Join us for a virtual exploration of the living collections at Longwood. Associate Director of Collections Anthony Aiello will discuss what a living collection is, how we have developed our collections, and examples of different collections that we’ve grown over Longwood’s history.
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So my name is Nicole Chrome I am the marketing and Outreach manager at Longwood Gardens it’s a pleasure to have all of you with us tonight uh virtually and I am excited to have Tony with us he is our associate director of Collections and he’s going to take some time with
You this evening to explain kind of what he does and what a living collection means and all that that goes into that um if you have questions along the way please definitely use the Q a for that and at the very end we’ll kind of go
Through that and have a little q a session with Tony so with that Tony thank you so much for being here and I am happy to turn it over to you great thanks Nicole and thanks everybody for coming um yeah just a little uh introduction
Um as um as you heard my name is Tony Aiello I’m associate director of collections I’ve been at Longwood for just under two years now and I work in the research division which is a small part of Longwood that looks at new and unusual plants and and part of our
Division also manages all of the uh natural areas the land stewardship uh part of Longwood I’m from from Philadelphia originally I’ve lived in various places but first came to Longwood probably around 1970 which um you know really dates me and have been coming you know on and off
Um ever since then so it’s always it’s nice to share a little bit of what uh I do there because it is sort of a really behind the scenes um aspect of Longwood so with that in mind um uh you know what I want to share with
You tonight is a little bit of what goes into building the living collections at Longwood and explain what that means and explain how we do it and just give you some examples as well so I think when you come along with you know you’re you
See all of the you know sort of well you don’t see this these days because this area is under construction but you get the idea you see you know sort of all of the you know sort of large display and all of this sort of um the the major Horticulture that goes
On there um but what I want to talk a little bit about is um some of the as I said some of the behind the scenes things and you know and what you know if you’re looking at chrysanthemums for instance as as we are in this slide you know we have a you
Know really significant collection of chrysanthemums if you’re looking at the platter lilies we have you know a big number of those a big collection and though I I’m not going to use those to as examples it just gives you an idea of you know when you see all of the
Diversity of say chrysanthemum there really is a lot that happens behind the scenes to to be able to do what we do in these display areas same goes with orchids and you know annuals and all you can go down the list of all the things that we have um at Longwood Gardens
Um and you know and um uh you know and I think to not just the Casual Vision there too but I think to even you know regular and really you know a prisoner who really knows the garden as well hopefully I can share with you some of what you know comprises
The complexity and the diversity of what we do uh at Longwood so um just going through some you know sort of images that I think you’re all familiar with some of these now are are dated images I realize um so we’ll just start off with um
Talking a little bit about you know in museums in general what are Collections and and you know I have a couple definitions that I pulled from you know various sites um and you know just starting off very basically you know collection is is a set of material or intangible objects which an individual
Or an establishment has assembled classified selected and preserved in a safe setting and usually displays to a smaller larger audience I think when we think about museums and we think about collections we tend to think more I don’t but you know lots of us think more about objects whether they’re paintings or
Whether they’re furniture or whether they’re sculpture you know all sorts of different objects whether it’s Library collections um and I think we you know maybe don’t think as much about living Collections and and you know zoos are living collections um and certainly Arboretum and Botanic Gardens and Gardens are living
Collections and so that’s what I want to delve into a little bit tonight is how the the living collections really add that museum aspect to uh what we do at Longwood and so again just sort of following up on this idea of what are collections um and collections are really what make
Museums unique um they’re more than objects they’re they’re carefully chosen assemblages that the product of curatorial way of knowing and the word curation is sort of you know I sort of these days it’s used very widely and um I think it’s maybe been uh diluted a little bit but you know there’s the
