cc >> Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin
Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the
Science Alliance here at UW-Madison, thanks for coming
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure
to introduce to you Ed Lyon. He's director of the Allen
Centennial Gardens here in Madison at UW-Madison, a
position he has held since 2008. He has worked for the Chicago
Botanic Garden, the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, and the
Rotary Botanical Gardens. Through Spellbound Gardening--
excuse me, through Spellbound Garden Writing and Consultation,
he writes and speaks for both public and professional
audiences across the Midwest. He currently writes the "Ask the
Expert" column for Wisconsin Gardening Magazine as well as
feature articles and a regular regional report on southern
Wisconsin for Chicagoland Gardening, in addition to other
feature articles. He has just launched a project
to author a book on gardening in the Midwest, which will
specialize on how to do it without any water.
[LAUGHTER] He teaches lectures and has
served as the keynote speaker for many gardening conferences.
He delights in focusing on regional flare and flavors in
gardening. Most importantly, he's an avid
gardener with dirt under his fingernails.
This is the second talk that Ed has given to Wednesday Nite at
the Lab. It's a reprise from his talk
four years ago. We get to see about the
evolution and future direction of Allen Centennial Gardens.
Please join me in welcoming Ed to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> Thank you, everybody.
I have to find my keys on here. I'm a clicker guy and apparently
I have to use keys. So we'll see how this works.
It's kind of funny, as Tom said, the final line of that biography
I think is the most important one, and that is I'm an avid
gardener, but what was rather amusing is I gave that talk to a
large group of about 300 master gardeners this winter and they
actually checked my fingernails. [LAUGHTER]
And, of course, in the winter, I really didn't have dirt
under the nails, so I'm not sure they felt they should believe
anything else I said in that talk.
And I don't know about gardening without water.
I don't think it's possible. In fact, I just got back a
matter of a couple of hours ago from a week-long conference in
Boston and Maine, and I'll tell you, it was very difficult to
leave those two areas and come back to the heat and the water
stress that we are going through.
I did take a quick walk through the gardens since I have not
been here for a week, and any of you who are gardeners know you
can only go so long through conditions like this.
No matter how much water you put on, those plants are going to
stress. And they're really starting to
show it. At least we have the ability to
water and get those plants through.
That may not be the ideal that we want if these conditions
continue, but certainly there are a lot of other people out
there, including our farmers, who don't have the same
abilities. I really feel for those folks
because it's going to be a very tough year for a lot of people.
We are going through an awful lot of water.
I think my largest bill at home this year will certainly be the
water bill. But anyway, four years ago, in
fact July 1st was my fourth anniversary, I took the position
at Allen Centennial Gardens. It was coming back home for me.
I had actually gone back and got my master's degree in
horticulture at 40 years old from UW.
So I considered it a return home.
And at that time, Tom asked me to do a talk on what, as the new
director, my vision, direction, for the gardens would be.
Did anybody actually happen to be here and see that?
We've got one person anyways. So then we chatted the other day
in the gardens, and he says how would you like to come back and
tell people where it's all gone in four years.
In the perspective of progress in botanic gardens, four years
is a relatively short time period.
Most of the time we do master plans or strategic planning, we
look at 10, 15, or 20 years. But I said, you know, that would
be fun. It also gives me the chance to
sort of sit down and look at what did we accomplish that we
wanted to? What didn't we?
What have we changed our minds on?
What types of things that have happened that we weren't
thinking about at the time? So, what I did is I took that
presentation that I did in 2008 and you're going to see some of
the very, well, one person is going to see some of the very
same slides. I'll point out what they were at
that time, and then I'll show you sort of the evolution then.
Let's see if this is the one I want.
Yes. Anyways, I started out that last
talk talking a little bit about my background.
Like I said, this was actually a second career for me.
I came back and got my graduate degree.
I was 40 years old at the time. Do the math.
You can see I'm getting fairly old there.
But I did get my master's in horticulture here.
I have been in public garden administration since Chicago
Botanic. I was the director of education
for Olbrich. I ran Rotary Botanical Gardens
for four years before coming here.
Again, you heard in the biography, I lecture and
instruct. I write for professional and
public audiences. A 2012 update, now I'm not only
writing this regional report and feature articles for
Chicagoland Gardening, but a brand new magazine
for Wisconsin. I hope you will all subscribe to
it. Publishing, as you all know, is
in turmoil right now. So if we want a gardening
magazine for our state, the best way we can support that is to
subscribe to it. But I am the regular "Ask the
Expert" contributor. I have two pages that I do on
that. It's interesting writing for
magazines. I just did the November/December
issue. Can you imagine the conditions
that we're under right now. I had to come up with questions
for November/December. But the most recent news I'm
very pleased about, Timber Press, which is right now the
predominate publisher of gardening books, just asked me
to write a book on gardening in the Midwest.
