The Planternship Thus Far

It’s been really cool, starting a truly new job for the first time in oh, 9 years or so. Oh, and it has been quite refreshing to actually look forward to going to work in the morning. So here’s the rundown:

I live with two other interns in a furnished apartment. There are four bedrooms, with two shared baths. As the Intern gender ratio is MM F, I share a bathroom with Maurice, who is in his late thirties, and comes to Stonecrop by way of the NYBG. The other intern is Tara, a 20 yo who was an assistant manager in a retail nursery’s perennial section. There was (reportedly) some friction between Tara and Maurice before I got here, but I haven’t seen much of it. Generally we all get along and keep our stuff out of each other's way. I am having to be vigilant about my mess - T and M are both pretty neat people.

All of us are really eager to learn, all of us have our strong points. I know rock garden plants and alpines, a wee bit of latin, but not much common garden material. Tara knows all the common garden perennials, but doesn’t know the rock plants. Maurice knows a lot about the plants he does know, especially trees, both forest and landscape, but doesn’t know any rock garden plants. We are all learning. There is a hell of a lot to learn.

The director and the head horticulturalist here are both Brits. The director, Caroline, has a masters degree from Kew, the Royal Botanical Gardens. Kew is the Harvard of horticulture. They both say a lot of funny british things (uh, that's paper towel, not kitchen roll) and sometimes I wonder if I'm learning to pronounce latin with a british accent. There are a number of other full time staffers, including 1 full time and 5 part time gardeners, 2 maintenence guys, and an office manager.

I work from 8:00 to 5:00 M-F, with an hour for lunch and a 20-minute coffee break (coffee break? what the hell is that?)

Inside the alpine house, Summer 2005

Everyone has rotating assignments for watering and monitoring certain greenhouses or portions of the collection. Also in rotation are opening and closing, periodic weekend duty and “loo-duty.” I’m on the loos this week, but I won’t have a weekend for a while yet – I’m insufficiently trained. Other things I have done a lot of in my 2.5 weeks include grooming alpines, (Primulas in particular), raking, sowing seeds, taking a field trip to a tropical nursery, cataloging, mispronouncing Latin names and my GOD have I potted up a lot of rooted cuttings.

Every day after lunch I pick a plant from the collection as my “Plant of the Day” (POD), and do a brief write-up of it. The write-ups consist of determining specific epithet and plant family, the etymology of the specific epithet (Latin, Latin, Latin, Greek, Latin, some dead guy’s name, Latin), common name, location in the collection, habitat, cultivation requirements, descriptions of the flowers, foliage, and habit, an explanation of why we like the plant, and sources. I frequently do brief sketches of the plants too, if there is time. We’re only supposed to take fifteen minutes. I’ve been working hard to keep it under 25.

The POD is, like many things here, a little frustrating because I’m never sure how thorough a job I should be doing – I feel like they want me to find too much info in only 15 minutes, but I also know that once I know more Latin and more plant families, this will go much quicker. I have already learned a lot doing these PODs – I’m cramming Latin in left and right, I’ve been surprised to find very different looking plants in the same family, and learned that Sagina boydii, a choice form of pearlwort suitable for the alpine house, was collected in the wild in Scotland in the 1850’s… and has never been found in the wild again!

Sagina boydii (Family Caryophyllaceae)

Well, I have to save things for future posts, and posts over at Rich Planty Goodness, so I'll leave you with installment one of "Secrets of Correct Latin Pronunciation For Those Who Never Took Latin":

You can probably get away with saying the first syllable or two, mumbling, and then “eae". And people actually know what you mean. So Mesembryanthemaceae becomes Meh-sem-brhmhmrmnhm-see-ay.

Much more to come. Some redundancy at Rich Planty Goodness, and hopefully a lot of new content. We'll see how it goes. The alpine house is about to explode into bloom and the bulbs are poking up all over the place. Just a few more weeks...

Aloinopsis schooensii (Family Mesembryanthemaceae)