Cultivating Curiosity

A campus in bloom: the UGA Trial Gardens

July 01, 2022 CAES Office of Marketing and Communications Season 1 Episode 2
Cultivating Curiosity
A campus in bloom: the UGA Trial Gardens
Show Notes Transcript

Nestled on UGA's South Campus in Athens, the UGA Trial Gardens offer a stunning environment for students, researchers and the public.

We talked to John Ruter, professor and director of the Trial Gardens and Sandy Begani, Trial Gardens manager, about what visitors might find in the garden, what a plant trial entails and more.


Resources:

The UGA Trial Gardens' website
Dr. John Ruter's information
Dr. Pam Knox's information
Some of the flowers found in the garden, including the rex begonias and double impatiens
See how our experts are breeding better plants.
Contact the gardens to volunteer
Learn more about the Great Georgia Pollinator Census
Visit the Trial Gardens - click to view a map: 1030 W Green Street Athens, GA 30602

Edited by Carly Mirabile
Produced by Jordan Powers, Emily Davenport, Carly Mirabile
Music and sound effects by Mason McClintock, an Athens-based singer, songwriter and storyteller who creates innovative soul-pop music that transcends traditional genre boundaries. Hailing from small-town Southeast Georgia, Mason's influences range from the purest pop to the most powerful gospel. Mason is a former Georgia 4-H'er and a recent University of Georgia graduate! Listen to his music on Spotify

Get social with us!
Follow CAES on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn and check out UGA Extension on on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn for the latest updates.

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Emily Davenport: 
Welcome to "Cultivating Curiosity," where we get down and dirty with the experts on all the ways science and agriculture touch our lives, from what we eat to how we live. I’m Emily Davenport.

Jordan Powers:
And I’m Jordan Powers. And we’re from the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Today we’re talking to Dr. John Ruter, professor of horticulture and director of the UGA Trial Gardens, and the Garden’s manager, Sandy Begani.

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Jordan Powers:
Thank you both so much for coming down during a very busy week. We really appreciate it.

Sandy Begani:
Thanks for having us! It’s great to be a part of the new podcast.

Jordan Powers:
Absolutely, and thanks again. And really, to kick things off, wanted to start with, people may hear trial gardens and may or may not be familiar with what a trial garden even is. You may hear trial and think a legal trial or possibly even a clinical trial. But tell us, what is a trial garden?

John Ruter:
So a trial garden is where we evaluate plants for various reasons. The trial gardens here at UGA, we’re known for evaluating plants for heat and humidity, so we’re really the go-to garden for the industry for testing plants under those climatic conditions. And so we work with major breeding companies from all over the world, Germany, Israel, you name it. We’ve got over 20 companies that we’re working with this year. And so a lot of the breeding goes on in places that don’t have hot, humid climates. And so these companies wanna see how the plants are gonna perform in Southeastern United States, so they know whether to market those appropriately, or should they just market them in the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast? So one of the services we provide is being able to trial those plants, evaluate those plants, give feedback on those plants, and then they can use that in their marketing and promotion and make a decision as to whether that’s something that wanna market in this area or not.

Jordan Powers:
Absolutely. So what does that process look like?

Sandy Begani:
So we work with about 20 to 30 different companies in the horticulture industry. There are some major players. Dümmen Orange is one of the larger companies that we work with. We also work with some of the smaller, more independent breeders and growers around the world.

Emily Davenport: 
So will you have a company do a specific request? Or are all companies getting the same trial?

Sandy Begani:
Depending on what they want to see, they may send us 50 plants, they might send us two plants. They may decide that they wanna send plugs, which are basically a miniature plant that can be grown up in the greenhouse until it’s ready to be planted in the ground. They may send seed, and so we germinate the seeds and bring those out into the greenhouse and plant them after the frost date, which here is April 15th. So all of our plants go into the ground, out of the greenhouse, between April 15th and May 15th. And we begin taking data on them at that point in time. We have a huge variety of plants that we trial, so we have a whole selection. We have almost 500 plants this year. We have a large selection of annuals, such as petunias and begonias, so things that will only last one season. Increasing in popularity are perennial plants, so most people think that with a perennial, you only have to plant it once and it lives forever. That may not necessarily be the case, but most perennials are known for their longevity in the gardens.