Curatorial experts expertise in the museum that really uh provides a way of understanding objects making arguments with them and telling stories with them and so if you think about the you know how the uh the chrysanthemums in the conservatory are curated that really is
A a major story in a big way that we do but there’s lots of other things that happen um at Longwood and so one of the things we do or one of the things we have is a policy that guides our living Collections and so this really provides a framework for um our
Day-to-day activities related to The Living collection and how it works that long way to achieve Horticultural excellence and garden design and it really is a strategy for client acquisition overall sort of big picture development and then very specific collections development as well so it provides it’s sort of a Guiding Light
But also provides basic goals and benchmarks that help us achieve various various collections goals so the living plants collection policy I’m not going to go into too too much detail about this but we’ve divided it into some core collections sort of the most important collections that get the
Most expertise and get the most attention and the most development and Heritage collections which are part of Longwood um and have been part of Longwood for a long time but don’t rise to the same standards and same level of level of curation as these as these core
Collections and so I’ll I will give you a couple of examples of core collections as we go through and then I’ll kind of digress and talk a little about a little bit about other collections that um we’re working on either to add in general to the diversity or to elevate
Some of the uh some of the other collections to the standards of a core collection um so um there’s a lot of attacks that I realize and maybe my last big Tech slide I promise um so what are these core collections you can see the ones on the right of the
Screen are listed there what we consider core Collections and then um these are ones that really essentially you know have a much higher level of of uh attention a much higher level of curation we develop management plans for these and you see on the screen here we talk about
Um uh PCN accreditation that’s a uh essentially an industry-wide standard of accreditation that really recognizes Superior attention to detail and Superior attention to curation so it’s a national recognition of various collections at Gardens across the United States and so far we have four of these and we’re working on adding uh more as
We go along so the one collection that uh probably nearest and dearest to my heart is the Pierce’s Park collection and this is the these are the alley of trees when you uh when you leave the Pierce to Pond House going um East from the Pierce Dupont house and
This is really the core of Longwood Gardens in many ways the origin story of Longwood Gardens so um starting in the early 1800s the predecessors to Pierre Dupont the Pierce family Samuel and Joshua Pierce who were brothers started planting an arboretum sometime around 1800 or so and you can
See by this photo by 1884 these trees had matured and really significant trees this area was known um throughout Chester County as a you know a place not only of Horticultural Excellence it was known as one of the Premier Arboretum in the area at that time through the 1800s but also was used
As a public park and people from the area would come in picnic and you know and have uh just recreate there and so it was really recognized even though it was private property as a really public space in the 1890s uh it was sold for Timber
Rights and um a Timber Mill was set up and on the property not just to we think not just for the trees in the LA’s in Pierce’s Park but also for uh the forest walk and what we call the Boiler Room Woods the two natural Forest areas that
Are that are north of the Pierce decline house um uh Pierre Dupont learned of this in 1906 and um decided to purchase the property to preserve the trees uh both the park and also we as I said we think the uh the forested areas as well so that was
Really the origin it’s it’s preserving this wonderful collection of trees that’s the origin of Longwood Gardens um so by 1909 you know Pierre had been there for a few years you can see it’s looking a little more cleaned up things are limbed up so there could be either
Moan or or grazed under probably moan underneath there there’s a couple stumps so some things had to be removed clearly so this is really how things look when pear first started developing the property today when you go there there’s still a collection of large old trees and you
Can see this is kind of a same view two slides of the same view you can see um in the center here of the left hand side there’s a younger tree so slowly we are adding to this collection and as trees Decline and need to be removed we’re replacing them and so
We’re either our goals with this collection and this is a a different sort of collection and there aren’t many like this in the United States the goal of this is to propagate what is there so replace in kind or to propagate plants that are from the
