Learning about plants helps connect them to the community

Documenting Plants of Wild Origin

Learning about plants helps connect them to each other and the community.

By Tom Arbour, Curator of Living Collections

The Pennington Bed in the Myrtle S. Holden Wildflower Garden

As a community of plant lovers, Holden Forests & Gardens works to connect people with the wonder, beauty and value of plants and trees. But what does that really mean and how to do we make that happen? During my first year here, I’ve thought a lot about our mission and how I can use it to help build an inspirational collection of plants. The beauty of our gardens may be the easiest quality of plants for our guests to behold as they walk through a woods, meadow or garden. But what about the wonder and the value?

When you visit the Myrtle S. Holden Wildflower Garden at the Arboretum this fall, you will see flashes of bright yellows and purples, courtesy of a range of goldenrod and aster species. The banana-like fruits of pawpaw will ripen and be welcomed by people and racoons alike. And as winter descends, when all other vegetation has turned brown, the Virginia witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) will open its yellow, star-like flowers.

These plants are certainly beautiful in their own way, but they each hold a deeper story. Pawpaw is the nation’s largest native fruit, increasingly appreciated for its potential as a food for people. Goldenrods and asters grow for the entire season, waiting to unfurl their flowers until fall, when the number of pollinators reach peak levels. And the witch hazel blooms when nothing else does. When we begin to learn more about these plants, to see how they fit into the ecosystems they evolved with, then we begin to learn their stories and how each connects with the community of people, plants and animals around them.

But what about the value? What makes a plant valuable? While it’s difficult to see, plants are chemical reaction powerhouses that provide a myriad of ecosystem services. Clean air, clean water and oxygen production are three of the biggies. These services are so important that if we tried to replicate them economically the costs would be outrageous. That plants provide these amazing services for free AND do it in a package that is also beautiful is really quite amazing (and highly undervalued) when you think about it. Picture when you last drove by a large chemical “plant.” I doubt beauty was the first thing that came to your mind.

But let’s travel back to the wildflower garden at the Arboretum. There’s something particularly special about the garden. The plants that grow there have been highly curated — carefully selected using a set of guidelines, which stipulates the plants not only must be species that grow in Ohio but the plants themselves must have originated from Ohio. Whether by seed or cutting, nearly all the plants are of what we call “documented wild origin.” They were carefully, legally and ethically collected in the wild, propagated in our nursery spaces, and then planted in our garden.

Why are plants, specifically of documented wild origin, so important? Because they serve as a backup to wild populations if ever something was to happen to them. My second week here, I was working through a list of accessioned plants, and the species Bog Labrador Tea caught my eye. “Oh, that’s interesting,” I thought. After a quick text to my contacts at the ODNR Division of Natural Areas and Preserves, I learned that it had been extirpated from its only known Ohio location — a bog in Portage County. A check of our plant records database, BG-Base, led me to learn that our Bog Labrador Tea came from this wild population. Due to the foresight of botanists from the ODNR Division of Natural Areas and Preserve, and former staffers Tom Yates and Brian Parsons, there is hope for Ohio genotype Labrador tea to grow in the wild again in Ohio. This is why botanical gardens collect plants of documented wild origin and keep detailed careful records about each plant in its collection.

Across our campuses, we have 854 different species of plants that were collected directly from the wild, meaning that about one out of every 10 plants and trees that you see on our campuses serve a directly connected conservation purpose. As the horticulture and collections team works to build our collection of trees and plants, I will work diligently and strategically to increase the number of taxa in our gardens that serve as backups to wild populations. The next time you visit your favorite HF&G campus, I challenge you to take look at the gardens more deeply to find the wonder and the value in our forests and gardens.

Across our campuses, we have 854 different species of plants that were collected directly from the wild.

P.S. – When you spot one of our inconspicuous metal records label on a tree or plant, look for a “CW” stamped in the bottom left corner, and you’ve found a plant that collected in the wild.

MEET THE STAFF

Tom Arbour is the Curator of Living Collections at Holden Forests and Gardens. He guides the acquisition and documentation of more than 20,000 plants and trees at Cleveland Botanical Garden and The Holden Arboretum. Tom has been working with rare plants and trees professionally for over 20 years while exploring Ohio’s highest quality natural areas.