Curatorial Summary

Woah, so its been awhile since I have done a blog entry... Oops. So a summary is in order. Well it is now 2011, and nearly the end of January already! I left the IPM department the week before Christmas and went up to my friend Davids house in the Pocono mountains. It was a great break, learnt to snowboard, ate plenty of food and generally lazed. Much needed. The week after Christmas I drove up to Wochester Massachusetts (Pronounced woo-sta in New England speak. It's not too far from Boston) for a Phish show with my friend John. Great time, and I made it into Boston one day as well. New years was spent riding into into Philadelphia on a yellow school bus and going to a Lotus show.
 So back at work again in the New Year and I started in the Curatorial department.  Its been a busy month, not only with work but also with a whole bunch of job applications! Yes its that time... I have only four months left at Longwood, and I have suspicion its going to fly by.

Curatorial has been fun. I am working with Kristina Aguilar, an intern named Josh and a new PG, Jeanelle. Tomasz Anisko is the curator of plants, but is away for half the month as he is going to Brazil to research Victoria amazonica, on which he is currently writing a book.
The curatorial department is responsible for the recording, mapping and labeling of plants, both existing and new. Plants are recorded using accession numbers, which are always 8 digits and a "qualifier". The first 4 digits are the year it was received at Longwood. It is important to recognise that it is its received date, not its age. The next 4 digits is its number in that year. Accession numbers can, and are, given to groups of plants received. The qualifier is unique to a plant, and is always one or more letters, starting with A. Therefore an example of an accession number would be 1999-0236*A, which for the record was a Corylopsis glabrescens.

The primary tool of the trade is the database known as Botanic Gardens-Base, or BG-base. BG-base is a database that was designed specifically to manage plant records. It is a large application that has been under development since 1985, and originally was written in DOS. Partly because of this it is not exactly "flashy" or particularly user friendly. There are codes left over from DOS, for example F7=start new record, and the s/list (a search function that really makes BG-Base) requires typing like "select plants with acc_num "1999-0236" ". So there is a lot to learn with BG-Base. Despite its looks, BG-Base has  the capability to store and organise a huge range of data, from plants accession numbers to images, mapping, plant conservation statuses, bibliographies, contacts, DNA sequences etc...  As the manual puts it, "no one institution uses all of BG-Bases functionality". Information is stored in different 'Tables', for example the 'Names' and 'Images' tables. Tables can be thought of as being like different drawers on a filing cabinet. The advantage of a database such as BG-base over other spreadsheets such as Excel is that you can search and consolidate information stored in different tables and fields.

In my first week Kristina set me two tasks, one learning how to enter data onto BG-Base. For this I picked a group of plants (a mixture of herbaceous perennials from the perennial garden) and entered data on flower color, culture requirements, and hardiness. The other task was learning how to upload photos. For this picked an area (the silver garden) and took photos of all the plants that didn't yet have photos and attached them to the plants accession number in the images table.
After learning how to do this, I was set the task of creating a tour for Longwoods website "Plant Explorer" (Plantexplorer). Plant explorer is a website that takes information from BG-Base and a mapping program designed specifically for Longwood, BG-Map. The site allows the public to find information on what plants are at Longwood, or to design a tour relating to what the want to see. I decided to do my tour on plant species at Longwood that are rare or threatened (Threatened sp tour, click on plant names for more information). Writing the tour first required finding the plants (using s/list), then narrowing the list to those that were practical to include, were in public areas, weren't seasonal etc. It started out as a large list but was quickly narrowed down. One issue I encountered was whether or not to include plants that are common in cultivation yet threatened in the wild, eg Metasequoia glypstrboides. Longwood is primarily a display garden, and while there is a huge diversity of plants at the gardens, there are not a lot of truly rare and and endangered species here. Although from talking to Tomasz, its sounds like conservation and collections are becoming more important to Longwood (as it is to gardens around the world). After compiling a list it was a matter of researching and gathering information, writing and taking any photos that were needed.
All in all it was a fun exercise to do on a subject I am very interested in.

Oh and a weather update. Before I left for Christmas we were getting snow flurries that werent sticking. Now its defineatly sticking! We got about 20 inches last night, so there was a fair amount of shovelling to do in the morning.