9UNP1278HD_Ben_Futa_WordPress

- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ 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, Wisconsin Alumni Association and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Ben Futa. He is the new director of the Allen Centennial Gardens, except for now they're gonna be the Allen Centennial Garden. They've lost an S, and that's gonna be part of the story, I think, because Ben's gonna tell us about his view for the future of the Garden. Ben is from South Bend, Indiana, which is where he was born and grew up. He went to school at Purdue University and studied horticulture. 

He has worked in Chicago at various gardens in Chicago, and he came here about five months ago as the newest director of Allen Centennial Gardens. I'm a plant pathologist. I remember when my dad showed me, about 50 years ago this month, how you can take a dried marigold seed, flower, and pull the seeds out of it. It was pretty amazing to have that bundle of seeds there. We saved them over the winter, sowed them the following spring. They grew. We transplanted them, and I ended up a plant pathologist. So as I said earlier today, if you tend your gardens, your gardens will tend you. So please join me in welcoming Ben Futa to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. 
(audience applauds)

- Well, thank you. I think he just told my whole story, so this will take about five minutes. No, I'm just kidding. 
(audience laughs)
 Thank you all for coming out this evening. I'm excited to see so many of you here, and I see a few garden folks in the audience. And don't worry, I'll pick you out later. But again, my name is Ben Futa. I'm the new director of the Allen Centennial Garden here on the UW-Madison campus, and I'm gonna take you on a little bit of a journey before we bring it back home because what I want to try and do tonight is explore what it means to be a public garden and what it is we do. So without further ado, we're gonna get started. 

So I want you just to take a couple minutes, or a few seconds, I should say. I'm just gonna go through a few photos, and just quietly, to yourself, think, what do these things have in common and what might be missing?

And if in seeing those three photos, you thought, "What is similar? "There's an animal in each one," you're correct. However, if you're also like most people, there's something missing. There's something that was maybe there that... Because we know we're here tonight to talk about gardens. We know we're here tonight to talk about plants in some fashion, there's something else in these photos. There's plants. And there's a lot more of them than there are animals in each one of them, and they're doing a lot more things than animals, but we typically don't see them first. 

So this is something called plant blindness, and this is a more or less official diagnosed term. This is something that is sort of really, there's been some recent research done on this in terms of elementary school students, so K-12, and particularly in biology classes, in how they respond to learning about plants versus learning about animals. And basically, this research is showing that children really don't pay attention to plants like they do animals, and there are many reasons for this. But before we get into those, plant blindness has a few sort of key symptoms, if you will, which are listed here, and I should say this is not an exhaustive list. If I had put the whole list on here, it would have gone on for a couple of slides. But just to sort of give you a picture of what it means to have plant blindness, the first, and this is true in all the photos I just showed, plants are the backdrop to animal life. They're just kind of there. They're the scenery. We don't see them as needing our attention. And leading into that, we fail to see, notice, or focus attention on those plants in our lives. 

We see this every day in the Allen Centennial Garden. We have a pond, we have a large family of beautiful koi fish, and they're the stars of the whole garden, I swear, especially with small children. They run in, and they go right for the bridge, and they will spend 10 minutes there, 
(snapping fingers)
 but they'll through the rest of the garden like that, and that bothers me. 
(audience laughs)
 As a plant person, as a garden person, that phenomenon bothers me, and that is a symptom of plant blindness. People go to, or they see the chipmunk and they just think it's the coolest thing. Or they see a bird, and "Oh, it's the bird." And wildlife, I will say, is a crucial part of gardening. 

We are interacting with nature. This is important. But at the same time, there's something to be... we're losing something in not having that connection to the plants in our environment and just seeing the animals. And another part of this is misunderstanding what exactly it is plants need to survive because, of course, they are alive. They're growing. They are breathing organisms, just like you and me. But because they lack certain things in common to being an animal, we don't really necessarily not... the general public, I should say, doesn't necessarily understand what it means for plant... what does it need to grow? 

Sunlight, water, good soil. That may seem pretty basic, but again, when you're coming from a perspective of, "Well, animals need food because we need food," they may not be able to conceptualize what plants need as far as what do plants eat? We don't see them eat, so there's a disconnect somewhere. And then I think this is what it all boils down to. This is the, how should I say this, the, I guess, result of this condition is that we fail to see the importance that plants play in our lives. What do they actually do for us? Why should we care? Which brings me to the... Oh and some causes, I forgot. So again, what exactly causes plant blindness? 

How does this come about? Ad it actually, it's quite interesting because it's not because there is some big coup at the education level, or, you know, educators just hate plants and there is a lobby out there that hates plants. That's far from the truth. It's hard-wired into us, in a way, and a lot of it goes back to how we see the world, how our vision operates. And for example, let's see, the last basically three points, plants blend in when they're not showy. Our eyes look for contrast. That's how we discern when we're seeing one thing versus another. I see all of you tonight because you're in contrast with the seat behind you. But if you were wearing sort of a brown burgundy cloak and a hood, I'd be less likely to see you. That's the same goes, same thing goes for plants, and all of those photos, it was just a lot of green, but there wasn't anything that really made them stand out. 

