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Amanda Rasmussen is a plant physiologist in our School of Biosciences at the 糖心原创, where she collaborates on projects investigating horticultural histories to solve current environmental and climate sustainability challenges, and future-proof plants for the next generation.
Dr Amanda Rasmussen is an Associate Professor in the Division of Agriculture and Envrionmental Science. She's author of What to Grow for a Climate Resilient Garden, published in 2025, what plants are best suited to certain conditions. Her research spans multiple disciplines including drawing on historical practices to solve today's environmental challenges. In this Take 10, Amanda discusses how interdisciplinary research delivers real-world results, and the early negative setbacks she faced in her career.
Plants are masters of survival, finding ways to thrive in the toughest conditions. Some can even grow roots from their stems – it’s like a person sprouting a leg from their neck. These aerial roots take on different forms and functions depending on the environment. They’re everywhere; in houseplants, crops, and at the heart of cutting propagation.
My research uncovers how these systems develop and function across a range of contexts. I recently translated this science into a practical book, helping gardeners choose plants suited to different and changing conditions.
I grew up in rural Australia watching landscapes swing between drought, fire, and recovery, and seeing firsthand how plants endure extremes and bounce back. That curiosity shaped my research.
As a student, I was taught to run experiments on plant responses to environmental stress; later, in forestry, I worked on cutting propagation, taught by the people who propagated the Wollemi pine, helping turn a species once known from 10 trees (and fossils) into a conservation success. I became fascinated by how plants form roots from stems…and why they sometimes don’t.
My research showed these roots aren’t one system but several, with distinct roles in survival. Understanding these differences offers real potential for developing climate-resilient crops, forests, and urban green spaces, which affects us all. I particularly love working with culturally and scientifically diverse people and sharing our research with industries and public audiences.
A particular strength of my work is its interdisciplinary nature. I collaborate across fields including computer science, pharmacy, architecture, arts and english history. This enables us to uncover deeper understanding not just of plant responses but for building design, social science and science communication, and delivering wider real-world applications. By embedding this science in accessible, and diverse outputs, like the book, I hope to help research move beyond academia, for example to inform climate-resilient growing practices.
Most imminently our research funded by the Forestry Commission is already helping with propagation of UK broadleaf trees for biodiversity and wood product applications and similarly our KTP with Pinnacle Plants helped them with a pipeline for cutting propagation of many of their species.
Our UKRI funded Historical Horticulture project will identify new peat-free options for propagation and potentially new rooting mixes we can share with commercial and amateur propagators. It will also develop an AI-based tool that will improve cataloguing of historical records in databases making searches quicker and more accurate. I work closely with stakeholders and to regular people in many countries.
Publishing a book has been an unexpected highlight. The publicatuon has led to being interviewed by Gardeners World Podcast and the Gardens Trust.Receiving the UKRI Cross Council grant is another achievement that is really amazing because it is funding one of the wider interdisciplinary projects I’ve been musing over for quite a few years!
The continued funding from Forestry Commission also reflects the real-world impact my research has for UK forest production.
Currently, I’m working with charities such as the Royal Horticultural Society, listed as grant partners on our UKRI funded, and Future Trees Trust (Forestry Commission grant partners) and Natural England (Forestry grant partners). I have an ongoing collaboration (previously funded by a KTP) with Pinnacle Plants International.
These partnerships have led to wider network connections that may in future turn into more formal collaborations, and are essential for our research for 2-way “cross pollination” (to use a plant analogy). They help us understand the reality of their problem or challenge and we get to share our potential solutions or strategies with them to apply in their practice. Often this involves a series of cycles – them telling us a problem, us finding a solution, then telling us why the solution doesn’t work (or which aspect might not work) and then we make improvements.
So many big questions!
I’m really excited by what we might find with the historical horticulture project which will explore historical records back to the 1600s for peat-free media and techniques used for propagation – but also bigger questions around how and when new technologies or ideas were adopted in horticulture – what was the tipping point between resistance and acceptance? Can we use that knowledge to improve adoption of sustainable strategies?
In our tree propagation research we have just set a series of big experiments to understand the “omics” differences (both transcriptomics and metabolomics) between cuttings that root and those that don’t which is really ground-breaking for this discipline.
People and facilities are the current bottle-neck! More PhD funding opportunities would really help us increase the number of questions we could explore while providing training for future researchers! I’ve also been exploring ways we can refit our glasshouse to be more in line with industry misting propagation facilities. We are currently working at capacity and I get other requests from industry partners that could in future turn into funding, but right now we don’t have the space.
Being from a low socio-economic background and foreign-born has proven challenging. I grew up in rural Australia. Mum has MS and Dad was her carer so we had very little. No university nearby and no-one in my family knew anything about academia – I didn’t know what a PhD was until I was well into my undergraduate studies. I had wonderful undergraduate mentors, but it’s often hard to find mentors who understand what advice I might need, but don’t know I need to ask about.
Being foreign-born is hard for all kinds of reasons. My family are at least 9 hours time-difference away and it costs more than £2000 and 2 days each way in travel to visit. I’ve experienced racist jokes, was introduced as “coming from the colonies”; and been criticised for not understanding the hidden meaning and expectations in British communications.
Get involved; and drive change.Listen to advice but have a go. You will make mistakes but that’s ok so long as you learn from them. Noone is perfect and everyone has a different journey. I’ve made many mistakes but I’ve also created my own path by deciding what I felt was best and going for it!The world is changing – try stuff and be an early adopter. The more comfortable you can be with being uncomfortable, the easier change is. Have suggestions on how to make positive changes to your environment but be open minded about other options too.
I’ve made many mistakes but I’ve also created my own path by deciding what I felt was best and going for it!