Ever-smiling, Ms Powell said she was looking forward to finally talking about it after being sworn to secrecy.

"They give you a bit of lead time, and secrecy's not my forte, so I've actually dropped out of communication with some people for a little while," she joked.

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Ms Powell has been involved in the Friends of the Ballarat and Buninyong Botanic Gardens for decades - meeting up with The Courier this week, the depth of her knowledge, and genuine enthusiasm for the trees, was immediately clear.

She was the author of An Eden of Loveliness: The Ballarat Botanical Gardens - a challenge which "nearly killed me," she smiled - and remains a volunteer guide at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, as well as volunteering for a litany of other good causes across the city.

"It's astonishing," she said of the OAM honour.

"I'm not particularly remarkable, and there isn't anything I've done where there hasn't been a whole heap of people doing it with me.

"I think this award actually recognises all these other people who have been there too - I think if I said what I was proudest of, it wouldn't be something I'd done at all, it'd be Julie Bradbury's Botankids (program at the Ballarat Botanic Gardens).

"She came up with an idea that was so wonderful, and I was able to be a tiny part of it.

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"One time, there was a little boy, and he was the only person who came that day, but there were dozens of adults, and we gave him the full monty.

"I took him on a treasure hunt, that was my part.

"Years later, he'd changed completely, but the mother came up and told us about the impact we'd had on that one child - maybe if you can do that for one person, that's all you need to do, maybe that's as good as it gets.

"It's really about the people, you just meet some amazing people and hear some extraordinary stories."

Ms Powell said she remembered family trips as a child with her dad, who "was really keen on dams and dam walls".

"At that time all the dams would have arboretums attached, and all the trees were named, and that was pretty wonderful," she said.

"It was accidental, you might say, but it twigged an interest.

"There are places on the way to Mount Gambier, for example, all the plantations had plaques with all the years they were planted, they just seemed impossibly old at the time.

"But it's wonderful to know that before you were born, these people are doing stuff - you see these fabulous trees, and someone did that, someone put things aside for it."

It's that long-term view that's striking - Ms Powell said she hoped her contributions would be built on into the future, just as she built on the contributions from others before her.

"I believe if you tell down and don't listen up, you get disgruntlement - you want a community that's absolutely excited with what's about to be transforming, and the reasons for it," she said.

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"By my reckoning, if you have your community groups able to be part of that, of making it the most exciting and wonderful thing ever, that's pretty good - you don't have it by having a community meeting and telling everyone what's going to happen.

"There's learning to be had, people really value what they've contributed.

"My privilege and my joy has been to just be a little small part."

Anyone can nominate any Australian for an award in the Order of Australia. If you know someone worthy, nominate them now at www.gg.gov.au.

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