And that lack of contrast in the plant world, a lot of times, is what leads our eye to not see them as we should. The other piece is that plants appear relatively stationary. We know they're not. We know they grow. Over the course of either a season or a day or a year or 10 years, we know plants change. We know they grow. But because we can't watch them walk across the street or, again, fly across our backyard, which is an instantaneous sort of motion, our brain doesn't quite register them in the same way. When something moves, it catches our eye and we turn our head. Again, that's built into us from an evolutionary level of seeing danger and "What's that?" and this idea that plants aren't threatening to us. 

You know, back in the day, if a predator was coming after us, we had to have those quick reflexes, fight or flight, and we had to see where we were going, and plants were never gonna attack us because they didn't move. They didn't do these things. So our brains have sort of been hard-wired to not care, in a way. Now, that's not to say that our conscious brains don't care. Obviously, we do. But on a hard-wired level, we have some boundaries to overcome, and we have some work to do because our brains don't want to see plants for what they really are. And I'm actually gonna bounce back then to the first point to say that another cause of this beyond our sort of hard-wiring is how we have experienced plants in our life. The story about marigold seeds is perfect because it was an experience with plants, and it was meaningful, and that's happening less and less, and that's one thing that leads to this. When you have a meaningful experience with something, it changes you and it impacts your life. We now have a plant pathologist in the room, thanks, in part probably, to that experience. 

I grew up gardening in my home. No one necessarily said, "You need to do this. "This is what you have to do. "Gee, it might be fun if..." I just rebelled against everything else and just kept going outside, and it happened, and my parents just eventually gave up trying, and just said, "Well, he's outside." For me it happens organically, no pun intended. But for others, it doesn't quite work that way. Others, we need 
(fingers snapping)
 to flip the switch. 

And so who are these flip-switchers? And something else to think about, not only who are flipping these switches, but why is it important again to... Why should plants matter? Why should we care? Why shouldn't we just think of plants from a perspective of growing food for us or providing clean air? Well, those are two both very important things, but they also provide shelter. They provide energy. They provide fuel. They are the only mechanism on earth... they are the baseline of all energy. 

They take light and make food. Without plants, we're done. They're the bottom of the food chain, and they are nature's power plant. And so they perform a pretty important function. And if we don't value them, if we can't identify them, if we can't label them, some of the research done around plant blindness has also suggested that children of a certain age can identify 300 name brands, Kraft, Nabisco, Heinz ketchup. They know these brands because they see them and they interact with them in their daily life. But ask them to identify an oak tree versus a birch tree? Coming up blank. Even with animals they may be able to say, "Oh that's a cardinal, that's a blue jay" because there are certain really distinguishing characteristics between the two, but they can't do that with plants. Or they may say, "Well, I know what corn looks like, "because I see it in all the fields." 

But soybeans don't look like normal beans when you're driving by at 60 miles an hour. They may be able to tell you it's corn, but they can't tell you if it's sweet corn. They can't tell you if it's Indian corn. They can't tell you if it is broom corn. They don't know that. Not that everybody should have to know all of these things, but it, again, people no longer are able to identify things, and things we can't identify, we don't value. We can only assign value to things that we understand and we know. So basically, plants are getting the shaft at this point. And again, I shouldn't... I know I'm spinning this a little dark. 

We're coming to the light part of this, I promise. And I'm not... obviously there's good work being done in a lot of places, and that's what we're gonna start looking at because while this is a problem and while this is something we have to work at it, people have been working at this for a long time. We're at a place now where this work has been happening for decades at a university. And there are universities just like this over the country and over the entire world that are doing important work to combat plant blindness. But we have a lot more work to do. Our work is not done. It will never be done, so we have to keep moving. So what I would like to propose and what we're gonna explore tonight is that, in public gardens, we can find a solution to plant blindness, one solution among many. And public gardens, for those who are not familiar, I'm gonna give you the textbook definition first, so bear with me. 

So a public garden is an institution that maintains collections of plants for the purposes of public education and enjoyment, as well as research, conservation, and higher learning. It must be open to the public and resources and accommodations must be made to all visitors. Public gardens are staffed by professionals trained in their given areas of expertise and maintain active plant record systems, because we are living museums. These entities include botanical gardens, arboreta, cemeteries, zoological gardens, sculpture gardens, college and university gardens, historic homes, urban greening organizations, natural parks, and some city/county/state/federal parks. So, I hope right there, I just expanded your mind a little bit. If you've thought that public gardens have to have 'botanical garden' in the name, they don't. There are many registered public gardens, again, that are cemeteries. Cemeteries have some of the most beautiful woody plant collections in the country. They are stunning because someone plants them, maintains them, and they don't get disturbed. It's basically an arboretum but in a very different context. 

And you could argue that cemeteries also have beautiful landscapes, and some of them have... there are some in Chicago that are just stunning, their architecture, and it's sculptural. There's more to see... It's cultural, in a way. And that's what public gardens bring to the picture. But at the very end of the day, when it all boils down, public gardens connect people to plants, period. That is what we all do on some level, in some way, in some fashion, and this is the direct solution to plant blindness. When people are connected to something, when they understand something, suddenly, 
(fingers snapping)
 that light turns on, and they can start to care. 

