Botanical Gardens And Modernity: The Record Speaks For Itself

My contention (posted here) is that our botanical gardens, including the New York Botanical Garden, are behind the times and not fully serving the needs of city dwellers.

Following are a couple of NYBG site searches that illustrate the point. Incidentally, the same searches will produce the same results in the vast majority of botanical gardens across the country.

Garden OR gardening - Over 3,000 hits. They obviously talk about gardening at great length. However, it is only about dirt and nothing about modernity.

Self-watering OR sub-irrigation - It is rather incredible to find just one hit that was triggered by my comment on Plant Talk, the NYBG blog. Note that my comment posted over a year ago is still unanswered. The blog post was from 2008.

Hi Sonia, it’s now more than a year later. What did your experiments with EarthBoxes and other self-watering (sub-irrigation) containers reveal to you? A NYBG site search reveals no information at all about these planters.

Thanks,
Bob Hyland
 aka Greenscaper

The comment was answered privately but only in response to my follow up email to the NYBG PR person. There are at least four staff members at NYBG who read my email. Only the blogger replied with a rather wishy-washy answer.

Not only does the education program fall short but so does their professional communications. My comment should have been answered in public on the blog. It clearly deserved an answer. My advice would be to not blog if all you are going to do is duck and cover. 

It does not take a team of investigators to build the case. Google is a cold chronicler of the facts. Sub-irrigated planters (SIPs), the EarthBox for example, have gained widespread consumer acceptance with little or no help from our botanical institutions. They are essentially mute on the subject.

The public pays for and deserves better.

Comments

[Ed]

But I don't hear the public clamoring for information about sub irrigation or even self watering. It seems to me they want to have success and fun growing a few vegetables. It's not a big science experiment.

[Greenscaper]

Education about modern food production methods is about fighting obesity, hunger and creating new green jobs. Of course that pales in comparison with an opportunity to see Martha in person.