planted in the first couple of years were heavily biased towards butterfly host plants. They brought two thousand plants with them from Mt Tamborine, which gave them a good start.

They thought (and rightly so, as has been proven) that the dry climate just outside the rainforest belt would enable them to grow plants from many types of habitats and climates. The average rainfall is 1048 mm.

After they stopped breeding butterflies they turned the butterfly breeding cage into a fernery where they now grow a large number of native ferns and other delicate plants under 70% and 80% shade cloth.

As they wanted to make their garden a proper scientific botanical garden they divided the plantings into grids of about 10m x 10m squares so the plants could be accurately located and recorded. Almost all the plants are from wild collections and this gives them scientific integrity.

Each plant receives a number and is recorded in a database along with the locality where it was collected, which plot number it is in, when it was planted, along with other information such as when it first flowered.

In the garden there are over 9000 plants representing at least 2700 species. These are mostly rainforest plants from tropical Australia.

Because of the scientific nature of the plant collection the garden is often used by scientists studying various aspects of botany and plant biology.

Over the years the authors have accumulating huge numbers of photographs and amounts of data on Australian tropical plants. Rather than have numerous different volumes of the CD manufactured they are duplicating them themselves. Version 5 is now out and contains 2,460 species and 15,000 images.

If flowers are included for a species there will be a very close up image of the flower which will be of use for comparing closely related species.

While travelling around they also voluntarily collect specimens for various Australian herbaria. They also provide their images to these institutions for their online herbaria.

Sales of other products on their website help in the ongoing funding of the 'Australian Tropical Plants' project and the voluntary work carried out by Garry and Nada Sankowsky for various scientific institutions.

Link to their website here.
A detailed history of their garden here

Source: Extracted from:
http://rainforestmagic.com.au
http://rainforestmagic.com.au/zodiac%20gardens.html
Portrait Photo: (1) 2007, M.Fagg; (2) Garry and Nada (their website)

Collecting localities for 'Sankowsky, G.' from AVH (2024)

Data from 5,432 specimens