Watton, Geoffrey   (c.1930 - )

Born in South Australia around 1930 and has lived in Adelaide all his life.

From 1945 he was employed as a Survey Draftsman in the Engineering and Water Supply Department of the South Australian Government.

He became interested in Australian flora in 1958, joined the Society for Growing Australian Plants, and has been a keen grower of native plants ever since.

At that time he also became interested in the new developments in colour photography, especially applied to plants and 'close ups'. This led to the first of 21 trips across the Nullarbor from 1967 to 2011 with his wife Beryl, mostly with a caravan, to the South West, to find and photograph the plants from Esperance to Kalbarri region.

With Ivan Holliday he has published several books in the field guide series.

Over these years he became particularly interested in the 'Banksias'. Following Alex George's revision in 1981, he had to travel extensively in the West and also the East to locate all the new species. Their latest edition 'Banksias - A Field & Garden Guide', a complete revision, was published in 2008 with the financial assistance of the APS, (South. Aust. Reg).

In Adelaide he became known as 'The Banksia Man' and in 1969 began an extensive arboretum of WA Banksias on a local Reservoir site in the Adelaide hils. His intention then was to grow every Western species, but the 1981 revision put an end to that. This collection was eventually used by the South Australian Waite Research institute for experiments in cross pollination of some species. This eventualy led to three new cultivars of Banksia.

Photography

In 1967 his camera was a Praktica Nova Reflex for 35mm colour slides using up to three extension tubes for 'close up' work and, of course, a lght metre. In 1976 he bought the latest Canon AE1 Single Lens Reflex camera, 35mm model with changeable 'close up' lens producing colour slides and finally in 2006 a Fujifilm Digital Finepix S5600 camera, unfortunately without a 'cose up' lens.

In 2019 he offered to donate part of his photograph collection to the Australian National Botanic Gardens' Australian Plant Image Index (APII) and these images are being added to this national collection.

Source: Extracted from:
Back-cover flap, 'A Garden Guide to Eucalypts', Holliday & Watton, 1980
Pers.Comm. Geoff Watton (2019)
Portrait Photo: Seeking portrait.