I'm very pleased. Actually, I shouldn't say that.
We haven't signed a contract yet.
I just submitted an outline, but hopefully that will come to
fruition. One more thing to get
accomplished. And actually, my story is rather
interesting. When I did my graduate work, I
actually came back with the intention I was going to get a
PhD and then teach in an academic setting.
And once I started work, Dr. Dennis Stimart was the
director of Allen Centennial Gardens at the time.
He was my graduate adviser, and I started working with him
behind the scenes at the gardens.
In fact, one summer I was the rock garden intern.
And that's when I realized that my real passion was going to be
public garden work. I got to work with all age
levels, children, adults, teenagers, various ages.
I just really fell in love with that.
I finished with my master's and then moved down to Chicago
Botanic and made the progression that we were talking about.
But then was really pleased that in the whole sort of realm of
doing that I was able to come back to Allen Centennial
Gardens. Both the university and that
little garden were near and dear to my heart.
So that was a really good thing for me.
As I said, I felt like I had come back home.
Just a little bit, we're not going to go through, last time I
went through fairly extensively the history of the gardens.
We're not going to do that tonight.
I do many talks on the history of the gardens, and if you have
groups that want those talks, certainly get a hold of me.
But it is a little bit important just to know that the house is
part of that because that's also part of the update, some of the
things that are happening to the house right now.
I think most of you know that that house was built to house
the very first dean of agriculture, Dean Henry.
It was built to his specifications.
In fact, if you know Victorian architecture, there's a number
of styles that are all incorporated into that beautiful
ornate house. Well over a hundred years old.
Was built in 1896. And it is, of course, the
centerpiece of the gardens, I think most of you know.
Four deans of agriculture lived in the house.
EB Fred was the last dean. After two years of being dean of
agriculture, they asked him to be president, and he took on
that role. It was interesting in that when
he became president he asked that they remain in that house
rather than moving into a president's residence, which
they did. And, actually, EB and Rosa lived
out their lives in the house. And they were the last staff to
live in the house because by the early '80s they were no longer
providing housing for the deans. So then what happened, and now
this is an old slide because it says now houses the Ag Research
Station, CALS Conference Services, and our staff.
And that's what it did right up until last year.
In '84 it was placed on the National Register of Historic
Places. That was a result of a project
of a landscape architect student, and it has not been
open to the public because it was office space.
Now, 2012, how many of you noticed there's things going on
over there? Nobody?
You haven't noticed what's going on over there?
All right. August of 2012 they moved all of
us out. I'm temporarily housed in a very
small room in a dorm. The house has been under
renovation. In fact, at the time they moved
us out they told us that the project was going to be done
May of 2012. Not that I believed that.
Any of us that know anything about construction and if you
saw the extensive plans that they were doing, I thought that
was awfully optimistic. >> I think you're confusing us
because August 2012 is after. >> Oh, I'm sorry.
It should have been August of 2011.
Yep, I think I confuse myself by starting out with 2012.
It was August of 2011. So we've been out now almost a
year. They've been working on it for
almost a year. It will house a new Department
of Sustainability. The Ag Research Stations were
moved up to Arlington. CALS Conference Services are now
over in Humphrey Hall. They will not move back.
The only groups that will move back in the house when it is
completed is the Department of Sustainability and Allen
Centennial Gardens. So if you've noticed all of the
work that's going on at the house, that is what is
happening. It's been quite alarming to our
brides, as you can imagine, but we manage to make everything
work out for them as well. This is something that I had up
in 2008. A lot of people I don't think
knew what our mission was. We do have a mission and a
mission statement. Our primary mission is to serve
as an outdoor classroom. That would make a lot of sense,
particularly to horticulture students but also LA students.
But anybody that's a student and can use it for any purpose, we
certainly have a variety of different students that will use
the gardens. It is a public garden in
addition to a teaching garden. We're open all year, 365 days,
from dawn to dusk at no fee to anybody who wants to come in.
We have been available for weddings, other events.
One of the things when I'm giving talks and tours through
the gardens that I think is the biggest surprise, especially to
our community who either knows about the gardens or they're
learning about the gardens, is we are 100% self-funded.
All of our operations, including my salary, my benefits, are
entirely self-funded. So there's not a dime of state
taxpayer dollars or university dollars that go into the
operations of the gardens. Now, where that makes it a real
challenge is our location on campus.
Obviously, the public all thinks, well they don't need any
money because the university supplies them with everything
they need. So being in that type of
location makes it a little bit more difficult for us to
fund-raise than many other not-for-profit gardens out
there. There's one full-time employee,
and you're looking at him. I'm the only one there all year.