So now, what we're gonna do is sort of take, again, a little bit of a journey through public gardens. And before, again, we sort of come home to the Allen Centennial Garden here at UW, I wanna show you what a few other gardens are doing because there are some really innovative and creative solutions out there. And number one, I hope it inspires you. If you're traveling, find a public garden within 20 miles of where you're going and visit. Not only will it just be fun, but you'll get to see some of these things. So the first here is the Canopy Walk from the Atlanta Botanical Garden. And Atlanta has been doing... I think I may have them three times in this presentation... They've been doing incredible things. On the one hand, exhibits like this are built for the good of the organization. 

They're built to drive membership and visitation and revenue so that they can keep their doors open and pay their staff. But on the other hand, it's serving that critical function of connecting people to plants. Canopy walks, I think, are a really innovative solution to that because how frequently can you daily walk 40, 50, 60 feet up in the air and know what it feels like to be an owl or a bat or a bird or a squirrel? Not terribly... This is not something that us, as humans, can easily access. Yes, there's zip-lining. Yes, we could do tree climbing things, but that reaches this many people. They have millions of vis-... Or, I don't wanna say millions... hundreds of thousands of visitors per year, and almost every one of them could go over this. 

They're impacting so many people with this attraction... it's an attraction, but it's also a learning and an engagement opportunity. And a lot of these things that we're gonna look at first are what I call 'get 'em in the door' things. They're somehow related to the garden's mission of connecting people to plants, but there's also a little bit of a, dare I use the word, 'gimmick' attached. This draws in those people who would never normally say, "A garden is where I want to go or spend time." Those are the people we really wanna reach. If you're a gardener, you're in our camp already. We like you. You get why plants are important. But for those who don't understand, they need a reason to come in the door. 

They need a reason to come and engage with plants. And so things like this are that invitation. They're saying, "Come see this thing like in a way "you've never seen it before. "It'll blow your mind," and I want you to keep this image in mind. It's gonna come back up in a moment from a very different context. Something else, of course, that public gardens do is we do plants. We do plants well. We do plants very well. That is what we do. This is an image from Longwood Gardens, sort of one of the, I would call it sort of the granddaddy of public gardens in the United States located just outside of Philadelphia on the East Coast. 

Longwood was the private estate of Pierre DuPont, DuPont Chemical Company. It is a very resourceful garden, and they're doing some really.. They have made it their mission to present horticulture and plants to the public in a way that nobody else does. They do things with plants you would never expect. And one of them is this thousand bloom mum, which is pictured right in the center. This is in their East Conservatory, and obviously, it's surrounded by plants, but this plant is the center piece. And you may think, "What? It's a bunch of flowers." That's one plant. One. 

And they're trying to get it up to being 1,000 blooms. And every year, they improve their technique, they improve their methods. When they first started, it had just a couple of hundred. I haven't checked up on this in a while, so they may have broken that thousand bloom boundary. I think maybe last year, they were over 700. But from the year before, that was maybe 5 or 400. So every year, this thing has been growing and getting bigger, but it's a sensation because it's cool. It's weird. A plant with 1,000 flowers all blooming at the same time? And they start growing this, probably the moment this one's done, they're starting the next one. 

And it's a learning process for them, but it's also, it's a piece of botanical art. It's a piece of botanical showcase. It's not just, "Here's a plant. "Here's a plant. "Gee, come look at it. We hope you enjoy it." They are making a showcase of this thing, and this is something that a plant would never do in the wild, but that's what makes it cool. It's something you'll never go see in the wild. You have to go to a public garden to see it because they're the only ones that can do it. And of course, again, plants are one of the showpieces of public gardens. 

This is the corpse flower. And if you are from the Madison area, I know that... I come from a very corpse flower deficit area in Northern Indiana. 
(audience laughs)
 I understand you've had quite a robust population in Madison, between those that bloomed here at UW. Olbrich had one bloom just a few weeks ago, and I was thrilled to get to see it. That was the first corpse flower I've ever seen in person. Other than that, I've only seen them in leaf. But if you're not familiar with this plant, this is the largest flower in the world, and it's open for anywhere from 24 to 36 hours. From seed, this plant takes 10 to 12 years to get up to flowering, and that's it. 

It is 
(fingers snapping)
 that fast. And I believe this species has only been in cultivation for maybe the last 15 to 20 years. Because since its bloom is so fast, how are you gonna find this in the wild? It's so quick... someone just had to find it at the right time to get this plant into cultivation. But not only is it the largest inflorescence in the world, it smells like rotting meat. They don't call it the corpse flower for nothing. And you know, humans sort of have this draw to things that are weird. 

We have freak shows, and you know, we always are sort of drawn to the weird and abnormal in some way. Again, something in that... I don't know how we're hard-wired for that but we are, and something about this plant draws people in because it smells like rotting meat, and it's big and it's funky and it's weird. And then they name them. They all have their own names. They have personalities. These plants have taken on a life of their own, but not only... Public gardens are one of the only places that have the resources to grow something like this and to get it to flowering size for the public. Again, the botany greenhouse here technically is a public garden. It's open. 