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Emily Davenport: 
According to Pam Knox, agricultural climatologist and director of the UGA Weather Network, growers use the last date of frost in the spring and the first date of frost in the fall to determine the length of the growing season. This is especially important for plants like tomatoes that have to have a certain number of days with no frost to produce fruit.

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Sandy Begani:
So we have a huge range of plants that we will evaluate for the companies. They may request their plants to be grown as perennials and, if so, we keep it in the garden, at least one, two, up to three years to see how it does over time. If it doesn’t do well after that first cycle of summer and winter, it’s probably not going to look very good in the garden after the second year. So our perennial trials can last up to three years. But the annual trials are just one season.

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Jordan Powers: 
Annuals are a plant that you have to replant every year, while perennials are a plant that will come back year after year.

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Sandy Begani:
And that gives us a good amount of information to how they will perform here in Georgia, where we have a lot of heat, a lot of humidity, a lot of pathogens, insects. So maybe some of the problems that people don’t have, either in colder climates or dryer climates, so as Dr. Ruter was saying, if it does well in Southern California or Arizona, that doesn’t mean necessarily that it will do well in Georgia. And we’re really looking for plants that do well all summer long so they can really hold up to the extremes of Georgia summers.

John Ruter:
So one thing I would add to what Sandy said, you know, about the companies requesting trials is that we can do in-ground trials, we can do trials in hanging baskets, and we also have large containers or planters that we can do trials in. So the companies can also select how they want the plant trialed.

Jordan Powers:
So this is an incredibly customized level of detail that these companies have in an opportunity to work with you all.

John Ruter:
Yes, absolutely.

Jordan Powers:
So we can obviously see the impact of the trials for the companies, right? It’s helping them make sales decisions and marketing decisions. What is the impact on the state of Georgia, or even nationally or globally of the trials that you all are doing?

John Ruter:
So, for example, we just had our industry open house yesterday. And so not only did we have people stopping by who were with the companies that we’re trialing for, but we have a lot of the growers from around the Southeastern United States dropping in, checking to see how the plants are performing. We have a lot of the landscapers coming in to say, “Hey, this would look good in my flower beds.” Other aspects of the industry, chemical companies, pot suppliers, allied industries dropping by. And then we’ll also have a community open house coming up this Saturday. On a more, you know, global scale, obviously we’re looking at these plants. And if they get a good rating from us, then generally that adapts pretty well to a good portion of the Southeastern United States. Some of the plants will do good nationwide. Not all of them. We’re really working with a global economy with what we’re doing because the company headquarters for, say, Ball Horticulture might be in West Chicago, but a lot of their breeding stations, you know, may be in, say, Arroyo Grande, California. But then they have rooting stations in South America. Lotta places have rooting stations in Kenya, in some of the African countries. With consolidation of these companies, a lot of the US companies have become more international. Using Ball is another one; Selecta, which is a German company, is part of their group there. Dümmen, who we work with, you know, they’re from the Netherlands. And you know, they acquired Ecke Poinsettias, that you may be familiar with. And so we’re seeing a lot of consolidation, but yeah, what goes on here really, in the big scale of things, has international influence.

Emily Davenport: 
How do industry find the Trial Gardens and partner with you?