We do have student labor. It doesn't look like this picked
up all of the slide, but then the balance are volunteers.
Students, these are some of our past students.
Update for 2012 is I did have to cut back.
We used to have four interns. I did have to cut back to three
this year. We haven't had the funding that
we would have liked for the full-time interns.
We always hate to see that happen because these are young
people that are getting valuable experience for their careers.
But these are the three young ladies that when you come over
this year have been exceptional students and are spending their
summer here gaining valuable experience in the gardens.
And then, of course, our volunteers.
Again, this is a slide that I put in in 2008.
This is still, here's 2012, this is still the really valuable
part of the labor force in the gardens.
This is the reason that we're able to manage those two and a
half acres and provide them free to everybody.
In fact, one of the volunteers is sitting in the audience
tonight. The white-haired gentleman
standing in the back. So see if you can identify him
in the audience. Tom comes every Tuesday just
like clockwork. We have some wonderful
volunteers, and the gardens would not be what they are
without their assistance. The other thing that I do like
to point out, almost every public garden out there relies
very heavy on volunteerism. And I say ours are very special
volunteers because they have the additional challenge you can all
relate to and that's parking on campus.
[LAUGHTER] We are given no consideration
for our volunteers. They have to use meters and do
anything that the public would have to do.
So you can imagine that to go through those kinds of hoops in
addition to anything else a volunteer has to do, that makes
them really, really dedicated, and we sincerely appreciate
that. When I tell people it's two and
a half acres, we have 26 individual gardens, at least
ones that we identify as individual gardens.
That's pretty amazing. The conference I was just at,
people who didn't know me and I was explaining about the
gardens, and I said we've got 26 gardens within the two and a
half acres, they just couldn't comprehend that.
That's a lot to put in that small space.
I'm sure all of you are familiar with the gardens and know all
those beautiful intimate spaces. Now, when I arrived, we were
hitting our 20th year. We were dedicated in 1989.
And you get 20 years into a public garden or anything
similar, this is when things start falling apart.
So I got to inherit all the things that were falling apart,
which is typical. I knew very well that that's
what I would walk in to. I figure it's going to take a
good four years, five years, to get through everything that is
structural and rejuvenating gardens.
And I tell everybody I'll be glad when that's over, and what
I really can then concentrate on are plants.
But there's two different things that a garden that age has to
look at. One is the rejuvenation of the
existing gardens. As you can imagine, if those
gardens hadn't changed in 20 years, there's many reasons
you'd have to rejuvenate. They might become overgrown.
Maybe the plant materials, obviously as fast as new and
improved cultivars come out, we want to make sure you have the
newest and the latest. So you have to make upgrades to
that. And one of the big problems we
have that many other places have, believe it or not, two and
a half acres in an urban setting is invasives.
Whether it's insects, whether it's diseases, and you know many
of them, and, believe it or not, even garlic mustard we have at
the gardens. So when you start having issues
like that, and I'll show you the conifer garden was overwhelmed
with field bindweed and thistles, then there are times
when you just have to step back and start over again or you're
just dealing with those problems over and over.
Just some examples of some of the gardens we've rejuvenated I
pretty much have done something with almost every one to this
point. The iris garden was one of the
first we worked on. That had gotten infested with a
lot of weeds, needed updates in the irises, so we did that.
And the last two years, the irises have been absolutely
spectacular. In fact, they're all ready to
divide again. So that's pretty good for only
two years in the ground. The English perennial garden,
the borders, after 20 years, have gotten really overgrown.
I was going to go in and simply divide plant materials down as
you would in borders of that nature, but you'll see we also
had to put in a new irrigation system for the entire gardens.
And I wanted water in the English garden, water boxes.
There were no valves in there. So they put two in, but in order
to do that they had to dig along just inside the borders and said
you have to remove all those plants.
Well, I said if we're going to remove the front, we'll remove
all of them and completely replant, which we did.
Last year was the first year, and this is what it looked like
after one season of the new plantings.
Now, we did take some plants that had already been in there,
divide out, and put back in. So you'll see a little height in
there. That's from plants that were
already established and we put back in again.
The lower picture is a little bit deceiving.
There's not two gazebos there. I just put two pictures side by
side so you can see. But this is this year, and you
can see from spring all the way up until just about a couple
weeks ago when I took those pictures how quickly it's all
grown back in again, looking very lush.
The Victorian garden, the exterior portion of the
Victorian garden used to be only between the two main gates.
I extended that to go 38 feet down the north direction and
then up this way, the south direction, a couple of years
ago. I felt to be a real Victorian
garden you had to balance those beds on either side of the
gates, not just have them on the in-between.
Also allowed us to expand our bulb display.
