Vietnam partners name newly discovered plant species in horticulturist’s honor.
Conservationists use fire, mechanization to restore acres of Florida Panhandle wetlands.
A detector dog, a.k.a DJ, helps staff sniff out hidden endangered plants.
Q UEEN OF THE POND
Garden horticulturists act as “nocturnal pollinators” to grow gigantic Victoria water lilies.
In the hustle and bustle year in and year out to create breathtaking plant displays, crowd-pleasing art exhibitions, scores of fun, engaging activities and one ever-popular holiday night show, it’s easy to overlook the core important mission work of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. This year, as the Garden celebrates its golden anniversary, lends the perfect reminder to stop, take a deep breath and look back at 50 years of connecting people with plants.
For this issue of PlantIntel, staff were asked to identify five milestones in their respective areas of work, and key moments bubbled up: There’s the creation of the Garden’s flagship collection of species orchids. The 1991 addition of “conservation” to the Garden’s mission statement — crafted three years earlier by several volunteers sitting around a table in the Garden’s modest trailer, just to name a couple.
And the work continues at an unprecedented pace, as this eighth annual issue of PlantIntel illustrates. Go behind the scenes with our conservationists in the Panhandle as they mark success after 10 years of efforts to restore 300 acres of imperiled wetlands. Learn about one of the Garden’s most fascinating but lesser-known orchid collections that is growing at a time when its species is threatened with extinction. Get to know the various ways the Garden’s dedicated volunteers engage guests in teaching moments — in many ways, just as they have done since the Garden’s founding. And meet DJ, the nosy canine conservationist lending a paw to staff as they strive to sniff out rare and, in many cases, threatened plants.
There’s truly much to celebrate. Here’s to 50 more!
DANNY FLANDERS, PlantIntel Editor
Danny Flanders Bo Shell Editor Designer
Jessica Boatright
Mary Pat Matheson Vice President, Marketing Anna and Hays Mershon President & CEO
As the Garden celebrates its 50th anniversary, this year lends the perfect opportunity to look back on noteworthy achievements over the years in the key mission areas of horticulture and collections, conservation and research, and educational programs. In a nod to the five decades, here are five milestones and moments deemed
CONSERVATORY: The opening of the Fuqua Conservatory in 1989 solidified the Garden’s presence on the national horticultural stage, a feat considering the Garden was founded only a few short years earlier by dedicated volunteers. Avid gardener and supporter Dorothy Chapman Fuqua and her husband, businessman J.B. Fuqua, made the facility possible with a generous gift.
ORCHID COLLECTION: Development of the Garden’s signature species orchid collection has made the Garden synonymous with orchids in the United States. Housed in the Fuqua Orchid Center, which opened in 2002, the collection is believed to be the largest under glass in North America. The esteemed, massive collection of 2,000 orchids species is at the heart of guest enjoyment and education.
FROG RESCUE: Rescuing amphibians from the catastrophic chytrid fungus plaguing Central America the past 20 years was a major effort by the Garden unknown to most guests. In the 1990s, frogs were dying in unprecedented numbers because of the deadly pathogen, making it one of the greatest threats in history to biodiversity. The Garden joined efforts to rescue frogs and safeguard them in a specially built lab and years later helped repatriate their lineage, demonstrating the important roles botanical gardens can play globally.
PITCHER PLANT
Sarracenia became the Garden’s first nationally accredited plant collection in 2006. Recognition by the American Public Gardens Association’s Plant Collections Network demonstrates a commitment to resources, staffing and continued work expanding this group of plants. Peer-reviewed and critically assessed, Sarracenia was followed by other collection accreditations, including Magnolia, Acer, Gongora and Stanhopea. The Garden is among only a handful of institutions in the network to have five or more accredited collections.
GAINESVILLE GARDEN: The Atlanta Botanical Garden, Gainesville’s opening in 2015 provided more opportunity to display even more plants for enjoyment, education and conservation efforts. The land, donated by Gainesville residents and philanthropists Charles and Lessie Smithgall, was designed as a woodland garden and is the perfect complement to Midtown’s more formal garden. The Gainesville location is also integral to the Garden’s woody plant collections, cultivating and evaluating plants before they’re displayed in both gardens.
