What I do at the Gardens

This week we hear again from Francisco, our propagation/nursery track scholar from Spain.  He’s been at the Gardens for two months.

This time I want to show my job in the Jerusalem Botanic Gardens, doing propagation of rare and endangered plants in Israel.

This photo shows all the seed trays I have been sowing for the last 8 weeks.  I do most of the preparation myself, cutting the trays from the bottom of plastic pots, mixing coir, perlite & vermiculite as propagation media and cutting the labels.  I research information on the species, including habitat or previous germination rates on the IRIS botanical collections management program and whether the species was grown by other scholars.

Sometimes the seed bag is full of chaff, then I have to find 2-3 good seeds in there and ask the volunteers to find more of those in the bag.  Everything I do has to be registered on the IRIS program; every seed tray or pot has a label with a number on it as well as a Latin name, date of sowing, special treatments and so on.

Sometimes the seeds are so big or do not like root disturbance, I sow those in plugs or cups (six-pack pots) as you can see in the photo above.

The photo below contains the plants already grown in cups after the potting up.  I am helped with this job by Dave, the Scholar from Australia, two days a week.  He also helps Lysa (the other Friends’ sponsored scholar) with the curation and care of the tropical plants in the quarantine glasshouse.

The bench (in the photo below) contains plants in bigger pots, some arrived recently into the collection, others were propagated by previous scholars.