Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Ed Lyon Satellites Over Wisconsin  July 11, 2012 UP741    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]