John Ruter:
The gardens have been here since 1982. And Dr. Armitage was the director until... Gosh, about 10 years ago, so I took over as director in 2013. He had lots of publications and involvement in the industry. That’s how it kind of all got started. It actually started with one company back in 1982. I think 75 plants were sent that year. And it was just a barren spot between Snelling Dining Hall and the pharmacy building. Nothing had been built yet [laughs]. And the Trial Garden, in its current form, dates back to about 1994, with the beds and all. But we have various methods that we get the information out there. So listservs are big for us, and so we’ve got that divided by an industry listserv and a public listserv. Anybody that comes by the garden, we always ask them, you know, “Do you wanna sign up for our listserv?” I believe we have, I don’t know, industry folks, 2,000, 3,000 different contacts. So we can send that out. Facebook, Instagram, so some of the social media. During the growing season, we try to do something called Plants of Distinction. So that would just be two to five plants that look really good in the garden this week. They may not be award winners at the end of the season, but this week, they look really good. And so a lot of these posts, the industry really likes, particularly early season content. So for example, we had all these flags in the garden. So what we do is we have -- whenever we have an open house, we have whoever’s there, so the industry folks yesterday, they all get 10 flags and they all get to flag their favorite plants. And so Sandy and her group go through and they count all the flags and tally up what the winners are, and then we’ll send that out through our listserv and probably put it on Facebook. And it’s amazing how, all of a sudden, you’ll see a company in “Greenhouse Manager” magazine, for example, suddenly has that plant with Plant of Distinction or award winner at the open house at the UGA Trial Gardens. So we have those, and then later in the season, we do the best 12 plants. We call it the Classic City Awards. And we also have another list that we call sort of the Best of the Rest, which would be another 20 plants that didn’t make -- quite make the top 12, but they’re really good plants and would be absolutely fine for anybody to grow here. Another just involvement is, today we had a couple industry reps from two different companies stop by. So having that personal interaction with the industry going to trade shows and interacting with the sales people and technical people. We have a number of students now that are out in breeding positions, sales positions, technical support. So obviously going to visit them or staying in touch with them helps support the garden. In the spring, there’s a big industry wide event out in California, where all the companies show their wares for the coming year, all the new plants and things that they’re doing. That’s called CAST, the California Spring Trials. Try to get out there as many springs as I can. And again, it’s just those personal contacts and getting to know people and all that helps build those relationships that make people trust us and wanna put things in the garden.

Jordan Powers:
So you all don’t like to sit still -- [laughs]

John Ruter:
Absolutely not.

Jordan Powers:
--
is what I’m hearing from all of this. Like, I’m tired just listening to that, and I consider myself a pretty busy person, but wow.

Sandy Begani:
Well, this is a really important time for us, so June is basically when most of the plants that have come out of the greenhouse into the garden are at their peak, so that’s one strategic reason that we invite everyone to participate in the Southern Garden Tour. So our open house is part of a network of trial gardens in the Southeastern region, and so a lot of the representatives are stopping here on their way to some of the larger trial gardens in Alabama and North Carolina, so we are unique because we’re part of the University of Georgia, so it’s not that there aren’t other trial gardens in the southeast. We’re not the biggest, we’re not most well-known, but being a part of the University of Georgia allows for students and visitors and tourists and anyone who happens to be on campus at various times of the year to interact with the plants. And so it’s an opportunity for these breeding companies to showcase their plants in a place where future horticulture professionals, the horticulture students, the entomology students, even the marketing and the college of fine arts to interact with the plants and to sort of be inspired by them and to just gain experience in the horticulture industry.

Jordan Powers:
I mean, that’s amazing and that’s a really excellent point in it being really nestled right within campus. I mean, I know when I started here at UGA, one of the first things Emily told me was trial gardens is a great place on your lunch to just go walk through or, you know, sit and have your lunch in the gardens and have that experience. So to have that access is something that is really special.

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Jordan Powers:
So you all have obviously done countless trials since the gardens started. Are there any that have really just completely surprised you?

Sandy Begani:
Some of the plants that I’m most excited about this year are the double impatiens, and I know that the Ball group that visited about a month ago was also very excited about them because they look super delicate, so all of the flowers are double and they come in a whole variety of colors, like sweet pastel pink. I think it’s called apple blossom. There’s white and there’s red. And they look so delicate, but honestly, they are holding up super well. I definitely would like to highlight the begonias. Begonias have always been one of my favorite plants. They are gorgeous, their foliage is gorgeous. They have a whole range of colors and spiral patterns in the leaves. They do really well in the greenhouse. You can bring them in as houseplants, and that’s kind of what I always thought they were in terms of the rex begonias.

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Emily Davenport: 
In case you’re curious, Sandy shared some photos of these lovely plants with us, and we’ve put them in the show notes. So head over there after the episode and check them out.