Same era so from the 19th century and particularly the first you know 75 years of the 19th century so trying to find trees in the Delaware Valley that are would have been alive when The Pierces were alive uh and then propagate those and add those to the collection so
That’s how this is you know as I said this is a much different sort of collection and that’s how we’re really going about trying to add and develop this collection so uh here’s one example of where we’ve done that on the left is the Lafayette Sycamore at Brandywine
Battlefield it’s one of the largest sycamores in the United States or in in Pennsylvania and then on the right that young tree you see in the middle sort of silhouetted there is a is a cutting uh from the Lafayette Sycamore so this is a tree that would have been alive during
The 1800s and that we’re adding and is age appropriate to add to the Pierce’s Park collection similarly uh this is the large old giant sequoia at the Tyler Arboretum and in the middle of the slide is a very small sort of young plant which is a cutting from a cutting of the
Tyler tree so again uh something that would have been alive at that time that we’re adding to this collection so uh and we’re always on the on the lookout for things that are as I said are aged appropriate or period appropriate and here are two examples that I’m I’m
Interested in propagating and adding to Pierce’s Park uh the zelkova the uh Caucasian zalkova is at The Woodlands which is a cemetery in um West Philadelphia near Penn and on the right is ulon Magnolia Magnolia denuda at Laurel Hill Cemetery which is in um sort of the uh Strawberry Mansion part of
Philadelphia and and you know you may be wondering why we’re looking at cemeteries and during the 1800s cemeteries were sort of the Arboretum and public parks of their day and often you find really interesting and really old plants in these places and so uh this Magnolia for instance is probably I
Would say it’s at least 130 years old maybe older so some really significant plants can be found in these places so moving along and someone talk about another collection is our native azaleas uh and and sort of more broadly talking about rhododendrons and if you walk through Pierce’s Woods the area between
Pierce’s Park and the large lake and and you go through there and from Spring through summer you see a collection of really stunning and beautiful native azaleas most of which are native to the Southern United States and so this is a collection that um has been added to and developed over the
Last you know 30 years or so and one of the ways that we’re interested in building these collections is doing field collecting doing wild collecting and getting new sources of germoplasm into Longwood and and potentially you know new unusual species but also potentially new color forms
That may not exist or we may not be growing and so um with that in mind this is a slide that shows all of the plant exploration that Longwood has done since 1957 and you can see you know it’s basically spans the globe um and you know with with many trips to
Asia Russia et cetera et cetera Tanzania is is highlighted here because my colleague Peter Zale was just in Tanzania in January looking at orchids um but you can see we’ve you know we’ve traveled across the United States and and you know many many places um so what
I want to highlight uh tonight is a trip that Peter and I did to the Southeast U.S in the fall of 21 to collect native azaleas and also I’ll talk a little bit about some Oaks that we collected there so we were in it was a short trip it was just you know
One it was Sunday through Friday um we were in um I’ll show you a map in a minute we were in um the um in Alabama and Georgia um very targeted collecting and you know we’re looking for a very specific native azaleas but also as I said looking for a couple
Of Oaks as well and so we started out in Birmingham Alabama um drove down to far Southern Alabama to um the place called Solon Dixon forestry education center which is part of um uh Auburn it’s Auburn University’s forestry education center they have a forestry program there they use it for
Teaching about you know Forest management Natural History it’s and it’s botanically very very diverse place we uh we then went over to um South Western Georgia to a town called Albany uh moved up to FDR State Park and then finished up uh at Oak Mountain State Park just below
Birmingham so as I said a quick trip we were as with any Botanical trip we’re always assisted by local botanists who really know the area and you know hopefully can take you right to what you need to find and here’s the group we were with there’s a couple folks there from poly Hill
Arboretum in on Martha’s Vineyard some folks from Auburn University and then a couple other folks who were local kind of independent field bodies so you know really remarkable to share some time in the field with um this this incredible group of botanists so one of the places we went to
Um was a private property in um Leesburg or Albany Georgia you can see highlighted here it’s a woman named Monica Williams who if you go to her house it’s an unassuming Suburban House built in the early 70s you know Suburban lot she ended up purchasing 77 Acres behind her that had been sort
