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Spotlight

Angela Snowball -- Blossoming Career

By Vicki Hyde, NZSM

The small office is covered in plants, some in pots, many in pictures and posters. It's home to Dr Angela Snowball, a plant physiologist at DSIR Fruit and Trees in Palmerston North. She finished her PhD at the University of Sydney some 18 months ago, and is settling in to work on flowering plants.

Snowball is enthusiastic about plants and their complex structures and functions. The roots go on for miles and miles, and the trunks can be there for decades, she says. The leaves may be part of this year's growth, sharing space with buds from last year. The complicated mechanisms that make plants grow are often not understood, and it is this that Snowball finds particularly intriguing.

The research that gave her her doctorate was based on finding out more about what makes seedlings flower. Much of the current knowledge is based on a few casual observations and anecdotal data, Snowball notes. With limes and kumquats -- her chosen fruit -- the published data posited flowering as likely to take place five to ten years after planting seed. Snowball tried growing the citrus fruit under optimal conditions.

"They just motored -- grew to three metres tall in five months, and were flowering in 11 months," she recalls. She found that size was the determining factor in flowering, rather than age as had been thought previously. The work has important implications for a wide variety of plants.

"In fruit crops, flowers are dollars," states Snowball. Significant commercial returns can be made by getting plants to grow faster, and flower and fruit earlier. Snowball is now working on kiwifruit. Studying a variety of plants provides useful information about how different plants react to different strategies.

The work takes patience, as much of it is long-term. Her PhD took four years from planting the crops to seeing fruit on the trees. Such work can have its problems. Snowball remembers a student colleague who saw a year's work on bananas wiped out by one tropical storm. She also sees the time as valuable to build up a knowledge of the plant under study.

"It takes a while to become familiar with a plant, to know if something's wrong with it or if it's about to flower," she says. "If I had post-grad students, I'd first want to know if they had a vege garden."