Seed Spotting - Seeing Beyond the Green

Seed Spotting – Seeing Beyond the Green

A nature‑connection workshop

When: Sunday 24 May, 1–3 pm
Where: Nature Discovery Centre, Coffs Harbour Botanic Gardens

Looking for a simple way to slow down, spend time outdoors, and reconnect with nature—while doing something genuinely useful for the environment?

Seed Spotting – Seeing Beyond the Green is a welcoming, accessible workshop that invites you to experience local native trees with fresh eyes, open senses, and deeper attention. No prior knowledge or experience is needed—just curiosity and a willingness to slow down and notice what’s around you.

Guided by Michelle, an experienced seed collector and mentor with the North Coast Regional Seedbank Network, you’ll gently tune into the landscape as you walk through local bushland—noticing textures, colours, shapes, scents, and seasonal changes that often go unseen. You’ll learn how to recognise the subtle signs of flowering, fruiting, and seed readiness, while also allowing time to pause, reflect, and connect emotionally with place.

This workshop creates space to listen, observe, and feel—to move beyond simply “looking at green” and instead develop a richer relationship with trees as living beings with stories, rhythms, and cycles. Through this deeper awareness, seed spotting becomes not just a skill, but a way of caring.

This workshop is about:

• Slowing down and reconnecting emotionally with nature
• Engaging your senses—sight, touch, smell, and attention—while outdoors
• Learning to really see trees, not just walk past them
• Gaining simple, practical skills that contribute to local conservation through seed spotting.
• Discovering how small, local actions can make a real difference

Through guided activities, stories, and hands-on learning, this workshop gently blends mindfulness, ecological knowledge, and practical action. It’s a chance to feel more at home outdoors, while contributing in a meaningful way to looking after local bushland.

You’ll head home feeling more connected to place, more aware of the living world around you, and empowered with a grounded, sensory, and practical way to care for nature.

What to bring:

Please wear covered walking shoes, a hat and a water bottle.

About the Presenter:

Michelle Chapman is a tree lover and seed collector based in NNSW, and the founder of SEEDTREE MAPS, a tree identification and mapping service that helps people to connect with nature, collect seeds, and grow their own trees. She co-authored Australian Rainforest Seeds: A guide to collecting, processing and propagation (CSIRO Publishing, 2020) to support species diversity in rainforest nurseries, ecological restoration projects and backyards. In support of the new North Coast Regional Seedbank network, she ran a series of seed collecting and seed processing workshops for Landcare groups to demonstrate how to collect seed for the purposes of short- and long-term storage in the Coffs Harbour Regional Botanic Gardens Seedbank. In all her endeavours, Michelle makes the science of seed handling easier so that one day tree growing will be as normalised as recycling or growing veggies.

The North Coast Regional Seedbank, a collaborative network that helps ensure locally sourced native seed is available for revegetation after fires, floods, and other disturbances. The Seedbank, based at the Coffs Harbour Regional Botanic Gardens, stores and protects seed collected from across the region so it can be used in future restoration projects—helping landscapes recover.