Of somewhat timbered and then um but mostly preserved it uh mostly purchased it seen her husband to preserve it um they like it’s on it’s on the Flint River and they just liked having this big natural area behind them so she started clearing paths and clearing Vines and started under uncovering
Um what she thought were honeysuckles but turns out to be this incredible diversity of native azaleas and so we were able to visit with her and really sample take seeds of uh this incredible diversity that was growing in her properties is many ways her private Nature Preserve and Azalea Sanctuary so highlight some
Of the things we saw there um I’ll go through some of the species that we saw in Monica’s uh and Monica swamp one was uh Alabama Azalea and you’ll see that some of these have very restricted ranges in the South but all of these grow well for us and so even though they
Occur you know in this case it occurs in in Alabama and you know adjacent States it’s perfectly fine growing this in the Delaware Valley it’s perfectly Hardy incredibly fragrant plant really a wonderful garden plant and we look forward to having you know adding this and the other ones I’ll show you to our
To our collections um here’s Monica with a rhododendron with an Alabama Rhododendron that she calls the queen um it’s one of the most sort of perfect specimens of Alabama Azalea that that anyone has ever seen it’s really a magnificent plant often they’re sort of sprawling um sprawling plants straining for the
Light you know reaching for for light and and nutrients and and this is just sort of a perfect specimen that you would find in in a Botanic Garden we also collected um uh Rhododendron austrianum another of the Southern native azaleas and uh this one um is imperiled that means it is its
Habitat and uh it’s where it grows naturally are uh being threatened uh it flowers much earlier um again these have great heat resistance and really are plants that do particular do really well in our area um another of the Native azaleas and these colors are really vibrant really remarkable
Um the Rhododendron can Essence the the hori Azalea has a much bigger range um but again is a really great plant for our area and then what you know what was really interesting about her property is because all these species are growing there there are these hybrid swarms so
If you take the first previous two slides the orange Rhododendron australium and the pink knessines there were plants that had hybridized and formed this sort of perfect mixture of pink and orange and these are all Monica slides we were there in um we were there in September when the plants were had
Fruit and seeds on them so we didn’t get to see any of them in flowers it was really great to have her send us these images of these uh and then finally Rhododendron disco sum which is a very very um widespread plant but um nevertheless you we were interested
In seeing it and again it’s a plant that does very well uh up our way and and I love these names the clammy Azalea is um is because the leaves are it’s viscous the leaves are very sticky and they have glands on them so that’s where it gets
It’s both it’s scientific and it’s common name so all right so Switching gears a little bit um I want to talk about um some work that we’ve been doing with Oaks and if you if you walk around along with Gardens there are lots of Oaks Planet all throughout um
Uh and it’s a collection that you know really serves in many ways as kind of the backdrop for everything that goes on there you know Oak Knoll but they’re really dispersed throughout the whole garden um we’re one of our goals is to increase the diversity of our Oak collection and the
Um scientific value the conservation value of the collection so a few years ago this publication came out it’s the red list of Oaks in the United States which essentially means it analyzes all the oak species in the United States which is about 100 species and determines what level of threat
There is whether they are endangered or threatened or near extinct and it does a complete assessment of all of them then a subsequent publication came out by the same group of people that basically looked at all of the oak species in North America and how frequently they occurred in Botanic
Gardens across across the United States and so I’ll go into a little bit of detail about this so the first slide is a number of very common species and if you look at the y-axis the number of plants you can see that these plants are widely held in lots of individuals and
Lots of gardens the stars mean there are species of of conservation concern that they’re threatened in some way or another in the wild so there are you know there are a couple of them here Fair numbers of those then as you get plant if you as you get
Species that are held in fewer and fewer Gardens you can see the scale and the y-axis scale is lower there are more plants that are threatened uh so more threatened plants fewer plants in Botanic Gardens and then when you get to this image which is um essentially shows
Um again this on this y-axis scale now we’re looking from zero to 100 individuals completely this is across the whole United States and if you go out to the right on this what you see is that the most threatened species all those stars to the right are are
