Dedicated ecologist, Julie Radford, has worked for the last 12 years to propagate rare native orchids to help bring them back from extinction.

But her first experience with orchids was not an entirely positive one.

"I just bought this orchid when my children were really little, and I didn't know anything about caring for orchids," she said.

"I worked on trying to keep this thing alive for years, and I actually threw it in the bin three times.

The McIvor Spider orchid is one of the rarest of it's kind in the country. ( Supplied: Julie Radford )

"I had a young daughter at the time, and she kept getting it out of the bin and saying, 'You can't do that. It's not dead yet'."

Julie's daughter's affection for the plant got Ms Radford wondering whether there were any native varieties growing in the Victorian bush, where she had grown up.

"I decided from then on that I was going to study more about them," she said.

"Not just about orchids, but study basically about the plants and animals out there that don't have a voice for themselves."

Ms Radford decided to return to studying and earned qualifications in horticulture, conservation land management, and environmental science.

For the last 12 years she has worked in orchid conservation but last year she decided to ramp-up her efforts.

Ms Radford spent $30,000 setting-up a home laboratory, which allowed her to propagate and pot over 800 rare endangered orchids native to central Victoria.

In a few years time the plants will be ready to go back out into the wild.

Some of the plants, like the Stuart Mill spider orchid and the red cross spider orchid, have been on the very brink of extinction.

Ms Radford currently has 250 pots of the McIvor spider orchid, which only has about six known wild plants around Australia.

"You want to talk the scary? Knowing that you're working on one the rarest plants in the country and hoping they come back up next year — it's terrifying," she said.

Julie Radford hand pollinating a Stuart Mill Spider Orchid in the Central Victorian bush. ( Supplied: Julie Radford )

The orchid whisperer

Some have called Ms Radford "the orchid whisperer" because the plant was notoriously difficult and complex to propagate.

Many of the varieties she has been growing required the presence of specific kinds of fungi to germinate, so Ms Radford has been collecting and growing the fungi on small petri dishes with agar jelly.

The red cross spider orchids is one of the endangered orchids Ms Radford is working to conserve. ( Supplied: Julie Radford )

She has then been going out and cross-pollinating wild orchid flowers by hand to encourage them to produce seeds.

"Some of these species that I work on, we might have two populations with two individual plants in them," Ms Radford said.

"So I got out and actually take pollen from one plant and then deposit it on another plant.

"That might mean that I have to take a two-hour drive from one plant to the next."

One of the reasons some of these plants are so rare is because they relied on specific types of wasps to cross-pollinate them.

"The orchid emits a pheromone that attracts the wasp, and the male wasp will emerge and they will think the orchid is a female wasp," Ms Radford said.

"The male wasp with attempt to mate with the orchids, in the process spreading the pollen from flower to flower.

"Essentially that means that if you lose that wasp species from the ecosystem, then you will also lose the orchid species."

A waiting game

Once Ms Radford has collected the seed pods from the plants that she has successfully pollinated, she has then been carefully combining the seeds with the fungi in her completely sterile laboratory to avoid contamination.

She has then been putting a few of the tiny dust-like seeds with a bit of the fungi onto a petri dish, hoping they will lead to germination.

The woodland leek orchid, native to Victoria, is also one of the rare orchids Ms Radford has been propagating. ( Supplied: Julie Radford )

The seed viability and germination rates for some of the plants has been as low as one per cent.

If germination has occurred Ms Radford has then been transferring the tiny seedlings into jars.

"They'll put down a little root and then they'll produce a little tuba, which is storing all the nutrients, then they go from there into an actual pot," she said.

"And over the summer they go dormant so all the leaves die-off because they are deciduous."

If roots with tubers form, Julie will be able to move this Bendigo Spider orchid into a pot. ( ABC Central Victoria: Beth Gibson )

Ms Radford said that was the most nerve-wracking part of the process.

"You've planted all these little tiny babies and you're just hoping that they survive and that they come back next year," she said.

"But you know, when they do come up it's pretty special."

Even then, it will still be several years before the plants will be ready to go back out in the wild.

Bolstered for the future

Ms Radford has been spending anywhere between three to six days a week propagating orchids.

While she has been getting some funding, mostly from government community environmental grants, there was no guarantee it will continue.

The Brilliant Sun Orchid is one the flowers Julie propagates. ( Supplied: Julie Radford )

She has launched a GoFundMe page to raise money for a larger nursery and a new autoclave for sterilisation.

Ms Radford said she questioned at times why she dedicated so much effort to the cause.

"Sometimes I actually wonder if they're giving off some kind of crazy pheromone that's tricked me into following them around the landscape," she said.

"Especially if I've gone and collected pollen from one site and then I have to drive for two hours to another site, I might be driving there going 'What's wrong with me?'"

Ms Radford said she hoped that by bolstering the orchid populations one day they would survive without her help.

"They're in isolated patches of bushland, and so genetically the animals and the plants within these isolated, fragmented populations can't actually talk to each other," she said.

"What happens is you get inbreeding depression, and eventually things start to die-out.

"What we're trying to do here is mix-up those populations genetically, to make sure that doesn't happen, and that these things get to stay there in the long-term."