But then this year we've felt that all of that exterior
ground, there's not good turf in that area.
It's that strip that nobody wants to deal with.
So we actually have dug the whole thing up now, and if you
go over there, you'll see. We're doing perennial plantings
on the observatory side. We'll put vegetables in.
And, again, this is a year into it after we expanded those beds.
And it just looks so much more lush and full all the way across
the front instead of walking down through and seeing a poorly
represents grass and is really weeds.
The rock garden, we tell people we have the finest rock garden
in the Midwest, and it probably is one of the best rock gardens
in the country. And, believe me, I've been to
enough of them to know that. And there's reasons that it is
that good. Originally, Buck and Alberta
Gabelman, Buck was a professor of horticulture here, many of
you probably knew him, they took on the responsibility of
managing that garden. After they stopped, Ed Glover,
you'll see his picture in here, who has been president of the
Wisconsin-Illinois Rock Garden Society, he took it on.
He's been doing it for about 10 years now, and it's
extraordinary. He actually works in oncology.
He parks in Steenbock. I see him every day.
He stops in every day. If you can imagine that kind of
dedication from a volunteer. He manages, there he is bent
over there with one of the interns.
He's the one who has, in those 10 years he's probably been
through every area of that rock garden.
Put in the tufa garden area. We've just last fall redid the
upper portion that you can see in the upper left corner.
We redid the moraine. Two years ago as a student
project we built this crevice garden.
It went over so well that this year we expanded that.
So on the right you see the new expanded version of that.
That's one of the most popular gardens that we have.
So, again, it's a volunteer who really helps us do it.
The woodland garden, this is the Wisconsin Woodland Garden, and
it's supposed to be for native Wisconsin woodland plants.
And when I came it was heavily infested with invasives.
One of the worst is the Adenophora, the common ladybell,
many of you probably have in your own gardens.
You know how noxious that plant can be, particularly since it's
not a native. We had all kinds of plants, and
even native plants, that were noxious like Virginia waterleaf
and lily of the valley. You have no idea, well maybe you
do if you've tried it, but you have no idea how hard it is to
kill lily of the valley, and we had to get that stuff out
because it is not a Wisconsin native plant.
The other issue is that area is so dark and so horrendously dry
and it had been years and years and years without any addition
of compost, and a good woodland garden should have compost added
every single year. So we went, at first what I
tried to do is we tried to just go through and manage and pull
and control weeds. It wasn't working.
And I felt so guilty because every week I was sending
volunteers in there to pull out basically the weeds they had
only pulled the week before. So, finally, I said this isn't
going to work, and we've tried to go as chemical free as we can
in the gardens, but this is one area I said we have to kill off
all of these invasives and basically start over.
That's what we did. There you can see a lot of the
plants in there, most of those are not native plants or they
might be a native plant that's trying to take over the whole
area. So we cleaned it all out.
We brought in enormous amounts of compost.
Some of the compost in there was specially formulated for
woodlands. You can see the plant materials.
We brought in enormous amounts of plant materials.
We've been doing that for two years and putting in the
compost. In fact, if you walk over with
us tonight you'll see 15 yards of compost in the driveway right
now waiting for me to come back. And it's still a struggle.
This is a very hard kind of garden to develop.
It's so dry, it's so dark that establishing plants in it, you
lose a lot of plants in the establishment process.
So that's still an ongoing project.
This was pictured this year. I think you can even see in the
pictures the dryness and darkness.
I think I might even have to limb up some of the trees just
to get a little more light in there because it is that dark.
This was an interesting one. The upper left-hand corner was
the picture I showed of the shady annual garden.
There's not an annual in there. I think in order to save money,
we spend roughly $15,000 a year on annuals.
That's a large amount of money they had planted up to
perennials. Well, I had a couple of issues
with that. One is there's a donor stone
that sits right there that says shady annual garden.
So we weren't doing what the donor asked us to do.
And, secondly, if people came in and thought those were annuals,
then they were mistaken. So that's not very good for
education. So we have changed, in fact it's
expanded, if you've been over, it's expanded to include that
entire area under the gingko as the gingko continues to widen
out. And it is now entirely all
annuals. In fact, it's one area that
people really love because it's extremely colorful.
Again, this is cutting some things off.
That's the daylily garden. That's been completely redone
because when we did the new irrigation system they had to
put that obnoxious looking pump there, and so that changed some
things around. But that's been redone.
The conifer garden is our project this year.
Now, one, many of the conifers are much larger than the average
homeowner is going to use today. We have smaller yards.
We really want to do more of the dwarf and miniature conifers.
So it's not really reflecting that smaller landscape.