Represented by less than 25 individuals in cultivation and so essentially the most threatened plans are the least frequently held in Botanic Gardens so this really points to the need to do a lot more work in terms of collecting and doing collections and holding collections of these in Botanic Gardens
In order to help preserve these species so um so while we were in Alabama this is something I learned that I didn’t know so as I said there were about 90 species or so of Oaks in in the United States 39 of those occur in Alabama which was a
Major shock to me so you know 44 or 45 of all Oak species occur have certainly some occurrence in Alabama so I just want to point out too that we collected um one in Alabama and one in Georgia quercus pointonii which the oak people call cuboid um it’s a critically endangered species
Which means it is uh very very restricted there are you can see from this map it only occurs in Alabama occurs in very specific habitats and it’s really a case of habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation is that’s leading to it being critically endangered and it grows on these um
Mountaintop balls this is Oak Mountain outside just south of Birmingham uh you know it’s a very fragile habitat it can be it’s also a habitat that has a fire regime so with fire suppression um invasive sort of native invasive species can come in and take over this
Habitat adds um this was our one of the park naturalists there standing with the quercus pointonia and you can see the other image there’s one in the back and this is not what you think of as a big Majestic single trunk Oak this is a shrubby species um but these plants
Um like the one that um um Monica is standing with on the left uh something like that could be 50 75 years old and a plant that has maybe a trunk that is six inches in diameter can be 125 or 150 years old so they’re incredibly long-lived plants and just
Gives you some idea of what these look like close up and so that that group of them on the on the left uh that is probably a single individual that’s you know perhaps up to 100 years old so a really fascinating plant we were able to collect acorns there we collected about
25 acorns um and those are growing in our greenhouses now and the idea is to grow them at Longwood but also to share them with other Gardens so if there’s some backup uh you know across various Gardens the other species we um Oak species we collected was quercus
Georgiana the Georgia Oak you can see um it has a slightly um wider distribution it’s threatened so it’s not as uh endangered as cuboid um but it’s really only had a few localities we visited um FD Roosevelt State Park at Pine Mountain which is where um Roosevelt
Um he would go to recuperate there were hot springs there and he would go to recuperate there and it’s actually where he um where Roosevelt died in 1945. um so here’s Peter here Peter and I are collecting them you can see it grows on this this Ridge line it’s really the
Only place that grows there there were many many more trees there this gets to be a large Oak uh and again made a collection of that and we hope to share this with people moving forward so um bringing home a little bit closer back in the fall of 2020 during Kobe
When we weren’t able to travel very much Peter and I decided to do some local collecting of Oaks and quircus falcotta or Spanish Oak is an oak it’s um related related to Red Oak you can see it has a very wide range across the South but it those yellow
Counties in Pennsylvania mean that it’s a threatened species in Pennsylvania so even though it is widespread in the South there are only a very few limited populations in Pennsylvania which makes it a you know a Pennsylvania listed or Pennsylvania threatened species so we were able to collect um
Drive down to Nottingham right near if you know where the hers Potato Chip Factory is um we were able to do some you know these trees there’s a small band of these that grow right around there so we were able to do make some collections roadside collecting um of quercus falcata there and
Sometimes plant exploration is you know is prosaic you’re already driving along a County Road and there’s the tree and you you make your collections right then and there so it’s not always sort of out in the wild um uh and so these are doing well again doing well in our greenhouses and
Represent a local resource that we can use and and the thinking is that because this is such a southern species that um that has greater heat tolerance than maybe our our native Red Oak and with climate change and with increasing temperatures that we think this might be
A substitute for the common Red Oak that we grow you know very very widely at Longwood and elsewhere so really interested in trying to um use these and sort of unlock some of the potential that this plant has okay I’m going to skip uh yeah I’m going to skip that slide
Um and then finish up with um sorry finish up with a trip that I just took in January to look at um a witch hazel species so at Longwood and you know elsewhere in our area we grow two native species of witch hazel and two Asian species and primarily what’s
