City Gardener

 On vacation…volunteering outside of my comfort zone All during my working years I thought I might like to do volunteer work in my retirement, even while traveling - but  especially  while traveling! I like to be active everyday, and the thought of just sitting around in retirement never seemed appealing. I’ve seen loved ones slump into their recliner chairs for the last twenty years of their lives, and I think they suffered for it.  If I’m going to spend weeks or months away from home, it be great to find some way to stay active but also give back something to my hosting community. It is hard for me to think of a place in the world that doesn’t have the need of volunteers for one thing or another. When I was working as a pathologist, I didn’t feel like I had time to volunteer for things in the community. It took so much time just to do my job reasonably well - I’d been working 10-12 hours per workday and often on weekends. And, I also had family responsibilities for...

 Urban tropical garden One of the joys of travel is the ability to visit special places where people have poured their hearts and life’s work. This year we took the opportunity visit a couple of Honolulu’s famous botanical gardens, the product of many visionary people over the span of more than a century. Foster Botanical Garden is arguably the jewel in the crown of five botanic gardens scattered across the island of Oahu, and all of them belonging to the Honolulu Botanical Gardens. Now occupying a combined  650 acres, this organization is a division of the County of Oahu which maintains the gardens. Foster Botanical Garden is situated in the heart of Honolulu, not far from the old Iolani Palace. Over the past 150 years of its existence it has grown in size from 4 to 14 precious acres. In 1850 Queen Kalama ceded the original land to Dr. William Hildebrand who was one of the physicians of the royal family. He was also a noted botanist, author, and plant collector. When he retur...

Raining in February   The morning began with a walk in the rain from my car to the Conservatory greenhouses - in the month of February. According to the calendar, we should be in the depths of winter. The precipitation today should be snow not rain. The storm system that we're experiencing is probably related to drenching rains moving inland from the west coast. I met Coordinator A... at the door of the Conservatory. His office desk faces one of the main doors to the building. He cannot escape observing everyone who enters...poor guy, it must be distracting for him. Anyway, as soon as I entered the building we started to discuss his plan for my activity of the morning. He offered me the project of rebuilding the support for vanilla vines which have been suffering from overexposure to sunlight and dry air. A bit of background The vanilla plant (Vanilla planifolia) is in the orchid family. It is native to Central America and Mexico. The seed pods were used by the Aztecs to flavor coc...

Although the January weather in Minnesota this year has been remarkably warm - well above freezing everyday for the past few weeks - still, it felt like a gift to spend 3 hours working with plants in the Conservatory's Diverse Desert room where the temperature was around 75 degrees F. Today, the task given to me was pruning and cleaning up a few of the plants in the Diverse Deserts display room. This room is open to the public. A similar climate controlled room exists on the Collection side of the Conservatory, is also open to the public but only by appointment. In the Desert Display room, the plants are in beds as they would be seen in the desert...on the ground. In the Collection room, the plants are all in pots. A small sidewalk path curves through the stony beds of the Desert Display room. Some of the plants have become overgrown, partly obstructing the concrete pathway. The goal of the morning's work was to clear the pathway without damaging of the plants. Desert begonia (...