Our Company

Ramm Botanicals is a multi award winning business that commenced trading in December 2002, having merged the entities Yates Botanicals and Ramm Pty. Ltd. The company has its own plant breeding programs and also represents outstanding plant breeders from within Australia and around the world. Our native plant breeding program is directed by noted plant breeder and awarded horticulturalist Angus Stewart.

We operate on two sites on the beautiful Central Coast of New South Wales. Our world-class tissue culture laboratory operates at Somersby, whilst our young plant nursery, R&D facility and administration offices are located on the Pacific Highway at Tuggerah.

The company is responsible for marketing, propagation and distribution of tissue cultures and young plants to both domestic and export markets. We principally market ornamental and commercial landscape plants, however we also produce other significant crops such as teak for plantation timber. Our nursery was awarded NGINA's 'Nursery of the Year - large category' for 2005 and in that same year, we were honoured to receive the Export Scholarship Prize at the Premier's NSW Exporter of the Year Awards. More recently, the company won three national industry awards in the 'Best Large Production Nursery', 'Training' and 'Export' categories announced at the 2008 Nursery and Garden Industry national conference.

We do not supply direct to the public, nor to retailers, rather, we supply many hundreds of wholesale growers in Australia with rooted young plants. In turn, these growers either finish supplied plant material or use our elite young plants as the basis for their cutting programs.

Our Anigozanthos (kangaroo paw) breeding program is the world's biggest. We distribute kangaroo paws as tissue cultures to many markets including U.S.A., Europe and Japan.

Ramm Botanicals employs around 90 people, mostly involved in direct production. Around 50 work in our laboratories and 30 in the nursery. We operate as many as 35 laminar flows (at right) where all tissue culture production takes place. We produce in excess of 7.5 million tissue cultures each year.

Many people ask 'what is tissue culture?' Without getting too technical, tissue culture is a form of asexual plant propagation that is conducted in a sterile, laboratory environment. The process is often referred to as 'micropropagation'. Tissue culture can be used to multiply the plant over a relatively short period of time, each plant being a clone of the original. The laboratory environment minimises viral and fungal infection and maintain a plant's health and vigour. Tissue culturing also allows us to propagate plants out of season.

New and unique plant varieties can be protected from unauthorised propagation by applying for Plant Breeders' Rights (PBR). Many of the plant varieties marketed by Ramm Botanicals are protected by PBR or are PBR-eligible. These rights are a form of intellectual property, like patents and copyright, and are administered under the Plant Breeder's Rights Act 1994. The owners of plant varieties protected by the Act have exclusive rights to offer the variety for sale. Part of our role is to protect the rights of the breeders we represent by preventing illegal propagation of protected plant varieties. A PBR'd variety can be reproduced for private and non-commercial purposes irrespective of the existence of Plant Breeder's Rights.