Grown Horticulture is a hybrid of the Asian species but in 2006 a new species of witch hazel was discovered in Alabama uh you can see from this map it grows along the Gulf Coast but it has a very restricted um range along the Gulf Coast it grows
In sort of a band uh slightly Inland and grows in the band stretching from Florida across to Texas um we were interested in going flowers in January so we were interested in going and sampling these looking at flower color variation and doing a doing some sampling for genetic work as well
And then getting an idea of the color variation so we can go back and try and propagate some of the better color forms this summer okay so we I went with a colleague from the U.S National Arboretum this was also a quick trip just so happens it was also Sunday through Friday
Um we went to we flew into Houston and drove about two hours Northeast to Jasper um near the Louisiana border and then traveled in a you know three or four County area around Jasper and um these two man-made Lakes the one on the right is the one to the east is um
Oh Toledo band uh Reservoir and the one to the West is Sam Rayburn Reservoir so we’ve sampled you know various locations there and what was really interesting was um with most PCS uh there’s very little color variation and if you you know there may be a little bit of variation
Or you know a color variant May pop up here and there in in an individual Place well the image with the blue background is one location maybe the size of a football field you know give or take uh and this these were all individual plants and all individual variants in
That one population so this was not only an astounding thing for witch hazel but it’s an astounding thing for pretty much any shrub that I know of uh rarely do you see this sort of variation going on there and so this is very interesting from a Horticultural point of view you
Know sampling some of these and using them in the garden but also interesting from a you know from a biological point of view what is going on with this species that gives it so much variation in such a small area and is it you know is it speciating before our eyes or is
Is this you know is there something that’s inherent inherent to it that makes it so variable so you know stay tuned we’re just sort of trying to figure this out and just a couple more images to show you the kinds of habitats we were in there
Were this is the one with the lake is that’s Toledo Bend lake kind of a scrub Oak um uh Oak Pine scrub Far Oak Pine Forest not scrub Oak Pine bars and the one on the right is a uh longleaf pine uh habitat really beautiful habitat that
Also has a fire regime and this habitat is threatened and there’s a specific woodpecker that’s associated with this habitat that’s also threatened so there’s been a lot of work recently to it reintroduce fire suppress some of the non you know the other species other than Longleaf hide and the the as a result
Um the Woodpecker populations are rebounding as well okay so um and with with the um with this witch hazel it’s it may not be your sort of a core collection but there’s something that has a lot of interest that has conservation value and really would lend itself to being grown in in
Pierce’s Park and um or elsewhere uh Pierce’s Woods or elsewhere at Longwood and so what I don’t what I didn’t talk about I’m going to wrap up but what I didn’t talk about were our our indoor collections I’m really a sort of outdoor trained shrub guy
Um I do know some of the plants in the conservatories but you know a lot of what I said tonight applies to what you see in the conservatories as well and these are just two of the many cycads that we have um in the conservatories which are really interesting group of plants that
Are primitive gymnosperms uh during the sperm and cycads as a whole are among the most threatened species uh in the world so it’s really there are lots of threats and and we are contributing in a small way to their conservation in the conservatories and then um I can’t talk about collections without
Mentioning our Orchid collection which is probably our largest collection and most diverse collection and I am by no means uh I won’t even say I’m by no means an expert I know I scratched the surface a little bit in my knowledge of orchids but it is one of the most
Diverse and one of the most significant collections um dates back to um our Founders to the duponts and really is a really significant part of what we do at Longwood so with that I am happy to take um any questions and thanks for coming tonight
Thank you so much Tony uh that was very interesting um and we do have some questions so um as people are um coming up with these questions I just want to thank everybody again for your time Tony as well um it’s a really great insight to kind
Of some of this behind the scenes that we do at Longwood um so over to some questions uh somebody is curious how you know where all of these items are situated um kind of where to look because it seems a little random so how are you kind of finding sure so um
