For some of the businesses, offices, organizations, institutions and museum that are currently shuttered, closing down meant locking up, setting the alarm, and walking away for a while.
But at partner organizations Holden Arboretum and the Cleveland Botanical Garden, known jointly as Holden Forests & Gardens, it’s not that easy. President and CEO Jill Koski recently posted a message to the community about their response to the coronavirus crisis here.
Both organizations care for a living collection of plants and animals that can’t be neglected or ignored. So while the public-facing employees may not have much to do with both currently not open for visitors, the horticulturalists are still hard at work, as spring is a critical season for plant maintenance and care.
As newly named Vice President of the Horticulture and Collections, Caroline Tait is experiencing her first spring in Cleveland. She arrived at the end of December after a stint as a fellow at Philadelphia’s Longwood Gardens and running a garden design business in her native England. She oversees horticulture on both campuses so she’s privy to what’s happening as they emerge from winter dormancy.
“I’m amazed by the winter into spring,” she says. “Overnight everything jumps out of the ground!”
But when it does there’s a lot to be done, so a full team is hard at work.
“We oversee the living collection here, not just plants but the animals we have living in Glasshouse — butterflies, tortoises, birds, chameleons, giant cockroaches, tenrec (a hedgehog that comes out at night). So we are allowed to come in and work. The days get longer, the rain comes, all those elements trigger the plants responses. They’re not consciously thinking about growing. It just happens.”
And with the warm spring we’ve had, a lot is going on already, at both locations, and Tait says the pandemic hasn’t impacted the work.
“The gardeners and horticulturalists are busy doing their usual jobs at this time of year — planting, pruning. They’re doing a lot of work with fruit trees, trying to encourage a goblet shape, with a hollow center, with the branches forming cup around it. It makes for better size and tasting fruit. We’ve been pruning the flowering shrubs like the hydrangeas. We’ve been pruning the weeping cherries that are just coming into bud.
“One very exciting project is Hosta Hill [at Holden Arboretum]. That started with a renovation last summer. The plants were removed and significant landscaping was done and improvements made to the area. We designed the garden over winter, and now we’re in the process of replanting, dividing the hostas, bringing in new varieties.”
Tait says that while they’re carrying on their normal seasonal jobs, the employees are taking precautions “maintaining social distancing, staggered shifts, everyone has their own tools. We’re very careful how we pass each other. We haven’t been able to carry out as much teamwork as we’d like.”
But in fact, there’s an upside to the lack of visitors: the horticulture team has been able to tackle some bigger pruning tasks and tree work that’s difficult to do when the Cleveland Botanical Garden is flooded with visitors.
“We’ve been doing some things we’ve haven’t been able to do in a typical year. [Before] we’d get those done early in the morning and then make sure everything was tidied away by the time we had visitors. You want to do work at the right time of year, but very few plants will irrevocably suffer. Spring could be six months long and you still probably won’t get all the jobs done you’d like to get done.”
As for when the public will be able to see the fruits of her team’s labors, Tait says,
“The governor has started to give some framework, an invitation to open up. We’re looking at multiple scenarios to make sure we’re ready for that. We’ve got an incredibly conscientious team working on scenarios. Hopefully we’ll get back to enjoying these spaces sooner rather than later. The pandemic has not really impacted work we are doing but of course we miss our visitors. A huge part of our job is interacting with public and telling them our story, to introduce them to plants, to see them, to smell them.”
One Response to “Work Goes On at Closed Holden Arboretum & Cleveland Botanical Garden”
Bob Beck
Visit several times a year; always bring a friend or two! Trying to mirror the Bontanical Gardens look in my own back yard. OK that’s not true. I’m just happy if I can get the flower beds cleaned out, the leaves raked up and all my new additions in the ground for bountiful, beautiful Summer.