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A women in a white coat and gloves in a laboratory.

A red flower in the Australian bush

"I had a young daughter at the time, and she kept getting it out of the bin and saying, 'You can't do that. It's not dead yet'."

"You want to talk the scary? Knowing that you're working on one the rarest plants in the country and hoping they come back up next year — it's terrifying,"
she said.
A women planting a flower in the Australian bush.

Red spidery flower in shape of cross

"Some of these species that I work on, we might have two populations with two individual plants in them,"
Ms Radford said.

"Essentially that means that if you lose that wasp species from the ecosystem, then you will also lose the orchid species."

Vivid green plant with tiny green flowers.

A woman with gloves holds a small seedling in a jar growing in agar jelly.

"You've planted all these little tiny babies and you're just hoping that they survive and that they come back next year,"
she said.

A flower in the bush.

"Sometimes I actually wonder if they're giving off some kind of crazy pheromone that's tricked me into following them around the landscape,"
she said.

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