So for example The Oaks are in some of that information is published it’s not always published because um these if these things are very threatened then people you know not that they well in some ways people don’t want you to find them it’s hard to dig up an
Oak but orcas for instance if there’s very threatened orchids often that the data or the information of those are now published um um but mainly is getting to know local um uh local botanists and really having that network of people who can help guide you and direct you to these uh to
The you know these classes and so for instance the The Oaks we knew about uh we knew where they were uh in general but we we had assistance from um some of the folks that I showed you in that slide with the group of uh you
Know the group we were within the field who could tell us exactly where to go to find those things and that’s that’s generally the way it is that you can get kind of you know sort of a ballpark idea from information that’s published and then get specific information from local people right
So Denise has a question did you see any unique plant adaption adaptations given climate change impact and any evidence that plant specimens are adapting to warming and wet environments yeah that’s a hard question I think I I think it’s hard to um I think it’s hard to observe those
Adaptations happening because you know our time scale is not you know our we’re not on the same time scale as plants evolving but kind of the converse of that which we can see is that there are plants that you know we bring them from areas that are warmer or wetter whatever
It might be and we bring them North and you know 20 30 years ago those would not have performed well at all so we’re seeing that we’re sort of unlocking some of those inherent traits of those plants by bringing them up up to our area and
Maybe the you know one of the best examples of this is southern magnolia which these days we sort of take for granted growing in our area um if you look back through the literature and through the records um southern magnolia was something that was maybe a hundred years ago was thought to
Be almost completely unreliable in Philadelphia maybe growing up against the wall or you know a very very protective place and then you know if you look through you know the 1950s and 60s people were trying them and they would die in cold Winters and now almost without exception we can grow
Them reliably all the time uh in our area and another and that’s the case of you know again kind of using those traits in our area for better for worse um the southern you know the southern Red Oak is one where we can we can utilize what we think or kind of unlock
That heat tolerance and use those in our area so so that’s the sort of roundabout way of saying it it’s hard to observe those processes happening but we can kind of use the inherent traits of plants to our advantage and there’s this concept of assisted migration where you know plants
May be threatened further south or further north um and we as humans can you know grow them we can help them move further north for instance um and assist with their uh you know sort of preserving them I I’m not sure that that idea works I think it’s a question of scale
Um and whether we can you know have enough scale to capture the diversity in order to to preserve plants in that way but there is an idea that has a lot of currency these days great what is the general timeline of you being in the field and collecting
These specimens to possibly seeing them in Longwood yeah so it depends on what it is right so if it’s an oak tree it might be five seven ten five to seven years um if it’s a herbaceous plan it might be two or three years if it’s a shrub it
Might be somewhere in between so it it all sort of depends so there were there are some um they’re kind of it’s really hard to describe where these are but in 20 actually 2020 right before the pandemic we went to um Coastal Virginia and collected um plant that’s very common in South Island
Spamatoria which is yopon Holly and it it’s basically if you know Japanese Holly it’s the American equivalent of Japanese Holly it looks if I gave you a branch of each they look pretty much exactly the same those we actually collected seed which are still small but we collected two small plants
Um which we collected them in the it was January of 2020 is right before lockdown and then those were planted in the garden I want to say in the fall of like a year and a half later fall 21 and so um that’s a really quick turnaround and
Those happen to be you know small plants but nothing big and those have um those have survived two Winters now we there is a record that The Pierces were growing yopon and Holly in Pierce’s Park in um the 1830s and whether they had it for one year where they had it
For 20 years we have no way of knowing but it is nice to know this is something that they were trying as well um 200 years ago very cool is there a society or like a LinkedIn organization that you use to communicate or Share info with um we um
It’s less I’d say less formal than that we have um well we belong to two consortia that do plant exploration one is a Consortium that has focused on collecting in China for the last 30 years the other is called plant collections Consortium which is basically it’s overlapping groups of Institutions and the plant