You could visit any time you want. And they had theirs on display a few years ago. If I understand, I believe their numbers, if I am remembering correctly, when theirs bloomed, they had about 30,000 people, roughly. This one was from Denver Botanic, and I believe they had over 30. Chicago Botanic had one blooming just about at the same time, and theirs brought in about 21 to 27,000 people over the course of a week. Any cultural institution would kill for something like this. The amount of attention that this brings to not only the organization and the institution, but plants in general, people are just, go nuts over a plant. And we as public gardeners think that's just the best thing ever because we have this... people will come in to see this. They crowd around this display booth, and they're taking photos and selfies and sharing this plant to their friends in the world. 

But at the same time, we get them in the door, and oops, suddenly, you've stepped in here, and now we get to expose you to everything else that we do and everything else that we offer and to really show you how cool plants really are. And then, oh, these people start coming back. They start becoming gardeners. They start taking our classes. We've got 'em. We've cured plant blindness for those people. And it takes things like this to get us to do that, but we need these... we are competing in such a busy world. We need things like this that are sensational, that make headlines. Because if we just grew pretty flowers, we'd be dead. 

Organizations that don't change, organizations that don't make themselves relevant fail to exist. And so things like this help public gardens stay relevant. Now a little bit of a twist on actually growing a plant is art. So art and gardening are... go together so seamlessly and so logically. And one of my friends, I think, described public gardens in the most perfect way. It is the slowest form of performing art. 
(audience laughs)
 And it's true. You could go to the opera or a ballet or a theater show or a movie, and it's done 

(fingers snapping)
 in 2-1/2 hours and you've seen the whole performance. A garden is 12 months a year, year-round, every day, morning, noon and night. It is a different experience at 7 o'clock in the morning than it is at noon, than it is at 9 pm. It is a different experience in spring than it is in summer than it is in fall. And every day to every week and every hour and every minute is different. You could catch that butterfly... I know, I'm going back to animals... you could catch that butterfly on that flower right at that moment, and then it'll be gone. These things are ephemeral, but it is a performing art, and it happens more slowly than we're used to. 

But public gardens have really latched onto this in a really powerful way. This is a piece by Patrick Dougherty. His work is known as 'stick work,' and he uses local materials, typically willows, dogwoods, things that are bend-y and easy to work with, to weave these larger-than-life sculptures. This is probably over at least... I'd say a good two stories tall, maybe a little taller. People can run inside it. People can walk around it. It's tactile. It's fun. We just installed one of these at the last garden I worked at. 

We had 109 volunteers give almost 1,000 hours to build it over three weeks. It was a media firestorm. We had newspaper coverage and media coverage. And our visitation and membership spiked like... we had the highest membership we ever had in our 50-year history because of something like this. It's botanical art. And just for the record, he uses no glue, no nails, no wire, no nothing. This is all woven together, all natural materials. It's using plants as art. And while it's not specifically growing and displaying a plant, it's showing people how to see plants in a new way. 

These aren't just these were probably things cut from along the roadside on the interstate. You'd be going by at 70 miles an hour and never see them. But suddenly, they're art, and people pay attention when they're art. This is another example from the Atlanta Botanical Garden. This is my favorite one. They did an exhibition a couple of years ago called 'Mosaiculture,' and it's this technique of... it's not topiary. Don't be confused with topiary. Topiary implies that something is sort of pruned and shaped into a particular form. Mosaiculture, this is actually a planted shape, so the entire thing is planted with individual plants. 

Aptly, this exhibit is named the 'Shaggy Dog'. It's planted with sedges, just one type of sedge, which is kind of that grass-like plant. And this guy is probably about eight feet tall. It may not look that way from the photo, but these things were huge. The exhibit was called 'Imaginary World,' and it drew throngs to the garden. Atlanta has just been nailing it, everything that they do. And again, it's using plants... yes, you could say it's a bit gimmicky. It's a little amusement park-like. But it gets 'em in the door, and it's using plants to do it. 

"Let's go see how they use plants "in these weird funky ways." And suddenly, you have people. And suddenly, they're paying attention. Another really great example is these railway gardens, and the company that does 'em and does 'em best is called Applied Imagination. They're based in, I believe, Kentucky, and they have done these all over the country. The closest ones to us that I'm familiar with is Chicago. They have one that's outdoor running year 'round, but they also have one in their conservatory, Lincoln Park, I believe. I think it's Lincoln Park Conservatory, also has an indoor display for the holidays. But this company, Applied Imagination, I think is a perfect name because they build, again, these larger-than-life, just architectural replicas out of natural materials. It's just phenomenal what they're able to do. 

This is from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I believe. And while it's not shown in this photo, they have two scale replicas of New York City skyline landmarks made out of bark and coconuts and pine cones and squashes and gourds, and, you name it, they use it, birch bark for siding. They're just, they are... they blow your mind because there's not a bit of... I mean, yeah, they use glue, obviously, but it's all built out of natural materials. and it's just, it's incredible what they're able to accomplish. Again not only, you know... it's a family exhibit 'cause kids wanna come and they wanna see the trains and, "Oh Mommy, look there's a train!" and they love the trains, but the adults are just... some adults like trains too, but again, it's art, and it's just... 

it's incredible what skill goes into this. But look at all those people in a conservatory surrounded by plants and engaging with them even though they don't know it yet. We're getting them. It's subliminal, but we're sort of planting... 
(laughs)
 planting the seed, no pun intended, that "Hey, you should come back here. "Things happen here, this is fun." Light is becoming a new trend in public gardens, having people see the garden by night because, again, it's an entirely different experience. This is an example, again, from Longwood. They did an exhibit called 'Light'. 