But this was a garden that also got heavily infested with
thistle and field bindweed. It's been very difficult to
eradicate. We had to do the same thing
again. We dug out all of the perennials
that we could save and went in, and we've spent actually so far
a year and a half hitting those particular weeds in order to get
rid of them. It's not a one shot deal.
It can be a time consuming process.
Here's where we were starting to do that last fall.
This is what it looked like this spring.
If you walk over, you'll see we're still hitting some weeds,
but this summer that will be finished and that will be one of
our projects that we're going to be doing.
I redid the entrance garden. That's now going to have an
emphasis on bulbs. So it'll start with the early.
And this is very important garden, I think, when you first
walk in. It needs to be very colorful, so
it'll start with all your spring bulbs that you can expect.
Your minor bulbs, your daffodils and such.
It won't have tulips. And then it then goes into
alliums, which are your really in between bulb that helps you
go from that point when all the other bulbs have finished but
your annuals haven't started yet.
The alliums were quite lovely this year.
It then transitions into lilies, my favorite bulbs, and then the
lilies into dahlias which will take you right up until winter.
This, as many of you may know, started as a bog garden.
Eventually, that wasn't working. The liner was leaking.
It wasn't a bog. So they took the plants out and
they put a bunch of plants in there and called it Wisconsin
Wildflower Garden. Unfortunately, it happened to be
a lot of Wisconsin wildflowers that, again, were fairly
invasive to the rest of the garden.
We're finding Indian plantain and fireweed and many of the
plants growing in other areas. And there's also a sight line
from the gazebo right over that garden, and it didn't fit.
It had all these sort of big, large prairie-type plants stuck
right in the middle, and a lot of people just didn't comprehend
that view across the sight line. So one of the issues with only
having two and a half acres is that I cannot expand.
So if we want to do something new, some new type of focus we
think is important, we can't expand out into a new area.
We have to find another area and say is this really the most
relevant use of the space and change it over.
So we want to do a sustainability garden, and I'm
currently writing a grant that has to be submitted by
August 1 for this. Landscape architecture students
are doing a plan for it. The goal is we're going to put a
boardwalk over the top of this so it's level with the sidewalk.
We'll come in from three points to a center circle with
interpretation in the center circle.
You'll be able to look down on a rain garden, the new German
gravel gardens that are relatively new to the country
right now, and an alternative lawn meadow type garden.
And so we'll be looking for funding for that through grants
and hopefully maybe some donors and many more.
Like I said, within my first five years I think every single
garden will have been touched in some way in renovations.
Now, here was the really big one, and that is in 20 years you
start have structural repairs. And we had some major ones.
We had walls coming apart, falling in.
In fact, we still have a fair number that we're going to have
to tackle. But we've already tackled the
very worst, and I don't know if you were going through the
gardens, this wall was coming apart.
Certainly that path with the ramp was becoming dangerous with
the separation of the bricks. And in fact, up in the upper
right corner, I had decided that fall that we were going to do
this work in the spring, and by spring the wall had even caved
in. So we didn't even have any
choice by that time, but we had already had it set to go.
And this is the work that we did.
It was major. Took many months.
It was a $55,000 project to completely rebuild these walls,
but they've been built in such a way they should last 50 years,
not 20 years. And, again, when it comes to
funding, nobody wants to donate to repairs.
This money has to come out of the endowment money.
People want to put their name on a new project.
They don't want to put their name on something that's been
rebuilt. So that's a stress when we have
to do that, but it turned out really well.
Beautifully done. We're glad we did it.
So some things we do ourselves just to save that kind of money.
The west walk, the bricks were coming apart.
Again, that walk was getting treacherous.
I had one of the interns, her boyfriend had just quit a job
where, for two years, he had worked for a company laying
brick. And he says for a good reference
he said I will direct your students.
And I said, all right, we'll do it.
We had an estimate of $12,000 to do the job.
He directed the other students to do it, and this is no small
job because if you look at that path there are a number of
squares and every square shows a different style of laying brick.
They pulled all of them up, relaid them down in those exact
same patterns, block after block, in three weeks' time at a
cost of $1,000 to us. And we all agree that by the
time they got done they had actually done a better path than
was there originally. It was an amazing process.
I was very proud of them, and they also left, again, with a
new skill they could take with them.
As I said, the entire water system started leaking
everywhere after digging down. It was four feet under
sidewalks. And after we kept digging up
sidewalks, I said this is ridiculous.
We'll dig one area, fix the leak, and then the next thing
you know it's springing up farther along.
And so we realized the whole system was giving out.
So the entire water system of the gardens got replaced two
Novembers ago. So, again, another cost that
certainly a donor doesn't step forward to give us money for
that. Painting and staining, we did
that entire pergola ourselves. I say ourselves, the students
did most of it. Amazing the amount of work that
we do so that we can save money for the gardens.
