Editorial – Newsletter 32, December 2006

Editorial from Newsletter 32, December 2006

Meetings in 2006

It’s been a busy year for PlantNetwork, with two conferences and five other meetings. The support from host gardens is always invaluable, and I would like to thank all those who have helped in the local organisation of meetings. Our most recent conference was held at the University of Hertfordshire in the Science Learning Centre at Bayfordbury, at the beginning of November. It was a great success in terms of the number of attendees, and the excellent balance of topics and issues. Our hosts at Bayfordbury provided an exceptionally interesting and friendly venue. I would especially like to thank Judy Cheney and Rupert Wilson for bringing together such a great spectrum of speakers, and Edward Eastwood and his volunteers for their wonderful hospitality and welcome. Some exciting and innovative ideas suggest that this topic area is one we will need to revisit again soon (see p.10). The presentations from the meeting are available on our website.

Meetings in 2007

The programme for 2007 is enclosed – do note the dates in your diary and make sure your staff know what’s coming up. There will be two technical training days: one on Winter Gardens, and one on South African Bulbs. The Glasshouse Forum will look at energy usage, by asking ‘How Low Can You Go?’. The spring conference, which will be hosted at Glasgow Botanic Gardens, will look at the ever increasing need to cater for public events in Gardens; and we will hold our autumn conference at Benmore, where we will look at the horticulture, science and educational possibilities of cryptogams in gardens. The Tree Forum will be considering management of historic landscapes in Royal Parks, and, later in the year, tree planting and establishment. We hope you find all these meetings helpful.

The Board has already started to consider meetings for 2008 and beyond. At present, we are planning a Tree Forum meeting to look at phytogeographic planting, and another to consider recently introduced pests and diseases on trees and shrubs. The will be a conference to consider the propagation, cultivation and display of native species, as a contribution to our Target 8 Project (see p.18). We are considering a meeting on planting for climate change. If there are topics you would like us to include, or you have comments on our past meetings, please let members of the Board (see inside back cover) know.

Networking living collections

The 4th European Botanic Gardens Congress was held at Pruhonice, near Prague, in September 2006, and a number of valuable ideas emerged. Dave Aplin’s talk on ‘Evaluating the living wealth of botanic gardens’ presented a valuable tool for managing a collection. He demonstrated how regular, critical evaluation of living collections should be an increasingly important activity in our space-limited collections. Although Dave’s talk was primarily aimed at botanic gardens, there are lessons for all plant collections, and it raised, once again, the issue of collections working collectively in a network. It has been a long-standing commitment of PlantNetwork to facilitate, as a whole, the plant collections in these islands, and there is a huge wealth of untapped expertise and knowledge that we need to share.

In the last issue, I drew attention to the Plant Search facility of Botanic Gardens Conservation International as a means to share the existence of taxa in our gardens. However, we need to add to this at another, more practical, level. In order to make it easier for holders and users of collections to find out what is being grown and where it is held, PlantNetwork compiled a Directory in 1999, and this is now online (www.plantnetwork.org/directory.htm). In 2004, a request for an update was sent to all gardens included in the Directory – there are still 70 gardens that have not updated their entry since 1999, and other members who do not yet have an entry in the Directory. The information will be all the more useful if we can add to it a section on expertise and research activities. What we need to explore is how to do that without duplicating the work of others. I would welcome suggestions, either to myself or to Board members, on how we might approach this.

Target 8 latest

There are now 18 gardens involved in the project (see p.18) with plans to grow some 85 taxa in total. We intend to hold a meeting on propagating, growing and displaying native plants. Meantime, I would urge gardens that haven’t yet got involved to consider growing just one or two species. Some of the feedback we have already received recommends starting small. Full details of how and where to begin are on the website. There is also a list that shows where the gaps still are: Target 8 Project species list.