PLANT CONSERVATION ELEVATED: Conservation and research received new emphasis in 1991 when it was added to the Garden’s mission statement, developed by a committee in 1986: The mission of the Atlanta Botanical Garden is to develop and maintain plant collections for display, education, research, conservation and enjoyment.
SAFEGUARDING EFFORTS: The Conservation Safeguarding Nursery’s opening at the Gainesville Garden in 2009, followed by an expansion to 8 acres in 2020, allowed the Garden to significantly increase its ability to safeguard and support endangered plants, especially large tree species.
SAVING SWAMP PINKS: In 2011, populations of endangered swamp pinks, Helonias bullata, reintroduced more than a decade earlier, began producing offspring in the wild – a significant achievement for center scientists who had been working since the early ’90s to conserve the species in its natural habitat.
PARTNER COLLABORATION: The inaugural Southeastern Partners in Plant Conservation Conference, or SePPCon, was held in 2016 at the Garden, drawing organizations and experts from across the region working to save endangered plants and habitats. The event led to formation of the Southeastern Plant Conservation Alliance in 2020.
SOUTHEASTERN CENTER FOR CONSERVATION: The Garden established its Southeastern Center for Conservation in 2018 as a regional hub for the conservation and study of endangered plants. The Center now includes more than 40 conservation staff who conduct research in seed banking, in vitro propagation and conservation genetics.
CHILDREN’S GARDEN DEBUT: The Garden opened its innovative Children’s Garden in 1999, one of the first in the world. The 2-acre garden, developed in partnership with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, was designed to emphasize wellness and healing.
KINDER IN THE GARDEN: Kinder in the Garden, launched in 2004, created a complimentary day in the Garden for elementary students from local school districts to engage in activities aimed at forming a connection with nature. That year, the Garden served more than 3,500 school children through this and other programs and partnerships, and today they number more than 10,000.
OUTDOOR KITCHEN OFFERINGS: The Garden was able to create Outdoor Kitchen programs upon completion of the Edible Garden in 2010. The popular offerings connecting guests with plants, chefs and local food producers include several dinner series and weekend Garden Chef cooking demonstrations.
EXPANDED CHILDREN’S PROGRAMS: An extensive renovation of the Children’s Garden in 2016 allowed the Garden to significantly expand its family programming. Renamed the Lou Glenn Children’s Garden, the site served as the launch pad for popular children’s events such as Garden Grooves and Garden Playtime.
COMMUNITY OUTREACH EFFORTS: The creation of its Community Outreach programs in 2019 allowed the Garden to take its show on the road. They have included the popular gardening workshop series Plant. Eat. Repeat, presented in partnership with five community gardens, and AgLanta Eats food festival, a hyper-local event hosted by the Garden to celebrate and support metro Atlanta’s food system.
By BECKY BRINKMAN
One of the Garden’s most fascinating but lesser-known plant collections is its orchids of Madagascar. This group is a cornerstone of the Garden’s flagship orchid collection, and a recent generous gift has allowed for an increase in the depth and breadth of this valuable collection.
WHY IT MATTERS
Developing and maintaining plant collections for display, education and conservation is critical to the Garden’s mission of connecting people with plants.
Madagascan orchids can be short-lived in cultivation unless the grower has accurate information about the microhabitat in which they flourish and the ability to reproduce those conditions. Elevation, light intensity, diurnal and seasonal patterns of temperature, humidity and rainfall are vital bits of information that help a grower create and then place plants in the appropriate area in a suitable greenhouse. The Garden is fortunate to have four different environments in which to grow the orchids.
