I have been at UCLA for nearly nineteen years--nineteen years of walking down paths and often not taking time to smell the roses. As MEMBG attracts more volunteers to lead tours and pamper the collections, and more visitors with keen interest in plant biology and environmental issues, I have been challenged to depart from the paths, take out my dusty hand lens, and relearn some of the plant characteristics forgotten from the studies of my youth.
The weekly Monday walks with docents to find plants flowering in the garden have given me an opportunity to view species that, frankly, I have never before seen in bloom. Joining a cadre of helpers who are eager to learn and awed by beauty and natural intricacies of any size certainly has buoyed my spirits. And it is pleasant to hear from my assistants that they, too, share that high. I wish that all of you readers could have seen the remarkable columns of flowers on Banksia ericifolia, the aloes loaded with blossoms, the African tulip tree still flowering in December and January. Come join us!
Writing columns for the newsletter has focused my attention on the really precious plants held in our care. Our outdoor plantings probably now include about 5,000 species. Many of these do not appear in standard horticultural books; hence, it is worth coming to UCLA to see them. This year I will encourage more people to write for the newsletter--and congratulations to Rebecca for her very nice contribution to this issue, on Bombacaceae. Others now need to help us out and make the newsletter more diversified.
Working on the Web site--many more hours than I care to admit--certainly has made me look closely at the plants in the collection, as I attempt to uncover useful examples to illustrate botanical properties. Even so, I do not have much to show yet, because the process of properly publishing thousands of digitized images is daunting: scanning, sizing, labeling, adjusting color, naming, storing, describing, and then linking to text. In the next newsletter we will begin listing new subjects that have been published online. Right now, I am working simultaneously on four "books"--world vegetation, life-forms, general botany, and economic botany--that I hope to complete within the next eighteen months.
Watch us grow!