Heavy lifting at Sydney’s herbarium: the quest to move and catalogue more than 1m plant specimens

For nearly three years, staff and volunteers have been going through about 70,000 boxes in a mammoth undertaking to digitise the collection

Outside the Australian Botanic Garden Mount Annan in south-western Sydney are four shipping containers with freezers inside.

Over the next six months, more than a million plant specimens will be cycled through the containers, each spending about a week in the cold to rid them of any insects.