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Sandy Begani:
So I think they’ve been really catching on, and now you’re starting to see rex begonias in the landscape. So just last year, we received a huge selection of rex begonias to be grown outdoors. And they have been amazing. So they really fill a gap in the shady backyards that we have so many of here in Athens. Everyone has trees in their yard. You always want something to provide some color when you have too many trees to grow all the fun, full-sun plants that you want to grow. So the rex begonias, they do really well in full shade or a little bit of sun, so partial shade. And I think a lot of people considered them house plants for a long time, but they are doing really well outdoors, and I’m really excited to showcase some of those this year as well.

Emily Davenport: 
That’s really exciting. I have many begonias in my house, but I didn’t think until, I think, I saw your last year’s winners, the Classic City award winners, that they could grow outside, and I have a very shady yard, so now I know what to plant there. [laughing]

John Ruter:
Yeah, sort of sticking with the shade theme, back in 2013, we had a disease show up, impatiens downy mildew, that -- impatiens were the number one bedding plant worldwide. And suddenly, by 2014, you have no production of impatiens at all due to this one disease. And so major loss of sales, you know, everybody’s used to using impatiens in the shady garden, in the landscape. And so one of the things I’ve really been impressed by is the breeding that they’ve been able to do in less than a decade to bring in disease resistance to where we can now have vigorous, really happy looking impatiens in the garden again. They tend to be a bit bigger than the smaller ones that we were used to a decade ago, but the vigor and the color and the uniformity and the survival here in the Southeast has been really impressive.

Jordan Powers:
That’s incredible just to hear it go from nearly wiped out to --

John Ruter:
Yeah!

Jordan Powers:
-- to flourishing again.

John Ruter:
Yes, yeah.

Sandy Begani:
Disease resistance is super important. If you can breed a way to be resistant to the diseases that are out there, then you don’t have to use as many chemicals, fungicides, and pesticides and things like that, so resistance is a good way to increase your ecological footprint.

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Jordan Powers:
To learn more about how our experts are breeding disease-resistant plants, visit leadinginnovation.caes.uga.edu. And we’ll make sure to put that link in the show notes for you.

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John Ruter:
One of the things we do is once they come out of the greenhouse, we don’t spray any insecticides or fungicides. We try to mimic as close as possible to maybe what a homeowner might do. We only fertilize and water. But, uh, being a trial garden, you know, death is okay. If we lose 30% of the petunias to root rot, for instance, the companies need to know that. And you know, it may be something we did, it may very well just be the genetics that they produce a lot of top and very few roots and just aren’t very well adapted to the environment, and we can provide them that information.

Jordan Powers:
That was going to be one of our questions is, I mentioned before we started recording that I’m battling fungus gnats with my house plants right now, but one of our questions was going to be what pest-control methods you use. And it sounds like y’all really just kind of mimic what would be happening out there and let nature take its course? Or are there pest control methods that you all implement in the gardens?

John Ruter:
So we will use some products for weed control. But like I said, generally, once they’re out in the garden, we’re not spraying for fungus, bacteria, insects. Some of these plants that we grow recede in our environment rather well. Vinca is one that comes to mind, celosia. And there’s a few of the common weeds, too, that we have out there. So we will use some pre-emergent and post-emergent herbicides just to help with the weed control.

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Emily Davenport: 
Pre- versus post-emergent is just referring to chemicals that are applied before or after the weeds sprout.

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John Ruter:
One of the interesting things that we do is we actually will steam our beds periodically. What we’ll do is we’ll run the beds up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. What that does is it kills off the weed seeds that are in the bed, it kills off the bad pathogens. But actually, a lot of the good flora that’s in the soil that we wanna have there, they actually will survive temperatures up to 180 degrees. So if we monitor it properly, we can knock out the bad guys and leave the good guys behind to repopulate the soil and have it good and healthy for us.

Jordan Powers:
Science is amazing.

John Ruter:
Yes, it is!

Sandy Begani:
Speaking of weed control, we owe a lot of the successes that we have in the garden to our volunteers. We’re almost 50% volunteer based. Our whole organization is heavily supported by our volunteers. We would not be able to keep the garden weed free without all of the help that we get from our master gardeners and partners all around the community, and even students who are interested in gaining some experience in horticulture but may not be a horticulture major are welcome to come and volunteer. We are very, very grateful for all of the students and the volunteers that have been keeping the garden running for the most part for the last 40 years.

