Repositioning plants

A introduced me to another volunteer (C...) who has expert knowledge about orchids. He was instructing E... on the details of orchid care. C... is the greenhouse's expert orchid grower, with many award ribbons to his credit.

I helped Al... and F... to move the floor-based small trees in C2. Their location was cleared, cleaned, and replaced by a waist-high table onto which we placed small plants. The space created on the adjacent low-table we placed the small trees up off of the concrete, presumably to allow better drainage, air circulation and pest resistance. Edible plants were placed at the south end of the low table. Bananas, gingers, and marantas were placed at the north end of the waist-high table. To make room for the waist-high table, we also had to remove one of the black troughs. The water plants within it (an aquatic fern Salvinia minima. “water spangles”) were relocated to a glass aquarium situated on the waist-high table.

I scrubbed the sooty mold off from the leaves of one of the small plants in C2, an understory plant, located near a group of orchids on a low table.

While the crew were having their usual Thursday meeting in the workroom I occupied myself by cleaning under the new waist-high table in C2, pruning dead leaves throughout the room, and picking up fallen leaves from the floor and pots. Later, I swept the path in D2, and pruned dead leaves in D2-4.

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Another routine spectacular day in the greenhouse

It has been a sincere pleasure for me to volunteer a few hours a week at the University of Minnesota Botanical Conservatory. After many visits over the last few years, exactly none of those days have felt ordinary or repetitive. If there is a routine , it is that the botanic diversity of the collection - with over 3000 species - is displayed in a spectacular way each day. The Conservatory is located on the St. Paul campus, and is free of charge and open to the public during typical weekday hours. For instance, today most of my allotted time was spent in just one of eight rooms, the room that houses the tropical collection. The chores included pruning, re-potting, spraying, sweeping, etc. As I moved through the room, in every direction, there seemed to be a stunning plant pleading to be admired. After the chores were complete, I had the opportunity to go back and photograph some of the beauties that surrounded me while working. Dendrobium tangerinum , Papua New Guinea Dendr...

I celebrate learning this about cycad plants

I didn't know that the cardboard palm - Zamia furfuracea - is a cycad. It isn't a palm tree (don't judge me, I'm not a botanist). But it also doesn't look like the other more familiar types of cycads with their fluted upright palm-like fronds. I didn't know it is said to be the second most commonly cultivated cycad, after Cycas revoluta . I didn't know this plant is unrelated to the common ZZ plant - Zamioculcas zamifolia - although they have a similar appearance. Before today I didn't know any of these things, but now I am happy to have learned them. From the parking lot I walked to the U of M Conservatory greenhouse in near-zero F weather. Stepping into the tropical spaces was a joy of its own. But being able to learn new information and experience new procedures was a compounding factor. Joy squared. During my 3-hour volunteer shift, my initial task was to clean the parasite critters (mealybugs and scale) from the stems and leaves of the cycad, Zami...

Remembering my former city garden

This post is more of a journal entry than a public blog post. It is interesting to me, but won't be too interesting to almost any other reader - except perhaps my partner who was there as a co-conspirator. I want to document my thoughts about the past, my backyard garden, and what we put in it. The size of our city lot was not large. At 100 x 50 ft, there was just enough room for the house, a small garage, and back yard. The driveway was shared with our neighbor. The style of the house was standard American Foursquare, built in 1903. We bought the place in the early 1990's and slowly, over the next 25 years, renovated almost every inch the house and garden. A dry stone wall was built, with terrace bed to break up the height of the wall Caladiums and dragon-wing begonias line the steps of the front porch Well-earned sit-down on the front porch after a busy day Front wall terrace with blue phlox, hostas, astilbe, snap dragons, and coral bells. Front wall terrace, brunnera "J...

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