I believe this was in 2012. The artist was Bruce Monroe, and this was the first U.S. exhibition and design that he's done. He is a British artist. And this was one of several installations, but there are these little glass bulbs with a little coil, a fiber optic cord within. And this was done just as dusk was setting, but they are sort of attached to this prism box, and it rotates colors at different speeds. So the path is actually behind the lake there on the other side, or the pond, whatever you wanna call it. And people would walk along there and look across the lake and it would just shimmer and undulate, and the colors would move and change. Some of them were timed to music, and you'd walk into a field with these big colorful pillars filled with water, and they'd hum and glow, and it was just magical. There's no other way to describe it beyond magical. And now, if I can bring you back to the Atlantic Botanical Garden, see that nice little sort of lit strip up there? 

That is their canopy walk. They have now positioned that... Now you get a bird's eye view of this. You get to stand up 60 feet, and they've laid this out on the woodland floor so you can walk up above and see this. You can also walk down at eye-level where this photo was taken, but you get that bird's eye view from their canopy walk. They're getting double-bang for their buck out of layering these two exhibits together. In this photo, you can see there's some different colors. There's those really rich, bright, sort of jewel tones, but those tendrils, that's what I like the most because those come out of those boxes that provide the fiber optic cord, but they kind of look like plant roots a little bit. And in a really subtle way, we're implying what's happening under the soil surface. We're showing people, "Oh, yeah, "there's something happening here. 

"There's something alive. "There's energy flowing through us "and underneath us right now," and this work of art, not only does it just draw people because it's pretty and magical, but again, we're sending subtle messages in doing these pieces. The Morton Arboretum, another one that's fairly close to us, about two, 2-1/2 hours away, I would highly recommend you go see this this holiday season, if you can. This is called Illumination. And the Morton Arboretum, being an arboretum, chose to not put Christmas lights on everything, not to have cut-outs of Santas or reindeer flying, whatever. They're about the trees. They're about connecting people to trees. So they said, "Okay, we're gonna make trees the focal point." And the thing that they did that no other garden has done so far that I know in terms of evening light exhibits is they made it interactive. So you walked into this grove, and there were these LED spotlights that changed the tree's color. 

You could see this coming off the interstate. It was like a beacon. And you walk up to this little platform, and there's an infrared heat-sensing pad. And depending on what, how far... you had to take your gloves off, and when it was negative 20, this wasn't fun... but you had to take your gloves off, and depending on how many fingers you put over the panel and how you moved your hand, it projected a light display on a stand of evergreen trees across the lake. You were changing that. You could go to another area and sing to trees, and they would change color depending on the pitch and rhythm of you voice. You could go to another and hug a tree and it would change color. They were imbuing these trees with personality, and they were telling a story through light, and they were doing it in a way that people didn't expect. 

And again, magic, but it drew people. Again, all of these things are what gets them in the door. The Lurie Garden in Chicago, this was my very first internship. This is what did it. This is what I... This is the Kool-Aid, and I drank it, a lot. 2-1/2 acres, exactly the same size as the Allen Centennial Garden here at UW, designed by some award-winning stellar landscape architects and planting designers, international, located directly downtown in Millennium Park, a really high traffic spot. We had thousands of visitors come through on some weekends. If there was a concert on the main lawn there, that Frank Gehry dome, it was just insane. So not only were we engaging with so many people, and yes, the plants were pretty, and no, they didn't do any Patrick Dougherty stick-work or railways, but they did this. 

They lit it at night. And with the skyline in the back and with that sort-of just that dusk sky, the sun had probably just set and the sky was that glowing deep blue, that purple-blue ribbon in the middle, their Salvia River, just explodes. And interestingly enough, the lighting was done by a theater designer. They didn't use a landscape contractor or... it's not just utilitarian. They wanted it to be a show. They said, "This is a performance. "This garden is the slowest performing art, and we're gonna treat it that way." So they have these big, sort of cantilevered spotlights that look like an industrial stage production on the opposite side of the garden, just behind where the photographer is standing, shining out over this half of the garden, and it makes it glow and pop, and it creates moods, and it's just... it's incredible. 

But again, showing people the different sides of gardens and the different sides of plants. We're getting them through this whole cultural art thing that other people seem to do well. And right here at home, this is so exciting, Olbrich Botanical Garden is doing light at night. They're combining art and light. They get it. They've done it. I will confess I haven't made it there yet. Been too busy, but this is up, I believe, through October. Please go visit. From what I've seen and what I've heard, it's exceptional. 

And I'm just so thrilled that we have such a rich collection of public gardens in this area. The Allen Centennial Garden isn't the only game in town, and I love that because it's so... public gardens can be so few and far between. And we can work together here and make this place so horticulturally alive. It already is, but things like this just amp it up even... no pun intended 
(laughs)
, electricity at night... amping it up. Oh. 

(audience laughs)
 So then, all right. we've got 'em in the door. Now what do we do? We have to teach 'em something. We've convinced them that you should come back, that this is a place you can feel welcome. The gardens can and should be a place you spend time. Okay, now what do we do with that? We teach them something. So this is from the Huntington Library Museum and Botanical Garden in Southern California. 

And they built a conservatory for an exhibit called "Plants Are Up To Something," and that's the only purpose of the conservatory. They purposefully made it so you couldn't have a wedding in there. They purposefully made it so you couldn't fit large groups. They didn't want this to be a revenue-generator like so many other public gardens are desperate for. They wanted to teach people something, and they wanted to teach 'em about plants. And none of their exhibits... all of their exhibits were from the plant's perspective. Why did the plant do what it does? So for example, there's nothing here that may talk about dye plants because that is something that humans have found utility in. There's nothing about medicinal plants. 

We've assigned that utility to the plant. Now if you can answer the question, why does the plant produce this toxin? For the plant's sake, as a defense mechanism. Why does it have this color? To attract pollinators, to deter pests, to deter predators. Why does it have spines? To conserve water or as a predator deterrent or both. Plants are really selfish, just like we are. They wanna survive. Why do they do the things we do? 

That's what this whole exhibit was about, which I think was great. And you have families coming in to do this, to experience this. And so public gardens have this really great potential to teach people things, and especially when things don't go so well. So if you were at all tuned in to social media about two or three weeks ago, I mentioned the Chicago Botanic Garden and Denver Botanic both had these corpse flowers bloom. I showed you the corpse flower from Denver Botanic at the beginning. This is Chicago. Theirs didn't bloom. It got all the way there. It had its bud. It was so ready. 

And then it didn't bloom. And they had this media hype, and they said, "Any day now, any second now, "it's gonna open, it's gonna..." and then no, and then it didn't. And when the flower started to sort of wilt a little bit, they went, "Uh-oh. "We gotta do something." And so they saw it as a learning opportunity. So they took the petal out off the outside of the flower. They wanted to know if it was creating pollen. Is it gonna set seed? Can we save this pollen and send it off to Denver so we get some good genetic diversity? 

And obviously, there's a crowd to see the inside of this... no one's ever seen a... 'cause who would dare cut off this thing when it was blooming? But it didn't bloom. So we have the opportunity to take it apart and see how it works. And we know not that much about these plants. So this was an opportunity for us, as horticulturists, to learn something about it, but also to teach the public something. So everything at public gardens is a learning opportunity, and especially for those people who don't know what they're gonna do in their life yet, children. Public gardens are an amazing place for kids to engage with nature. While these kids are, yeah, they're playing in the water, and you may say, "Well, all right, that's water, "that's not a plant." 

They're surrounded by plants. They're in a garden. They're having positive experiences in childhood in a garden. And one of my favorite all-time photos, this is from the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago, and they have this open area of bark mulch and stuff, just stuff from their conservatory, old tree stumps, palm fronds, banana leaves, but it's all natural materials, no metal, no plastic, no anything. It's all just basically stuff they'd normally throw in the compost, but they put it here and encouraged kids to create with it. They say, "We don't care what you make. "We don't care what you do." And I love how... My favorite part of this isn't that concept, but it's the little girl and the look on her face because she is on a mission with that palm frond. Just look. 

She is so determined, and she's just walking straight ahead. And she knows where she's going with it, and you can see the gears turning just by how determined she is walking forward. She's engaged. She's interacting with plants. 
(fingers snapping)
 We got her. She's gonna, she's gonna be... plant blindness cured. Now we can only hope that her parents keep, continue to bring her to the conservatories, they continue to bring her to other public gardens because she says, "Mommy, Daddy, "I wanna go back. "I had so much fun there. 

"I wanna go play in this thing again," and that's what we wanna do. And finally, public gardens aren't just pretty. We aren't just places to teach people things, but we're doing some bigger things as well. Similar to a university, we have a big impact beyond our gates and beyond our borders. This is from the Chicago Botanic Garden, their new science and education... or sorry, science and research center. And these are all laboratories where they're doing things like seed conservation and viability research, research on Illinois native plants, building a seed bank, how to control invasive species. And then, that little strip along the front there, where all those monitors and panels are, they're interpreting what they're doing. So as the public walks by, they're getting a X-ray view into the science behind plants. And again, it's a museum. 

We are living museums, which, again, adds an interesting aspect to what we do. On the roof of this building, it's surrounded by solar panels, and on either wing, they're trialing different types of green roof plants. On the one side, all succulents and sedums, which is what people normally think when we think green roofs. On the other side, they're doing all natives because they're better for local pollinators. They're more well-adapted to our habitat. Which performs better, one or the other? Is it a hybrid of the two? What should we be doing? But they're answering that question. They're doing really critical and important research. 

So basically, what I want you to take away from this is this idea that we, as public gardens, operate as a unit. And we, as this unit, believe in this tenet incredibly strongly. I don't know if those words go together. We believe in this tenet, a world in which public gardens are indispensable because we provide this vital function of connecting people to plants. We bridge the gap for people who don't know why these things should matter. They don't know why they're important. And with that, what are we doing here? This is where we get

to bring it home, and this is where we get to talk about the Allen Centennial Garden right here in your own backyard. Again, I mentioned the Allen Centennial Garden is one of many exceptional public gardens in our area, but not only in the area, at the University. 

