Where Art and Science Meet

We are very fortunate at Naples Botanical Garden to have a group of supporters who truly understand what it will mean to our region to have a vibrant botanical garden. In many cases they have seen the impact of a botanical garden or arboretum in their community. While there are many models for botanical gardens, Royal Botanical Garden, near Toronto, Canada is pretty much a classic and certainly has many aspects, excepting climate of course, that we will develop as Naples Botanical Garden matures.

When I worked for Royal Botanical Garden (RBG) in Canada our slogan was “Where Art and Science Meet”, a great description of the role that a garden plays with a vigorous program of both performing and visual arts as well as an extensive representation of ephemeral art such as Ikebana, the Japanese art of floral design. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ikebana, it is like karate only with flowers. That isn’t exactly true – designers don’t compete with each other only with themselves – but Ikebana training is every bit as rigorous as karate. There are several Ikebana schools such as Ikenobo, Sugetsu and Ohara each with their own style criteria and master instructors. It is a sublime experience to watch an Ikebana master create beautiful works of art that may only last a few hours. Whoops – I got a little sidetracked by Ikebana – now to science.

The science program at RBG included everything from being the International Registrar for lilacs and crabapples to plant breeding to taxonomy and plant pathology. But the mission at RBG went well beyond art and science to include an extensive education program for people of all ages and abilities and management of large tracts of conservation land. RBG also had a vigorous horticultural therapy program. Horticultural therapy uses plant-based activities to improve quality of life for individuals with special needs. In addition to providing direct service to hospitals and long-term care facilities, we trained occupational therapists, activity therapists and recreation therapists in the use of plant-based activities as well as accessible garden design.

While I’m writing this in the past tense Royal Botanical Garden is alive and well. You can check it out at www.rbg.ca.

Many botanical gardens are also involved in urban greening projects. The gardens in New York, Chicago and Cleveland are among the leaders in this movement. These programs generally involve beautification projects, youth programs and creating school gardens in blighted areas. Some, like Cleveland Botanical Garden even have urban farms where inner city teens grow crops to take to market.

Over the next decade or two it is going to be interesting to watch how our garden, Naples Botanical Garden, develops as a place “Where Art and Science Meet”. Our partnership with FGCU and the shared use education and research building that we are building is going to be a good base for developing strong programming in those areas. Both sharing our building with Naples Garden Club, and our partnership with the Club in presenting The Naples Flower Show bode well for introducing our visitors to the ephemeral art of flower arranging. The performing and visual arts are very much a part of the future of our Bayshore neighborhood – already we have undertaken several events in partnership with Bayshore Arts Association.

I hope that you and your family have a safe and happy holiday season, Brian

Bali Blog

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to take a vacation in Bali, Indonesia with my daughter Mairin for 2 weeks in late September and early October. It was the first time to Bali for both of us.

The people are gentle, kind and friendly – even the drivers are considerate. They are happy to share their religion and welcome foreigners (dressed appropriately) to participate in festivals, blessings and to explore their temples and holy sites. Mairin and I had the incredible good fortune to spend an evening with the designer of the Marcia and L. Bates Lea Asian Garden, Made Wijaya. Made dressed us in traditional Balinese togs and we attended an incredible festival with 20 barongs (a powerful force for good in the battle of good and evil – the barongs look somewhat like the lions in the Chinese Lion Dance but much scarier) and hundreds of musicians. I apologize for the very simplistic interpretation of an elegant and complex story.

At the core of the Balinese culture is the need to give daily offerings to the gods. The offering plates are woven from coconut palm fronds, filled with flowers and placed on shrines, around the home and business – even on the dashboards of taxis. When we were there the flowers being used for offerings were frangipanis, bougainvillea, marigold petals and hydrangea. Every offering also included some shredded fragrant pandanus and some might have a coin or small bill as well. Everywhere you go you see these floral offerings, even at the entrance to your hotel room or on your balcony. Perhaps this daily contact with flowers and the daily gift to higher powers is part of the reason the Balinese people have such a positive outlook.

One of the traits I admire of this island’s “personality” is that very little goes to waste. In some areas rice straw is used to thatch the roof – in other areas it is coconut fronds. Ducks keep the rice paddies clear of insects and deposit a little fertilizer as well. Roadside weeds are collected, bundled and carted off by scooter to feed the family’s livestock.

I think the island’s “personality” is also influenced by the extensive opportunities for creativity. Bali is a place where, from a young age, people create art everyday. The craft industry in Bali is alive and well with beautiful weaving, batik, paintings and carvings widely available. It is interesting that while massage is a regular family activity, it is really in poor taste to touch another person and it is taboo to touch someone on the head.

I’m just about blogged out but I wanted to mention that Bali is essentially a chain of volcanic mountains and as a result there is tremendous variability in the weather from a torrid 95 degrees at the beach to 65 or so at the higher points – making for an incredible diversity of plants that can be grown including grapes and consequently wine. Yes, I have had both Balinese white and rose – my take on Balinese wines? They can’t compete with the pinot gris from Madagascar!

