As a public garden, it is vital that we work with integrity to serve all communities and make sure our spaces and programs are welcoming and relevant to all.
At UW Botanic Gardens, we are thinking deeply about the mission of our organization and public gardens as a whole. We see ourselves as a resource for community education and engagement, a steward of urban green space for recreation and restoration, and curators of collections with important conservation value. 

4.13.22

Around The Farm

An Introduction to our Mary Gates Leadership Scholars:

This quarter we are excited to announce that two UW Students, who have volunteered with us regularly throughout their time at UW, applied and were accepted to be Mary Gates Leadership Scholars! They each will be working on a project on the Farm across two quarters. We would like to introduce them to the greater UW Farm community, as you all will be seeing a lot of them and their work for the rest of the growing season. 

A master plan is critical for a botanic or public garden of any size, to give it a sense of mission and purpose, and then to guide priorities to accomplish its goals.

“The Arboretum is over 230 acres and it is absolutely a public space. And when we say public that means everyone, not just the people that live close by,” says Christina Owen, co-director of UWBG.

Let’s dip our toes into the bizarre world of lichens! Lichens are those interesting, colorful, strange little growths found on trees and stones that are commonly mistaken for moss. Lichens and mosses can certainly grow together and often do, but they are far from the same thing. These underappreciated epiphytes are actually not even plants at all. They are a symbiotic combination of fungi and algae which form an estimated 3,600 (and counting) different species of lichen throughout North America. 

This excruciatingly rare plant has been documented in only one place: along a basalt ridgetop at the Hanford Reach National Monument.

4.6.22

Around The Farm

by Russell Botulinski, Undergraduate Student in Restoration Ecology & Environmental Horticulture, Former Student Staff and Intern
In 2016, as part of her Masters of Environmental Horticulture capstone project, Nicolette Neumann oversaw the design and installation of the Agricultural Hedgerow at the southern edge of the UW Farm. The primary purpose was to improve native pollinator habitat and act as a riparian buffer zone. 

Basalt daisy (Erigeron basalticus) is a cliff dweller, found exclusively along the Yakima River Canyon and Selah Creek. There you will find it tucked into crevices and cracks of the basalt cliffs formed in the late Miocene (5 to 11 million years ago). There are six known populations in Washington State. Over the past few years Rare Care has made a concerted effort to re-monitor all known occurrences, and we only have one left to visit! 

Each year Rare Care recognizes volunteers for their outstanding contributions.
Steven Clark has been with Rare Care since the inception of our rare plant monitoring program in 2001! Since then, Steven has contributed over 320 hours and submitted nearly 40 reports. He integrates Rare Care into the biology courses he teaches at Clark College, and helps inspire the future conservation biologists of our state. 

By Allie Howell
Allie Howell transitioned into Rare Care’s temporary Research Scientist position in February. Through September, she will be collecting field data, growing plants for outplantings, and helping with reporting on our many on-going research projects.
I have the exciting opportunity to delve deeply into several of this program’s ongoing projects.
So far, most of my work has been devoted to conducting vulnerability assessments on the rare alpine plants I monitored in the North Cascades, Olympic and Mt.