John Ruter:
Many years, we have, you know, enough volunteer hours from the community, it’s like the equivalent of two full-time positions.

Jordan Powers:
Wow!

John Ruter:
Yeah.

Jordan Powers:
Now we have to ask, how does someone become a volunteer if they want to get involved beyond, you know, lunch break walks through the gardens?

Sandy Begani:
You can contact the trial gardens directly. The e-mail address is trial-gardens@uga.edu. And we’ll schedule a time for you to come. We generally ask our volunteers to work in the mornings Monday through Thursday.

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Jordan Powers:
More information on how to volunteer is in the show notes.

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Emily Davenport: 
And aside from weeding, what would a volunteer get to do in the garden?

Sandy Begani:
Our volunteers typically work year-round, so when we’re not in the garden in the summer, we’re in the greenhouse, so starting in the fall, we propagate plants for our big spring plant sale. That’s our major fundraiser. We also host pop-up plant sales throughout the year. In the fall and winter, we kind of focus on house plants, but spring through summer, we host various events. Our spring sale is in April, and then we have another mini-sale at our open house event in the summertime. So our volunteers are always busy. If we’re not outside weeding, we are propagating, we are planting seeds in the greenhouse, we are getting the trials ready to plant outside in the garden, so it really is a year full of activities, and there’s always something to be pruned or maintained somewhere around the garden.

Jordan Powers:
It sounds like -- and I know last time I came through the greenhouse, there was a band of volunteers, I think it was dividing begonias ironically when I was in there last. So that leads me to ask, what does the day to day look like for both of us, or each of you?

John Ruter:
I have more responsibilities out at the horticulture farm. So I’m not at the garden maybe as much as I used to be. Sandy handles the day-to-day activities and the volunteers and a lot of the things that need to be done, work schedules and ordering and supplies. I try to stop by as -- hopefully on a daily basis, but that doesn’t always work out. But I get over there as much as I can. And then Sandy and I certainly stay in contact. A lot of times, I’m actually there at the garden before Sandy’s there. And so there’s some things I can come in and do and take care of and then get back out to the farm, do whatever I have to do out there with research and/or teaching responsibilities. And so, yeah, so another big component of the garden beyond industry outreach, public outreach is the teaching component of the garden. And so I actually teach two herbaceous plant ID courses out there, teach one in spring, one in the fall. So the fall course I actually teach the first half of the semester so I can teach live plant material in flower before everything freezes. And in the spring class, I teach the second half of the semester because the first half of the semester, there’s not much in the way of perennial plant material up outta the ground yet. And I really do like to teach live plant material in flower. So I teach two herbaceous ID courses out there. Landscape architecture, their plant material class uses the garden. Entomology, we’ll see kids out there with sweep nets catching bugs, and... Uh, plant pathology has a -- brings their classes through, so they’re looking for various diseases, whether it because bacteria, viruses, or fungal pathogens out there. We have, let’s see, who else? That very science? So plant biology, biology courses do labs out in the garden. We actually have a lot of folks from sort of the arts side of things come out there, so you’ll see drawing classes, watercolor classes. One of the best ones that comes through is interpretive dance. It’s usually a bunch of young ladies in the class, but when you suddenly see them coming through the garden doing the butterfly thing, you know, and then they see something hopping and they start hopping down the stairs and, uh... Yeah, yeah, so you never know. Another thing I try to do is guest lecture for a lot of the freshman odyssey courses. So invariably, a good portion of the kids that are in those classes are from north campus and have never been to south campus and don’t even know the trial garden exists.

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Emily Davenport: 
On UGA’s Athens campus, the area referred to as south campus is home to mostly science and math departments, including the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

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John Ruter:
So that’s another good way to expose, um, a lot of the undergraduate population to the garden and that the space is available for, you know, eating lunch, just walking through the garden, finding a peaceful place. We’ve had two weddings and two successful proposals that I know of happen in the gardens. It’s really cool, we’ve had a number of people tell us now that, like, during football season, it’s actually a destination. So it’s actually part of their trip to Athens. We do have four-legged wildlife in the garden, but sometimes we have two-legged wildlife.