Collecting Consortium is essentially everywhere in the world including the US except China and so that network of of Gardens and colleagues really helps us determine where we want to go and how we can go to these places and then you know sort of um beyond that lots of other botanic garden connections basically
Scream is three not one to bring into a longwood collection sure so so one of the things um uh one of the things we’re always on the lookout for are plants that um you know either well the main thing is the main thing is invasiveness and so um
I should say we generally when we’re doing International work uh and domestic work we generally collect seed and and so it’s much easier to transport but also if we’re doing International work it’s much easier to import and C generally does not transmit it’s not totally true but generally is much less
Likely to transmit diseases and insects than than whole plants so what we still are concerned about you know introducing diseases or insects um and then the the whole invasive question and so that’s a filter that we use when we’re collecting things is to make sure that we’re you know sort of
Avoiding those sorts of plants um and then very specifically um at Longwood um because of um we found boxwood blight which is a disease that um you know affects and can kill boxwoods and we have you know a few boxwoods at Longwood um we have a you know basically there’s
A ban on bringing any boxwood into Longwood um or any other related species into Longwood um and there’s actually a quarantine in Pennsylvania for shipping boxwood in and out of the state we are as part of Longwood reimagined we’re getting in some disease resistant um plants but those are going through a
Very strict quarantine process so you may see those and you may wonder you know why did I say there’s a band but um there there’s a real process in place for those so those are one that yeah definitely those are not um coming or going from Longwood
And Cheryl asked as a follow-up to that how do you know what is invasive or not right so you know one of the things is that when you’re in when you’re let’s say you’re in China and you see a plant that grows everywhere um you might you know it it rings some
Bells that sets off some alarms that um you know maybe this plant would perform the same way in the United States so that’s one way and then if there is something um you know like a honeysuckle where you know it’s sort of guilt by association uh where you know honeysuckles or
Barberries or you know something like that then um you know those they’re sort of again they’re kind of these filters that we have that we think well either you know this looks like it’s invasive or we know that um your close related species are invasive so we’re not going to do those
Um but you know sometimes there’s questions and I think the role a role that Botanic Gardens can play is to screen plants for invasiveness and so you know there may be other traits that the plan has that we want to capture or grow
Um and I think it is a role that we can play sort of a impartial and scientific role that we can play to uh you know to serve to screen things for invasiveness and and I think gardeners are a great way of uh helping with that because you
Know nobody likes to pull weeds and so we’re growing something and you start to see it seeding in then or the gardener starts to then you know we can kind of Corral that and um and capture that so I think I think there’s some things we can do I mean
There are things we do in the field but I think there’s still a role for trying things and keeping an eye on them and then you know if they do look bad you know invasive then we can remove them before they become a problem but that’s information that’s really helpful to have
So this one is more about you um okay it looks like you’ve explored lots of really cool places around the world do you have a favorite of where you’ve been uh that’s a good question um I probably I was in Japan I’ve been to Japan twice and probably traveling Japan
Um is probably that’s probably probably wrecked that pretty high on my list of places that I’ve been very cool all right so that is all the questions um unless anybody wants to get one in really quickly um but again I want to thank all of our Gardens premium members and innovators
That took some time to spend with us tonight um you’re definitely a really um High supporter of our Gardens and we do a lot because because of that support um as we are thinking about our next Garden chat we are finalizing some details for a June uh one in the Italian
Water Garden so we did try to do this one last September that got rained out so we are rescheduling for June so um stay tuned for more information which you will get um and it looks like um we have a lot of people saying thank you so great thank
You thanks for being here and we hope to see you all in the garden soon that are on the call and and Tony have a great rest of your night as well thanks you too thanks everybody all right have a good evening all right