So after this, I encourage if you, if you've never been to any of these, to go and discover them. There's the Botany Greenhouse and Garden. There's the UW Arboretum. There's the Lakeshore Preserve. There's the DC Smith Greenhouse. and those are just to name a few. I know there's more. The campus, as a whole, is just a beautiful landscape. Go discover it. Just go look and see what's happening. 

But at the Allen Centennial Garden, we celebrated our 25th anniversary last year, so the garden is going on 26 this year, and it's a wonderful time to start thinking about what we've done and where we're going. And since arriving as the new director here in May, that's been one of my primary focal points, beyond maintaining the garden. So we're in the midst of wrapping up a strategic plan right now. It's not quite finished, but I can share some of our early ideas and where we're gonna be going. And so that's what we wanna talk about for the, for the remainder of our time. And also before I do that, a lot of people have questions about the history of the garden, where we started, why we started. The garden is underneath the Horticulture Department, so we are the teaching garden for the Horticulture Department but also the broader community, both campus and Madison and beyond, so we reach a great diversity of audiences. We wanna reach more. The gardens were designed by Dennis Buettner, a local landscape architect, I believe, based in Milwaukee, who's done a lot of work with other public gardens. And that design came in the form of a master plan. 

So a master plan is basically the road map for what you're gonna develop and why and how. And the reason we're doing our strategic plan now is because it's time to update our master plan. We're 25 years old. The original master plan has been realized, so what's next? And that's a question I can't totally answer yet, in terms of the master plan, but it's where we're headed with this. So the first thing that we've... I should sort of just recap. We've revisited our mission statement because, again, as a 25-year-old organization, it's a good time to take stock and look at who you are. So the draft we're... and again, I should say this is all draft material, so bear that in mind, but the Allen Centennial Garden is UW-Madison's outdoor classroom and living laboratory for exceptional and sustainable ornamental horticulture. 

And we picked those words very intentionally, 'exceptional and sustainable', because why do any... there's a little paver block in this English garden that says something like "Don't aim for half perfection, "just aim for perfection any time." And that's sort of what we're gonna strive to do. We wanna do ornamental horticulture just on the same level as Longwood. We want to blow your mind with plants because we're at a place where we get to... we're still molding and shaping these young minds, so let's mold 'em and shape 'em the way we want, and let's make 'em care about plants, and let's get 'em 
(finger snapping)
 turned on. And also sustainable. Sustainability is something, it's not a buzzword. 

It's not going away. We have to care. Everything we do will be... we have to be sustainable financially, economically, environmentally, and socially. We have to hit 'em all, so we're going in that direction. One thing that was mentioned in our mission statement is that we are an outdoor classroom. We host plant identification courses. Plant pathology comes through. Entomology students come through. Those are sort of, I guess, the way we reach the masses, but we also have internships. 

We have four summer internships that work in various areas of the garden, and we've now introduced a few more year-round internships that deal with more sort of administrative, long-range planning, and management, marketing intern, a programming intern. And they've really been doing some exciting work in the last few months, which I'll talk about in just a second. We host bus tours from out-of-state, master gardener groups, garden clubs. We have free winter classes, if you remember, of our Friends organization, the Friends of the Allen Centennial Garden. We host a series of six free classes similar to this over the wintertime that explore all kinds of topics related to horticulture. So we're doing a lot of exciting outreach, but we are a classroom. We teach. We are part of the University. That's what we're here to do. And also one thing that we're gonna be focusing on is meaningful outreach. 

And again, I use that word 'meaningful' very intentionally because you can do outreach, you can bring people in the door, but if you're not giving some meaning to it, if there's not a little bit of meat on the bone, so to speak, then why bother? This is a photo from just a few weeks ago. The College of Ag and Life Sciences hosted an annual 'welcome back' picnic, primarily for freshmen as a way to get acquainted with the college, get acquainted with student organizations. And for the first time this year, the picnic was hosted in the Garden. So we had roughly 200 students, primarily freshmen--

First-time UW students still getting acquainted to the area in the Garden. They were exposed to us. They now know who we are, and we hope they'll come back. That's what we've been positioning a lot of student programming this fall, because we want to try to get them in and expose them to say, "We're here. "This is your garden. 

You don't have to-- "you can come in here any time you want. "Come in here to study. "Come take a nap. "Come relax before an exam. "Come take photos. "Come draw, come sketch, come do art. "Come think about your life. Come plan your future. "Do whatever you want, but come back. "We want you back." 

And just yesterday, this was an incredible event for us, Dogs on Call, which is an organization that brings dogs to dorms and libraries typically during finals week. But we said, "Hey, we can't have you here in December, 
(laughs)
 "we'll be a little cold, "so why don't you come now?" and they were happy to do so. We had 11 dog handler teams. We knew this was gonna be a thing two days after we started promoting the event. We had more than 500 people in two days say, "I'll be there." It lasted an hour and a half, and we thought, "Uh, how are we gonna fit 500 people in this garden? "This isn't something we've done before." 

