For many years Patrice O'Shea lived near the Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens in Daylesford and she and her children would enjoy the surrounds of the Victorian-era gardens.
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But then they moved further out of town, and her job as a teacher and eventually school administrator got busy, the family spent less time at the gardens.
When she retired from her job as assistant head of school at Ballarat Grammar in 2009, Ms O'Shea joined the Friends of Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens group, where she has been secretary since 2010.
For her service to the environment, and to secondary education, Ms O'Shea has been awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours.
Ms O'Shea said she did not "feel entirely worthy" of the honour but it was a "lovely and generous thing" for someone to nominate her.
"You keep saying you will give it away when you have done everything that needs to be done, and that hasn't happened (at the gardens) yet so we are still soldiering on," she said.
"It's a place that is enormously beautiful and it gives people who visit the gardens great pleasure."
The friends group has two roles - fundraising to support the gardens, and working to maintain the gardens.
"It gives us as a group an enormous amount of sense of being useful to the community ... a combination of fundraising which has been huge, and weekly activities there to this day where on Tuesday's you'll find our geriatric group pulling out blackberries," she said.
Ms O'Shea said the group worked hard to maintain the "wonderful community asset" that is the Wombat Hill Botanic Gardens.
"It's huge, historic and so beguiling in so many ways. It's wild and manicured at the same time. It's also a situation where there is not a lot of manpower or money to maintain it through the public purse so there has to be something else for that, and for that something else to be a genuinely community organisation is wonderful."
Ms O'Shea was also honoured for her contribution to secondary education, including 28 years spent at Ballarat Grammar during which she was an English and history teacher, tutor/mentor, head of house and finally assistant head of school.
"It's a wonderful place and they were extremely happy years for me not just because of the work but some of the kids I taught over those years are the most wonderful people," she said.
Ms O'Shea saw three headmasters come and go over her years at the school who "each bought a particular quality to the school".
"There has been such a good culture there for a very long time," she said.
