Seeds and saplings

I've started volunteering at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Founded in 1938 by David Fairchild, an eminent botanist, the garden consists in an enormous (83 acre) site. The garden is arranged around several small lakes, and has areas dedicated to, amongst other things, rainforest plants, butterfly favourites, succulents, tropical fruits, and replications of tropical ecosystems like the coastal Florida Keys and the spiny forests of Madagascar. The list of individual plants growing there runs to 291 pages, a catalogued collection of palms, vines, flowering trees, orchids, cycads, and a host of other incredible, beautiful things. Walking around the place is wonderful, a visual, aural, olfactory delight.

I asked for a horticultural placement, rather than anything to do with education, staffing gift shops, or the like. As it turns out, most of the gardening jobs get filled pretty quickly in the Miami winter; come the summer, they're more freely available as everyone prefers an air conditioned working environment. So rather than working in the garden proper, I've been set to at the Centre for Tropical Plant Conservation.

The CTPC is part of Fairchild's research and conservation work. It's located about a mile from the garden, on a nondescript site behind locked automatic gates. The security is not just for show; some of the species under cultivation in the greenhouses and outdoor growing areas behind the fences are both rare and valuable. In the chaos following the last hurricane, some opportunistic thieves turned up with a truck and helped themselves to plants worth hundreds of dollars. The section of the CTPC to which I've been attached has two main projects. The first involves a set of lab experiments designed to assess the viability of the seeds of various tropical species under storage conditions. The work feeds into the seed bank project in Colorado; samples those that are found to be sufficiently robust are sent for storage there, to allow for reestablishment of the species in the event of their extinction (similar to the planned seed vault at Spitzbergen).

Though this is, of course, tremendously important and exciting stuff, lab work is not really my forte, and so I've been assigned to help out with the other project. This is a massive, ongoing effort to cultivate specimens for reintroduction into the wild, or to replicate fast-vanishing ecosystems. For example, the pine rocklands of South Florida, which used to sustain a wide variety of succulents and associated wildlife, have been under severe pressure from development, climate change, the usual factors. At the CTPC, there's a host of plants being carefully grown in containers for replanting, either within the garden or in protected locations elsewhere.

So my four hours of contribution to this yesterday mainly involved re-potting a succession of seedlings, vines, and saplings. Pleasant, vacant work. The Americans, it seems to me, have a habit of making some good efforts at conservation and environmental friendliness, but not getting it quite right. Recycling points only accessible by car, trying to reduce dependence on petrol by investing in bio fuel, that kind of thing. So I was only mildly perturbed when told that the potting soil used in huge quantities at the CTPC is mainly peat. Anyway, that aside, I left after my morning's work feeling happy that I'd spent some time mucking around in muck, doing something useful, and not thinking about logic. Although, given the massive rainstorm that soaked me through on the cycle ride home, I could have saved myself the effort of watering in my new charges.