Well, by the time the event started yesterday, we had over 1,000 people say they were coming. We were just, "Batten down the hatches and hope for the best." We planned as much as we could, and we just said, "We're gonna go for it." As it turned out, it worked perfectly. We had three main big waves of students come in. Every time a class session let out, and then as they trickled out, the next group would come in. We saw almost 600 students yesterday in the course of an hour and a half, and they came for the dogs. And yes, you could say, "Well, what about plant blindness? "What about the elephants? "What about animals and them interacting "with animals rather than plants?" 

But look at where they are. They're doing it in a garden. They know we're here now. And the number of people that walked in and came up to us and said, "I never knew this place was here," 
(audience laughs)
 that's where it starts. Before we can start to make meaningful connections to plants, we have to make meaningful connections to the place. This has to be a part of the UW student experience. We should be just as critical and just as memorable as Union South. We'll never be as big, but the memories that people have of Union South and sitting on the Terrace and looking over the lake, we need to have that too because that's the only way people are going to assign value to us, as students, as visitors, as alumni. 

So that's the reason we've introduced events like this, is to just expose them, just to show them that we're here, and then we can start to make those really meaningful educational connections. And then, finally, research, which is something we've never really done before. Again, I mentioned that Chicago Botanic is doing some really exciting things in terms of conservation and things like that. Well, again, we have the Arboretum. We have the Lakeshore Preserve. We have the Botany Greenhouse. There's a lot of really important and critical research happening there about plants, about native ecosystems, so what makes the garden unique? What could we do? What could we look at? There's also West Madison Research Station, I forgot to mention. 

They could be trialing 50 varieties of a particular plant. They have room; we don't. We're 2-1/2 acres. We have 27, I count, 27 distinct garden spaces themed within two and half acres. We don't have room to do something like that, so how can we make research a meaningful part of what we do? And sort of where our conversation is going is that we're gonna look at the social and psychological impacts of gardens, especially in an urban environment. So again, there's this sort of buzz out there right now of, I believe it's Cornell University that is prescribing 'nature prescriptions' for students who are stressed, who are missing home, for people who need help focusing or concentrating or studying. We're not gonna give you drugs. We're gonna tell you to go take a walk. But that goes back to the social well-being of being in nature and being engaged with the world around you. 

And I would argue that the Allen Centennial Garden is in a very urban setting. We have some 50-odd thousand people on this campus, depending on the time of year, between students, staff, faculty. That's a small town. That's a small city. Just looking at the campus, when you include Madison and the surrounding areas, you better bet we're an urban garden. We're easy to get to. We're free admission. We're open year-round. The gates are always open. Parking is our only limiting factor. 

But on the weekends, all the lots are free, and after 4:30, all the lots are free. Come on out whenever you'd like. But because of that, we are in a position to look at the social impacts of gardens in ways that other gardens aren't necessarily... if gardens close their gates at 6 o'clock or... Again, Olbrich is a wonderful garden, but no student is gonna drive to Olbrich before an exam and then drive back here. How does visiting a garden for half an hour before taking an exam or reading a book... people have done studies with music and such, but how does visiting a garden impact you? And I'm sure that there has been work done out there, but we're in a position to really explore that in a powerful way. So that's something we're going to be doing. And then also I mentioned, so where are we going after this? 

These are just the broad ideas. This is gonna, sort of, manifest much more strongly over the next couple of months as we wrap up the strategic planning process. But then from the strategic plan, we're gonna take everything in that and say, "All right, here's what we wanna achieve. "Here are the goals we wanna do. "Physically, what do we need to make it happen?" So again, we're gonna be revisiting this master plan. We're gonna be looking at which of our garden spaces are most successful in helping us meet this new mission and these new strategic priorities, and which maybe are not. One thing that I'm gonna campaign for pretty strongly is a new main entrance for the garden. The number, again, the number of people that walk by our door, our gates and say, "I never knew this was here!" Or, they're walking down Observatory Drive and say, "Is that a garden?" 

and they keep walking. "Turn around, come back, please! "We want you in here." Part of it is because our entrance is a little bit out of the way. Where it is right now, with the location of the house on side, the old Dean's residence, it feels a little bit like you're entering someone's private garden. If you're a first... I can always tell a first-time visitor by looking at them near the gate because they kinda do this a little bit. They're not really sure if they can go in or not. And we have signage, and we say 'Enter here' and such, but there's still that hesitation, and part of that is, again, where the entrances are oriented. So if we can have a more visible, open, welcoming entrance, that's part... 

that's how we physically realize our strategic mission of being the campus' garden. So that's just one example. Again, we'll be looking at sort of all of our spaces critically as this moves forward. The timeline is probably within the next year and a half to two years. We have to wrap the strategic plan and then the gears of the everything just take time, but this is something we'll be working on, and then the real fun starts. Then we get to do it. We're already doing it, but then we're gonna be able to do it in a big way. So things are gonna get real exciting really fast. And so with that, I hope you have a better understanding of why public gardens matter, why we're here, what we do. And please go out and support your local public garden. 

Thank you. 
(audience applauds)