That would have been, again, a very, very expensive project to
hire somebody to come in and do. It has to be done about every
10 to 12 years. One of my students took it on to
do the donor arbor. She did that all herself.
We did the bridge, and I can't even begin to tell you how bad
that was. You can see in the pictures we
did it in a very, very hot August.
God bless my interns and my volunteers.
They didn't complain a bit. And we sanded, and we brushed,
and we pressure-washed, and we stained, and we primed, and we
put two coats of paint on, and you can see the results now.
In fact, we completely took the deck of it from paint to stain,
and that's no easy process because all of that paint had to
come off. And this is what it looks like
as a result. Again, we saved thousands of
dollars doing it ourselves. And then, of course, I'm like,
oh, wow, I really like the color of the bridge, and my poor
volunteers and interns are rolling their eyes because then
we had to paint all the benches. Get that color in the garden.
We did that all in the same year.
We've added sculptures to the gardens.
Our wonderful hortisculpture. I hope you all, everybody
comments on that when they walk through the pergola, which was a
gift from Dick Moll for his wife Pat.
We added the ruins columns, our little mini Stonehenge, we did
that at our own expense just to get some consistency in those
two beds. And what about projects that
weren't even on our radar? And this is one of them.
This was the house. This has changed enormously the
things we're doing this year. We've had to dig up the entire
herb garden. That's been moved.
We have lost the space completely around the house.
In fact, they're still supposed to come in and dig around it and
put in drainage tile. So we've just removed all the
plants out, so it's limited our space.
Thus, our theme this year, limited space gardening.
We moved the, the brochure rack. It's caused a lot of different
changes that we're working around this year, and I'm sure
you've all seen all this work going on.
And then in back of us right now we have no access to our back
service gate. In fact, when the phase two of
the Lakeshore dorm project is done, I won't be able to get
trucks back in there anymore. So we now have to figure out how
mulches and things in quantity will come into the gardens
because they won't be able to have access to the back.
They just put in a new boss shelter.
That kind of took up some space on the exterior of the gardens.
And they came through and replaced all the columns.
This I was very pleased about because they were falling apart.
In fact, look at them, they just finished them and they're
beautiful. They were cracking pretty
severely. In 2008 I told you some of the
things that we were looking at were new trends and concerns
that were coming up. And this is the big one.
I'll just briefly review. Right up until 2005, gardening
was the number one recreational activity in America.
It started to reverse itself in 2005.
It's been on a very rapid decline since.
Our green industry is hurting big time.
The rose industry is almost non-existent right now.
A lot of things that have been happening, the reason is is our
primary audience and gardener were baby boomers and older at
that time. My age and older.
And we were the folks that were predominately gardening,
basically because we had some kind of background in it.
A mother or grandmother who did vegetable gardening, maybe
agronomic background, and we started to do the same thing
about the time we hit our 30s and 40s in our own home
landscapes. But we're being followed by the
X and Y generation, and these were the kids that moved out of
the house before we got interested in gardening.
So they don't have that same sort of attachment, family
attachment, that we did. They didn't experience that.
Both couples probably were working, less time to spend on a
home landscape, and their emphasis is spending time
together as family. So this is, in fact, and they're
called this, and not in a derogatory way, by the green
industry is the do it for me generation because they would
rather have landscaping services come in and do their landscape,
a very clean, simple landscape, so they have more time for
themselves and the family. But they certainly aren't
interested in English perennial borders and ponds and streams in
their backyards. So we have to look at what are
they interested in. And I talked about this in 2008,
and you all know because you live in Madison.
And Madison is right on the cusp of all of these things with our
farmers markets, but what this group is interested is
regionalism, organics, green concerns, quality of product,
heirlooms, all of these types of things, and you can see that.
And it's understandable. I started my gardening career as
a vegetable gardener. I didn't even get into
ornamental gardening until I was in my 30s.
So, we think that the way to pull new people into gardening
is the same way that we got started: showing people how you
can grow, and we'll show you a little bit of that produce in
limited spaces. I told in 2008 gardening in
small spaces are in, colossal gardens or landscapes are out.
So what I've done is many of our larger beds I've broken down.
I've put paths through them so they are smaller spaces, so
people can relate to them and understand how to plant in those
smaller spaces, and you don't need the vast acreage in order
to do that. A boom without bloom, we call
it, foliage so that you don't have to rely on that flower
throughout the season. So we try to show that as well.
We've been doing it a lot. That entire bed, there was a
demonstration of how you could do color entirely in foliage.
There's no flower in there whatsoever.
So that's one of the things you'll have seen that we've been
approaching. I told you in 2008 adventurism
is in, safe is out. That's good because I happen to
like color, I happen to like adventurism.
