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Lainie’s Cutting Garden

Senior Horticulturist Mike Bone (left) and Senior Curator Panayoti Kelaidis at the Transformation Celebration. Click on the link above to learn more about their plant collecting expedition in Central Asia.

OUR TRANSFORMATION:

• Four new gardens were transformed by the Gardens’ Horticulture Department in 2009: Community Garden, Welcome Garden, Parking Garage landscape and streetscape, and Lainie’s Cutting Garden

• To accommodate the construction of our new Greenhouse Complex, valuable plant collections and production plants were moved to newly built greenhouses at Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield. One such collection was the Cloud Forest Tree exhibit in Marnie’s Pavilion, which closed in mid-March. The orchid collections were carefully extracted and moved to the Chatfield greenhouses where they will be housed until construction of the new Marnie’s Pavilion is complete.

• As part of our Plant Exploration program, Senior Curator Panayoti Kelaidis and Senior Horticulturist Mike Bone conducted a three- week seed and germplasm scouting expedition in Central Asia’s Golden Mountains in Kazakhstan (bordering Mongolia, China and Russian Siberia). This trip was funded by Plant Select®

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a collaborative partnership between the Gardens, Colorado State University and Colorado’s green industries that finds and distributes the best plants for the Rocky Mountain region.

• Horticulture staff was involved in the creation of the final designs for the Darlene Radichel Plant Select Garden and the Mordecai Children’s Garden, as well as preliminary designs for the upcoming Sensory Garden,Waring Green, Bonsai Pavilion and Tea Garden, and Nexus Berm. Progress was

2009 Denver Botanic Gardens Annual Report

HORTICULTURE STATS

1,758 PLANT ACCESSIONS WERE ADDED TO OUR LIVING COLLECTIONS IN 2009.

The Gardens’ living plant collections statistics for 2009: Total plants

Total accessions

Number of taxa represented Number of species Number of genera Number of families

30,414 21,400 13,849 8,246 1,983 259

also made in developing design elements for the new Marnie’s Pavilion and Orangery display.

•A new waterlily cultivar, Nymphaea ‘Bea Taplin’, was released from our plant collections in honor of a long-time supporter of the Gardens, Bea Taplin.

•The Gardens helped local gardeners transform their landscapes by offering more than 6,500 plants for sale from our own collections through the “Garden Grown” division. These plants were sold at the Spring Plant Sale and Fall Plant & Bulb Sale, as well as in our gift shop, The Shop at the Gardens.

•We added 80 new accessions to our collections through our Index Seminum program. As part of the program, we offered 77 taxa for distribution; 346 seed packets were distributed to 34 participating organizations.

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