Allison Wang: With 91.9 KVCR News, I'm Allison Wang. As a UC Riverside student, I have the opportunity to live and study next door to the UCR Botanic Gardens, a 40 acre living museum nestled in the foothills of the Box Springs Mountains. I interviewed Jodi Holt, the director of the Botanic Gardens on the garden's history, goals, and future.
Director Holt: I'm Jodi Holt. I'm a professor emeritus in the Botany and Plant Sciences Department where I worked for a little over 30 years. After I retired, the new dean at the time, Dean Uhrich, asked if I would like to come back to work as director of the Botanic Gardens. This is a great way to, sort of, extend my career and continue being involved in plants and botany and teaching with a lot less of the same kinds of academic pressure, but the ability to have an impact on a lot more people. You know, this last year was our 60th year of operation. The gardens were established in 1963; the first botany faculty needed a place to grow plants that they could study. So the gardens were established with just one director and one staff member for quite a long time.
Allison Wang: Today, there are 22 total staff members: 11 non-student employees, 6 student workers, and 5 UCR College Corps interns, who all work towards creating a space for the community to come and enjoy nature.
Director Holt: So a botanic garden is not a park. It's a botanic garden because it has a curated collection, similar to the way a museum would. The planted acres can be roughly divided into two types, themed gardens, which is what most people think of gardens: rose garden, herb garden, we have a cactus garden, we have a butterfly garden. So those have a theme and a purpose. And then the other gardens are called gardens, but they're really geographic areas that represent the native plant communities in different parts of the world. There's a theme for those too, because California has a Mediterranean climate, which means it's dry in the summer, which is the growing season, and wet in the winter, when it's the cooler season. And there are five places in the world only that have this Mediterranean climate. So we have gardens that represent all those areas. So we have a South African garden. We have Mediterranean gardens. We have Australian garden, that is, has a Mediterranean climate, but Australian plants. We have a Latin American garden. We're trying to build that into a Chilean garden, because that's where the Mediterranean climate is. And of course, several representative communities from California.
Allison Wang: Sustainability is an important goal. Currently, the gardens are working on-
Director Holt: -transitioning a lot of our irrigation to timed sprinklers, where you can base the irrigation on soil moisture, water needs and weather, and then the timers would run it only as long as needed.
Allison Wang: Collaboration is key. Students and faculty from UCR’s College of Natural and Agriculture Science (CNAS) works alongside the Botanic Gardens to further agricultural research.
Director Holt: This is a natural but managed landscape. We are the site of data collection or sampling, or smaller projects, a lot of student projects, on everything from bees, pollination, hummingbirds, botany, plant physiology, earthquakes.
Allison Wang: But their reach goes beyond the university. Engaging the wider Inland Empire community is a fundamental goal for the Gardens.
Director Holt: For many years, long before I started, the former staff have run an education program offering guided tours to schoolchildren. The school shows up, the kids get out with their teachers, and the docent gives them a one-hour tour that is coordinated with the statewide environmental education curriculum. So they just love it, and we'll have groups most weeks, all year, and that has just been a mainstay of our education and outreach program. What we started really ramping up when I became director, was education and outreach activities geared more towards adults. We offer things that people pay a small fee to cover our costs, and they come learn and engage in the gardens and learn about plants or plants or birds or wildlife.
Allison Wang: A few examples of such events include rose pruning demonstrations, bird walks, and twilight tours. Visit gardens.ucr.edu for the most up to date details. To close out the interview I asked Director Holt: what makes the UCR Botanic Gardens special?
Director Holt: Every garden is different. Every garden has an essence that makes people come. The majority of people come here because driving a very short distance in this huge, urban, Inland Empire, you can walk out in nature and feel like you're completely lost. In our geographic gardens, you don't see buildings, cars and people. You just feel like you've gone somewhere far away and you're out in nature, and there are plants and birds and maybe a bobcat, right here in the middle of Riverside. That is really why most people come.
Allison Wang: Visiting the UCR Botanic Gardens is free, but money from purchasing plants, merchandise, and attending special events all go towards maintaining this beautiful landmark in the heart of Riverside. From 91.9 KVCR News, it’s Allison Wang.
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Note: The UCR Botanic Gardens is mostly self-funded and relies on donations, sales, and memberships to operate.
Learn more at https://gardens.ucr.edu/