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Jordan Powers:
If you didn’t catch that, John is referring to humans. We’re the two-legged wildlife.

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John Ruter:
Occasionally, we see a few chicken bones or things like that get left, but other than that, most of the two-legged wildlife’s not a problem.

Everyone:
[laughing]

Jordan Powers:
So what does your day to day look like, Sandy? I mean, you’re there most of the day every day, right? What does that look like, both now in the midst of everything growing and blooming and then in the off season, which I know isn’t really an off season?

Sandy Begani:
That’s a really great question! So it varies so much, day to day. And you will never get tired of working at the trial garden. I mean, the students tell me all the time that sometimes they show up and they have no idea that they would be doing whatever it is that I ask them to do that day. So you know, sometimes it’s peeling labels off of metal signs with a heat gun, or um... You know, even just learning how to use basic landscaping equipment, so not many students come into this experience knowing how to use a tiller or necessarily knowing how to use a drill or just basic landscaping techniques that will benefit anyone who’s entering the horticulture industry. So besides working with the students, I spend a lot of time working with our volunteers. Most mornings, we have a great group of dedicated volunteers coming in anywhere around 8:00 to 9:00, so we spend the mornings working together. In the afternoons, if there are students available to come in and help water, that’s always a big job, so in the heat of the summer, just the watering alone can take someone up to three -- three to four hours just to get everything watered. So you can imagine if I was doing that every day, I mean, I wouldn’t get anything else done. So it’s really great to have a group of students to kind of be on rotation in terms of watering. That way, everybody gets to do a little bit of something different, so no one has to water all the time.

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Emily Davenport: 
In case you were wondering, which we were, why are they watering by hand? Why don’t they just have automated sprinklers around the gardens? And so we asked Sandy that.

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Sandy Begani:
We do have quite a bit of irrigation around the garden, and that’s one of the things that students learn about in the horticulture department is how to set up irrigation systems for greenhouses, so that’s something that we’re working on installing more of. However, it’s so important, you just can’t depend on automation. So even if you have irrigation, or you have automated sprinklers, there undoubtedly will be a repair that needs to be made, and so yeah, you might find be doing anything from plumbing to construction to, you know, planting or, you know, some days I get to do a little bit of floral design as well. So it’s something different every day.

John Ruter:
I was just gonna say, talking about irrigation, the garden had tried to automate once upon a time in the outdoor spaces. Unfortunately, we have a little varmint known as a chipmunk that loves to eat plastic pipes. It looked good on paper to put out, you know, tubing out there that would go to each hanging basket and each container, but soon you’re paying students to do nothing but repair pipes. Or you’re starting to charge admission to a water park because every time it comes on, water’s spraying all over the place, so...

Everyone:
[laughing]

Emily Davenport:
Okay, so tell us -- we know about chipmunks and we know all the people visit the garden. What else are you gonna see in the garden besides people and chipmunks? [laughing]

Sandy Begani:
We have an incredible variety of pollinators, and the entomology department is in our garden almost every other day setting up little collection stations and making observations. We also host the Georgia Pollinator Census.

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Jordan Powers:
The Great Georgia Pollinator Census is a citizen science project created by the University of Georgia. For two days every August, scientists and the public, including schools, work together to collect data about our state’s pollinators. We’re excited to share that South Carolina is joining the count. We’ve put the link to the census in the show notes in case you wanna find out more or participate.

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Sandy Begani:
So in August, believe you’ll see us out there watching the plants. So you’ll see a person sitting next to a plant for 15 minutes and counting the number of times that a pollinator lands on the plant. So that’s definitely a program that I’m excited to be a part of. And that’s one of the great reasons that we don’t apply a lot of pesticides in the garden. I mean, if I ever did apply something, it would be something that would break down really quickly so there are certain botanical products you can use that will break down fast enough that maybe you can kill your Japanese beetles if you have to, but you won’t kill everything that lands on the plant.

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Jordan Powers:
Speaking of exciting things, John, a little should I say bee told us, maybe, that you just received two awards from the American Society for Horticulture. Um, I believe one was a fellow and the other was outstanding graduate educator. Can you tell us a little bit more about these awards? And congratulations!