If you go over this year, you'll see my colored poles.
So we try to do things that are fun, interesting, and this was
our last year color your world theme.
That actually represented the color wheel, and everybody
really enjoyed that. So we try to have a lot of fun
with what we're doing as well. And you all know this, virtual
gardening is replacing things like our public garden's
extension where we used to get our resources.
Now everybody's getting their information off the Internet.
And we've got a long ways to be able to catch up to that.
I don't have the staff, but we at least are increasing the
interpretation we have. We finally pulled together
through donations from garden clubs and other annual donations
the $25,000 that it took for professional labeling system.
You can't imagine how many people will come through and
complain you don't have good labels on your plants.
They don't understand how expensive good permanent
professional labels are. We're doing more brochures.
We have a self-guided brochure now.
I completely redid the website. We are now on Facebook.
We're doing social networking. As much as I dragged my heels
doing it, I have found Facebook is generating all the audience
to the website. It's pretty amazing.
So we're trying to use some of that as well.
Pot-scaping, containers, has been really big.
However, we're not going big time.
In fact, we've reduced the number of ornamental containers
we have. They're extremely
labor-intensive. We're trying to show people how
to do things with less labor, less water, but we're doing a
lot more in raised beds showing people how to do mixed-use
garden, limited space gardening, vertical gardening, which is
maybe more practical. If you're going to have to go
out there and water that container twice a day, then
maybe it should also be giving you something back as well.
Hip to be homegrown, this is all about the fresh produce.
This whole new term: locavore. People who want to eat as much
as they can from locally grown We have dramatically expanded
our kitchen garden. It encompasses the entire
terrace this year. Every kind of raised bed
you can imagine. All different forms of vertical
gardening to show people how you can grow up, take less space.
We had a family fun day in May on a Saturday.
500 people came through. You could tell they wandered
through and enjoyed looking at the pretty aspects of the
garden. I stood in that spot from 10:00
to 2:00 without a break. That's where all the families
were asking all of the questions.
This is what they're interested in.
We've got a lasagna garden. This is really what the younger
generation is interested in. And sustainability is huge.
The issue of turf in America. The water it takes, the
pollution that it creates. Just look at the information on
how much pollution a two-cycle engine creates, the toxicity of
the soils. We have actually taken, our
lawns now are 100% organic. We mow them higher.
By mowing them higher, that completely takes care of the
weeds. The reason people have weeds in
their lawns is they're mowing the turf down too short so it
can't out compete the weeds, which it will do.
Everybody in the last two years has been coming in and saying
what are you using to kill all the weeds?
And I'm like, we're not using anything.
And we don't have all the weeds. But try to get men convinced to
raise up their lawnmower. [LAUGHTER]
It's next to impossible. We want more plant materials.
They're being released faster than ever at a very rapid rate.
So we're trying to get these plant materials as much as we
can into the gardens so people can see them.
And if you walk through in the spring and see our thousands and
thousands, well, hundreds of flats with thousands of plants
in them, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The amount of plants that we put in every year and keep trying to
get some additions in where necessary.
That crevice garden, that's the early one, is an example of some
of the additions we do. Here's a list of things I had as
a goal. None of these things were being
done. We need to raise more money
beyond the endowment. We can't keep robbing the
endowment to do these structural repairs.
So these are the things I said we need to do.
Well, I'm writing my first grant this year.
It took three years. I'm writing my first grant.
Not ready for a capital campaign yet.
The foundation will help us with that.
But we've been doing the new projects, the home
demonstrations as you just saw. Friends of the Garden, I'm
pleased to announce we just started that this year.
We have a steering committee. We will be doing fund raising
events starting next year. So, again, I'm pleased we
finally have that off the ground, so that fulfills that
fund-raising activities in the garden.
We'll see that happening now that we have the friends group.
Anybody interested in joining us, look at the website.
Certainly we can use more people.
I said in 2008 we want to increase educational
opportunities. At this point, we still can't do
a lot of the hands-on things we love to do.
We simply don't have the staff to do it.
But, as you saw, we're increasing our interpretation.
We are doing a theme every year, and that theme is to bring
everybody in every year to see what we're doing that's
different. We do your seasonal plants, but
then we make the theme educational.
So in 2009 it was ornamental edibles.
We showed people how you could, all those gorgeous beds that you
see there, every single plant in them all or part was edible.
And people learned how they could do that and be just as
beautiful as if they were all ornamental plants.
We took that a step further in 2010, broke it out into eight or
nine categories of plants that had multiple purpose.
So, again, people didn't realize that certain plants you made
beverages and teas out of and all the various things that we
could show them there. Last year was color your world,
and, again, when we're teaching design, there's terms like
analogous and complementary and monochromatic, and our gardeners
are confused. What does this mean?
We showed bed by bed what those terms meant.
And then this year we were forced into this one.
It was going to be paint your garden.
I was going to use paintings as inspiration for beds, but we
kept losing more and more space so I didn't feel I could do that
very effectively. I'm going to wait to do that
one. And I said, you know what?
We're doing all this limited space gardening in the vegetable
garden and we actually are forced to be more limited in
space this year, so it became more with less limited space
gardening. And again, we're getting that
education out there. Every one of the signs that we
have in our vegetables, they were all heirlooms.
Not only does it tell you what they are, it tells you a little
bit of history about that heirloom as well.
And that's all on the website. Addressing new needs, the
sustainability issues. We're doing that.
But one of the things I'd like to see within the next year or
so us getting into is horticultural therapy and
healing gardens. This has been an issue for about
10 years now and of real strong interest.
Look at my age and older, us baby boomers, those of us that
will now start looking at plants in a different way for maybe
their healing, their therapeutic issues.
And really nobody has grasped on to this, none of the public
gardens, in a way that I thought that they would.
So this is a great place for a university garden to maybe
establish itself, and this is one of the areas that I do want
to look at getting into once we have all the structural repairs
done. And we're trying to do more PR
and marketing. In fact, one of the committees
we're pulling together as part of the new friends group is an
actual PR and marketing group because one of our biggest
challenges is people don't know who we are, they don't know our
situation, they don't know about our funding, they don't know
what we're providing for free, and we need to get the word out.
I think we've done a good job of that at places like the Garden
Expo. I think in the four years I've
been here we've at least gone from I've never heard of you to
I've heard of you, I just haven't been there yet.
So we're making progress, I think.
But what I tell people, it's amazing.
It's not just people outside our community.
You'd be surprised how many people within Madison don't know
who we are. And, again, we have a different
setting as a university setting, and these are issues I told you
that we were going to have to look at in 2008.
I hate to tell you, not many of these have improved.
Parking is still an enormous issue.
Even those people in the Madison community that know we exist,
and many, many good gardeners that I talk to, they say they're
not going to come in because we don't want to park on campus.
We don't want to drive on campus.
It's a huge, horrible issue. And people even think they're
going to be ticketed on weekends.
So the education we have to get out there for parking.
The size of the garden, I can't expand.
So we've got to do with what size we have.
We don't have true facilities, so to do all these kinds of
educational programs, we don't have the facilities to do them.
Budget is still an issue and will be.
Staffing is an issue. I'm still the only full-time
person. And, again, all of the
structural stuff we talked about, they're still there.
So anyways, to conclude, I want people to understand, and
sometimes I don't think everybody truly knows what a
public, what a teaching garden is and what we're about, but I
say we are plants and education. If you know me well enough, you
know I'm not only passionate about horticulture, I'm
passionate about education. That's why I write for
magazines. That's why I want to write a
book. I'm emphatic on teaching
regionalism. The reason that so many plants
are, I do a whole talk and I think you might understand it by
the title. It's called "Why Doesn't Mine
Look Like the Marketing Image?" The Midwest is entirely
different than the whole rest of the country, and we need
to educate people why it's different, how it's different,
if they're going to be successful gardeners.
So, we are not just about plants.
We're about education, but I think just as important, we are
also plants and people. And that's the people who come
and use the gardens, it's the people who help us in the
gardens, it's the classes that use the gardens, the people that
we teach, the students down here on the left side, horticulture
for non-majors. So we are as much about people
as we are plants as well. So, that's four years in, folks.
I think we've accomplished a fair amount, especially
considering limited resource as far as funding and staff.
If you haven't visited recently, we're actually going to walk
over. Any of you that want to come
through, we'll walk through and point out things in person.
And I say, hey, even if you've been recently, keep coming
because things change almost on a daily basis.
We love our regular visitors. One of the other things that
makes us different than a lot of other public gardens is by being
on campus we have a lot of people that come and eat lunch
or come and relax. We actually have a postal woman,
she comes by every afternoon. Parks her truck and comes in and
relaxes. So, we love our regulars.
I said it's like a Cheers. We can almost go "Norm!"
when you come in. And that's a wonderful thing.
So please patronize us, use us. Tell everybody we're free.
You certainly can't beat that. There's many ways, also, that
you can contribute to the gardens.
It doesn't always have to be financial.
Our volunteers are contributing enormously.
Certainly, getting the word out, telling your friends,
telling people, use us. When you have friends come into
town to bring in visitors because the more people that
know about us, that generates more support as well.
Thank you, everybody. Do I have time for a few
questions before we go out? [APPLAUSE]