Flowers of October

October is a great month to be in Naples; it is when the Kapok tree, Chorisia speciosa, is covered with masses of pink flowers. Of course as with many other trees, breeders have selected many colors and forms of flowers. We have a chorisia next to the Pink Courtyard with 20 or more different cultivars grafted to it. The plantings of kapok trees around Pelican Bay are particularly beautiful.

Of course not all flowers are greeted with the same enthusiasm. I was in Chicago last week and people were bemoaning the fact that the goldenrod was flowering and giving them hay fever. I did speak up on behalf of this beautiful flower and explained that it can’t cause hay fever because its pollen is too heavy to float around in the air. The likely culprit is ragweed or possibly late flowering grasses.

Flowers have fragrance or are colorful to attract pollinators. They generally have sticky pollen that will adhere to the pollinator and generally need less pollen because it is being carried to a flower of the same species by the pollinator, perhaps a bee, butterfly or hummingbird.

Wind pollinated flowers need to produce lots of pollen because the odds of the grain of pollen landing on the stigma of the same species is definitely right up there with a needle in a haystack. The most successful wind pollinated plants often live in large somewhat homogenous communities such as grasses, pines, oaks or cypress. The proximity of so many flowers really helps the success rate go up for seed production and our sinuses to twitch like crazy.

Not all airborne pollen causes hay fever. A yellow coating of pine pollen seems to cover my car everyday for a couple of weeks in the spring. The pollen is too heavy to float very far and as a result is generally not the allergy causing culprit – it is more likely to be oaks at that time of year.

The worst culprit is ragweed – my nose gets itchy just looking at the spiny pollen grains. Unfortunately here in South Florida some plants are almost always flowering, but on the positive side, we don’t get the dense burst of pollen that they have to deal with in the north. Ironically the genus for ragweed is Ambrosia. There are many species of ragweed and all are noxious weeds.

If you are curious about pollen and allergies check out www.pollen.com. It is a great site for those of us who suffer from hay fever – you can even get allergy alerts!

Drying Out and Moving On

The Garden like most of Florida is gradually drying out after the King Kong Fay rains. We had a few trees blown over and lakes where there were never lakes before, but overall we were very lucky. It is remarkable how quickly wildlife occupies these ephemeral lakes. A pair of mallard ducks showed up in one lake right after the storm, I saw several fish including a small gar in another and, of course, lots of shorebirds on the edges of the lakes.

We have had a few suggestions come in for naming Chad's camo ATV and the contest continues through September 15. Don't forget you can win a tour of the site with Chad on the ATV if your suggestion is chosen.

David Webb recently joined the Garden as Manager of Education. David's mother and grandmother worked at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island so he spent a great deal of time there as a child and became a Ding Darling volunteer as a teenager. David is an FGCU grad and has worked as a classroom teacher and, most recently as a school program specialist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. David's energy and knowledge combined with a dynamic education committee bodes well for the future of education at the Garden. The new Backpack and Discovery Cart programs that we tested last spring have been expanded for the autumn — thanks to a grant from the McGraw Foundation. We will need volunteers to assist with giving outreach presentations, so please contact David at 239.643.7275 or dwebb@naplesgarden.org if you are interested in assisting with the programs.

I had the great pleasure of presenting a program about the future of the Garden to Naples Rotary Club recently. There are several of us, staff and volunteers, who are available to speak to community groups about the Garden and, best of all we are free! Please give us a call if you would like us to present to your club or association.

We are really pleased with the new website but we are still finding mistakes and typos here and there. Please let us know if you find a mistake and we will give you a free membership for a year!

All the best,
Brian

Welcome to Our New Website

Welcome to our new website. Last autumn we began working with the New York based design firm ESI Design to create a website that would make the Garden virtually open when we had to close the gardens for general visitation due to construction on June 1.

For all of us involved with Naples Botanical Garden, the design and construction of a 170 acre botanical garden is a once in a life time experience. From working with the “Dream Team” of landscape architects to design an incredible tapestry of beautiful gardens to creating a LEED Gold project with some of the leaders in sustainable architecture, Ted Flato, Bob Harris and Tenna Florian of Lake/Flato Architects, this has been a dream project. For more on the design team, check out their bios or if you would like to know what it is like to live through the construction check out our staff blogs.

Speaking of staff, it was pretty much love at first sight for Natural Areas Manager Chad Washburn when we bought a camouflage-covered buggy with four wheel drive, a dump bed and winch to use for maintaining the preserve areas. The one thing that the buggy doesn’t have is a name. It seems like a perfect opportunity for a contest. Send in your suggestions for naming the buggy by September 15 (by emailing from the "contact us" button or post a comment to the blog!) and we will form an illustrious panel to pick the winner. The prize is a personal tour of the natural areas and construction site for 3 people with Chad on the soon to have a cool name buggy.

You can keep track of the progress of construction in the photo gallery. Right now we are concentrating on digging lakes. The lakes are really important for a couple of reasons. They provide the fill that we need to increase the elevation of the gardens and facilities to reduce the likelihood of storm surge damage. The lakes also act as storm water reservoirs slowing the release of storm water into sensitive wetlands and improving the quality of the water by allowing the time needed for sediments to settle out. The shoreline of the lakes will be planted with an extensive palette of native plants to create terrific wildlife habitat.

If you get a chance check out our staff blogs to what we've been up to!

All the best, Brian