John Ruter:
Well, thank you very much! Yes, yeah, the most pleasant surprise on those. But yeah, those are both from the American Society for Horticultural Science. And so I’ll be getting recognized at their annual meeting in Chicago this year. And so that’ll be right at the end of July, beginning of August. Yeah, so I’ve actually been at UGA for 33 years now. For 22 years, I was our nursery crop research and extension specialist down on the Tifton campus. And then back in 2012, I had the opportunity to come up here to the main campus in the Armitage professorship and take over direction of the trial garden. And one of the big benefits of being on campus is just easier access to work with graduate students. You know, I’ve got, you know, graduate students that are working for major breeding companies. I’ve got a number of graduate students that are professors at, you know, various universities now. One of my former graduate students is director of the US National Arboretum. And one of the things I’ve always really tried to do is also get them out and have experiences, get them out, visit nurseries, take them on tours, make sure that they go to the meetings, present, publish their papers, do those sorts of things. And it’s been a very rewarding career so far. The special recognition of a graduate educator for success and working with graduate students is really rewarding, too.

Jordan Powers:
Absolutely, well, congratulations, that’s quite an honor.

Emily Davenport:
Sandy, can you tell us a little bit about what path you took to get to where you are today?

Sandy Begani:
So I started my career in horticulture, actually, with an undergraduate degree in environmental sciences. So I received my undergraduate degree from DePaul University in the -- on the Chicago campus, which is where I’m from. What I realized as an environmental scientist is that I really wanted to work with plants. Not many schools offer a horticulture degree in the same regard that UGA does. So when I was looking for undergrad programs, I wasn’t able to find anything local in horticulture necessarily, so working with plants, for me, started out working out in the field. So studying the soil conditions and the water conditions that would be more conducive for certain plants to grow out in the field. Knowing that I wanted to continue working with plants, I knew that I would have to continue my education in horticulture. So I found the University of Georgia, and I realized what a great program it was. And I started working for the university as a greenhouse assistant. So while I was working for the university, I took advantage of the TAP program. So UGA has a great tuition assistance program for staff members that are interested in continuing their education. So I was able to work full-time while pursuing my master’s degree in horticulture. So working for the university as the greenhouse assistant allowed me to learn the ins and outs of the trial garden in terms of greenhouse production and landscape maintenance. So I really wouldn’t be here without my mentor, Miss Pamela Lewis, who has been the greenhouse manager at the university in the horticulture department for a very long time. And so really working with her allowed me to hone in on the greenhouse production skills that are really needed in terms of growing out the trials and getting them out in the garden. I’m also really thankful for my graduate advisor, Professor Burley, who helped me to realize the opportunities here at University of Georgia in terms of master’s programs that are available. Everyone has been very helpful in terms of supporting me in my education and my career.

Jordan Powers:
Absolutely. Is there anything that we’ve missed? Is there a super important nugget from the trial gardens that we have not talked about yet today?

John Ruter:
I think as a whole, it’s just a really special place on campus. When you look at trial gardens maybe across the country, it’s not -- not necessarily a lot of them where you actually have this beautiful garden on a university campus. The fact that we can integrate that into a really nice green space on campus for a community and the industry and the university to enjoy is the -- one of the really big perks of having the garden on campus.

Sandy Begani:
You really just have to come and visit us at different times throughout the year and kind of check out what we’re doing. And if the door is open, come on in to the greenhouse and we’d be happy to give you a tour. Otherwise, the garden is gorgeous in June, July, and August, and that’s really when everything is kind of at its peak, so that’s really a great time to come and visit as well.

Jordan Powers:
Well, thank you both for taking the time to come in and talk to us today, especially during an incredibly busy week. We’ll let you go so you can get back out to the gardens, but I know I can’t wait to get back out there, and hope that our listeners, if they’ve been to the gardens a dozen times, come back again. And if it’s their first time, they make their way over to the trial gardens.

John Ruter:
Please come see us at the gardens!

Sandy Begani:
Thank you!

Jordan Powers:
Awesome. Thanks, y’all.

Sound Effect:
[music]

Emily Davenport:
Thank you for listening to “Cultivating Curiosity,” a podcast produced by the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. A special thanks to Mason McClintock for our music and sound effects. Find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts.