Science, Art, and Seaweed: A Conversation with Anne Daffertshofer, Curator for the Arts and Cultural Programmes of the St Andrews Botanic Garden

An art historian walks into a botanic garden… no, it’s not the start of a joke. Against a backdrop of golden leaves and a setting sun, Anne Daffertshofer, the Arts and Cultural Programmes Curator for the St Andrews Botanic Garden, took me on a walk. Daffertshofer joined the team in April 2025 after finishing her PhD at the University. Her thesis, titled ‘Anthropocene Mobilities in Contemporary Art: Exploring a Movement-Oriented Lens in Times of Ecological Crisis,’ served as a perfect background for her work at the St Andrews Botanic Garden.

“Art was the only thing that ever really held my attention,” Daffertshofer said. “I'm so interested in society and what shapes us. I think that's, for me, what life is about — to learn new things and think with people. Artworks are an extension of that.”

Although art acted as a mainstay in Daffertshofer’s life, her childhood was also marked by an interest in environmentalism. “I remember learning about Greenpeace, and overfishing, the oceans, and stuff,” Daffertshofer said. “The first secondary school I went to was this Catholic girls’ school, and we had to give a presentation. There was a nun [who] was so upset with me because I kept trying to get my friends to sign a petition.”

Daffertshofer’s interest in art and the environment was fused with the discovery of two artworks — Daisy Ginsberg's Pollinator Pathmaker and Precious Okoyomon’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World. They played a significant role in her thesis, piquing her interest in the intersection between the environment and art, which now manifests perfectly in her job at the Botanic Garden.

“It's so funny, I think, the path that life takes you,” Daffertshofer said. “With this job, so much came together in terms of the way I was raised, and what I was interested in, but in ways that I didn't really anticipate before.”

Now, as a curator, Daffertshofer sees herself “as a mediator, like a bridge between the institution and ‘the art world,’” Daffertshofer explained. “I guess that's what really drew me to this specific botanic garden, and the idea of building an arts and culture programme here. This garden is really interested in challenging the expectations that people have about botanic gardens.”

Daffertshofer’s desire to question traditional concepts of the botanic garden came at the perfect time as the Garden undergoes a massive change. “Five years ago started a moment of big transition for the garden,” Daffertshofer explained. “One of the things that’s been done since then is to start the process of decommissioning our glass houses.”

The decision to deconstruct the glasshouses was made with the environment in mind, by reducing the garden’s carbon emissions by 98%. For Daffertshofer, the dismantling provided the opportunity to try something new. She said, “We have a lot of space that's all of a sudden available to create something different that plays into this role of what [...] a botanic garden [is].”

The former glasshouses have now become part of the Generator Garden, a region representative of brownfields — vacant areas previously developed and now capable of biodiversity. The visual juxtaposition that brownfields allow for is Daffertshofer’s favourite space. “You'll see that there [are] these dead wood hedges that provide habitat to different types of organisms,” she said. “And you see different types of dead wood arranged in different ways throughout the space, but you will also see these piles of rubble. You see all these different textures and colours, but again, not necessarily what you would expect.”

The art of testing boundaries falls into Daffertshofer’s wheelhouse. “As an art historian, I'm always interested in the visual aspect,” she said. “We get used to seeing things again and again, and so challenging the aesthetics of what people expect in a garden is really, really important.”

For their mission of innovation, the Garden has collaborated with Studio Biocene, a design collective that combines architecture and biochemical engineering. Led by Brenda Parker and Marcos Cruz, the collaboration created the Bioscope, a wooden pavilion that fuses natural beauty and technological innovation.  

“It's a space where you can show screenings, for instance, which is something I want to do in January as well,” Daffertshofer said. “But it's also just a really fun-looking structure, and it shows these different ways of using the garden as a site for experiments, not just for science, but also [the] humanities and art.”

The Bioscope was just one of the Garden’s many collaborative projects. Currently, one of the former glasshouses acts as an artist studio. "We've been working with an artist called Désirée Coral,” Daffertshofer said. “She's been harvesting sea salt, and she's currently preparing for an exhibition in Aberdeen. It's been so fascinating. She's really interested in the colonial histories of salt.”

While harvesting materials for artworks, the Garden also harvested grains for Scotland the Bread, a project that aims to improve grain growth in the name of sustainability and nourishment: “This summer, we had grown different types of wheat, and then we did a harvesting day, and it was dried in the glasshouse. Then it was milled and made into flour, and we hosted a supper club in that glasshouse, and we had focaccia made from the flour.”

In an effort to expand their work in ethnobotany, the Garden also worked with storyteller Eileen Budd. “Ethnobotany is a way of understanding and making sense of plants in more traditional ways,” Daffertshofer told me. “What are the stories you know about plants? What are non-scientific names for plants, for example? What are the uses for plants?” 

Daffertshofer said the collaboration has proved revolutionary: “It was amazing. Like, the first time, [Budd] visited me at the garden, it was her first time and she showed me around.”

In the upcoming months, Daffertshofer has arranged for more collaborative efforts through film screenings. Documentarists Rachel McBrinn and Alison Scott created a project based on the decommissioning of the glasshouses, which has been exhibited by the Travelling Gallery. “I'm really keen to bring artists to St Andrews so that audiences, including students, can go and have the opportunity to speak to an artist, ask them about the process, and how you go about making an artwork [...] and get funding,” Daffertshofer said.

Another film, Indexed Beings, will be shown later in the year, with creator Helen Knowles visiting with her collaboration for the film’s UK tour.

Further upcoming events include a programme in the new year centred around seaweed. The Garden’s herbarium hosts part of the Margaret Gatty collection, a historic Victorian seaweed set, which Daffertshofer hopes to utilise as part of her more narrative efforts. “How can we tell those stories, I suppose, in a non-traditional way?” Daffertshofer asked herself. 

The local history of the Garden has also garnered Daffertshofer’s attention as she aims to create a project surrounding the Garden’s past. “We're really interested to hear what the community thinks,” Daffertshofer said. “We're just really keen to hear, what does the garden mean to people? Are there any memories that you can recall, photos, anything that you want to share?”

Daffertshofer hopes to involve students in the programme, potentially through a Vertically Integrated Project. “The way I envision it at the moment [...] is [as] a public history project,” Daffertshofer said. “We'll be getting all these memories, and it'd be such a fun thing to figure out how we can tell the story of the garden from the point of view of the environmental humanities, but also in a non-linear way. How can we use all that material and honour it?”

In the dwindling evening light, Daffertshofer paused outside the Bioscope. The purple waves of wood show the heart of the St Andrews Botanic Garden — a house of scientific and artistic innovation, bridging the gap between yesterday and tomorrow. Daffertshofer asked me, “What is the future that we want to move into?”

Photo by Ada Newton