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Oct 11, 2012
The OPGC continues to expand a fruitful collaboration with Brazilian institutions. Gabriel Loli Bazo from the Universidade Estadual de Maringa was a visiting scholar in the Seed Biology Program at The Ohio State University during the summer of 2012. Gabriel provided assistance to a variety of OPGC operations during that time. Luis Otavio Rehder joined the OPGC as a visiting scholar in the summer and will remain until January 2013. Luis comes from the Universidade Federal de Lavras. His work involves examination of seed dormancy in Rudbeckia.
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Oct 11, 2012
The OPGC is the recipient of a University project to demonstrate sustainable management practices. Spurred by a freshman student, Alec Janda, and supported by a grant from the Ohio State's Energy Services and Sustainability program, a rainwater catchment system was installed in the OPGC grounds. This sytems collects rainwater from the OPGC and Horticulture greenhouses and stores it in large bladders.
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Jun 25, 2012
A story about begonias and the OPGC appeared in the May/June issue of the OFA Bulletin. The story highlights the selection of begonias as the OPGC's signature plants for 2012. It also describes some of the opportunities and challenges associated with managing a germplasm collection that seeks to do justice to one of the most important floriculture crops as well as one of the largest genera of angiospersms.
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Jun 25, 2012
The genus Lilium is one of the priority genera for the OPGC. A recent article in the Quarterly Bulletin of the North American Lily Society (Vol 66, No. 2) describe some of the work Peter Zale has been doing with the rare panhandle lily. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:
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Jun 12, 2012
Buckley's phlox (Phlox buckleyi Wherry; also known as sword-leaf phlox or shale-barren phlox) was discovered by Samuel B. Buckley in the early 1800s near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The specimens Buckley collected languished unnamed as herbarium specimens for many years until E. T. Wherry, the world's foremost phlox taxonomist and naturalist, named it in 1930. In a recent exploration trip by graduate student Peter Zale and OPGC staff, the plant was located in the same general area of West Virginia where it had been originally described and collected.
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Apr 29, 2012
The principal pollinators for many of the OPGC plants are bumblebees; these workhorses do an excellent job in the often stressful conditions of a cage. Unfortunately, bumblebees do not appear to polliinate phlox so we must enlist different pollinators. In the wild, phlox are primarily pollinated by various Lepidoptera; we have observed hawk moths and swallowtail butterflies working the plants. To enlist butterflies in pollinating our phlox for seed increases, we need insects that are easy to obtain/rear and that work efficiently with phlox.
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Apr 14, 2012
Is Arabis patens the rarest plant in Ohio? On a 24 May 2008 post in his Ohio Birds and Biodiversity blog, Jim McCormac of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' (ODNR) Division of Wildlife asked this question. He had found only a couple of isolated populations in the shaded calcareous cliffs of Franklin and Delaware counties. The species is a member of the Brassicaceae and like many rock cresses, it produces pretty white flowers in the spring.
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Apr 14, 2012
The Spring of 2012 has been a bit unusual, with an early warming period that stimulated blooms in many plants. A subsequent cooling has kept many flowers open to the delight of pollinators and spectators alike. The phlox bloom in the OPGC's nursery area has been spectacular. The many accessions collected from the Eastern USA over the last couple of years have grown nicely and the consistently cool conditions have encouraged prolific blooms. Phlox bifida (photo) has displayed beautiful white to pale blue colors.
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Mar 21, 2012
Joana Fernandes, a student from the Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in Brazil is spending 6 months at the OPGC working on a variety of projects, but focusing on the establishment of an in vitro backup collection of the clonal begonias. She arrived in January of 2012 and since then has worked diligently in the development of the collection.
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Mar 20, 2012
The 2012 Viola Trial has been planted in the recently-installed beds to the south of the main OPGC building and greenhouses. This trial explores the adaptability of commercial pansies and some Viola tricolor accessions to the harsher conditions of the summer. Data on flowering response, abundance and duration is recorded to determine the material that performs best in the latter part of the growing season for pansies. The goal is to assess the variation in heat tolerance and its subsequet behavior - such as heritability.