Many of the epiphytic orchid species that are common in cultivation come from about 5,000 to 6,500 feet in the mid- to upper elevations of the eastern rainforest and want cool to intermediate growing conditions. These are grown in the Garden’s intermediate greenhouse, next to the wet wall, mounted on cork and placed vertically at the height where they receive the appropriate amount of light. Species from warm lowland areas that enjoy bright light, such as the striking eburneum ssp. superbum and A. longicalar, are grown in a greenhouse with a 64-degree night minimum and 50 percent shade. Species that want warm temperatures and deep shade, like several species of Aerangis, are grown in a warm greenhouse with 80 percent shade and 85 percent humidity.
Madagascan orchids on slabs and in pots can be viewed in the Orchid Display House, where they are on rotation. Elsewhere, the orchids are displayed in a naturalistic setting, growing as epiphytes, lithophytes or terrestrials in the Orchid Display House’s Madagascar bed and in the Desert House.
In 2024 the Garden received a generous gift from an anonymous donor allowing it to purchase flasks of lab-grown seedlings, adding three genera and 22 species to its collection. And last year, a second purchase added one new genus and 24 new species. The gift substantially strengthens the collection while allowing the Garden to display even more of Madagascar’s unique flora and eventually to propagate and share rare species with other gardens.
Garden, India collaborate on new conservatory, Magnolia research
By SCOTT McMAHAN
fall, Conservatory Manager Paul Blackmore and I traveled to India on a journey that would take us coast to coast and from sea level to 13,000-foot mountain passes, all in three weeks’ time.
The goal was to first travel to Delhi to meet with members of the Botanical Survey of India to discuss how the Garden could help by consulting with the research institution on a newly designed conservatory that will be the largest in India. After that, we would head to the far northeastern corner of India to the state of Nagaland to scout for future fieldwork, then finish our time in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.
We landed in Delhi at midnight, three days after one of the most popular festivals in the country, Diwali. The air was still thick with smoke from fireworks and the burning of trash left from the huge event. By morning, however, a strong wind had come through, and we spent a beautiful day walking the construction site of what will be the Botanical Survey’s newest botanical garden housing its west coast research division. The main topics of discussion were the parameters that will be used to build the new conservatory and any concerns about its design. Paul was able to provide great information, based on two decades of work in the Fuqua Conservatory, to be considered during these last phases of the project, including
having them visit the Garden this year to see firsthand how our tropical Conservatory and Orchid Center work.
After two whirlwind days, we flew to Dimapur, the largest city in the northeastern state of Nagaland. From there, our adventure would begin. We spent two days in the nearby city of Kohima where we tried to acclimate ourselves to the elevation by trekking up Mount Japfu (10,000 feet), the second highest peak in Nagaland. Following a very comfortable stay in Kohima, it was time to make one of the most miserable drives of our
lives. We had been warned the roads were bad (even our driver/guide was unprepared for what we were about to endure), but we thought, how bad could they be? The first six hours or so were not terrible, but then we began to work our way into more remote areas on the way to the highest mountain in Nagaland, Mount Saramati (12,550 feet). By the end of our journey we had bounced around on deeply rutted, mud roads for 14 hours — and it felt like it. But we made it.
The next two days were spent hiking and scouting the jungle for future expeditions.
During the 6.5-mile hike, we gained 4,000 feet in elevation while walking through some of the most pristine jungle I have ever seen, literally on the border of India and Myanmar. The entire area we visited has been very poorly documented and explored only by local village hunters. We will definitely be back.
Our next stop required us to make the dreaded drive back to Kohima, and from there we would work our way to Dirang, Arunachal Pradesh, the most northeastern state where 78 percent of the virgin jungle still remains. After two solid days of driving, we would now stay in the
The Garden’s International Plant Exploration Program was established in 2016 to collaborate with international gardens and institutions to help preserve plant species and evaluate new ones for use in southeastern U.S. landscapes. Plants from southeast Asia have long been reliable components of southeastern gardens because of the comparable climates. The program’s key components have been to develop a plant evaluation nursery at the Gainesville Garden, make formal seed-collecting trips to southeast Asia and sponsor an annual visiting scholar program.
same place for several days which allowed us to explore different directions and elevations each day. We hiked through dense, broadleaf evergreen jungles crawling with leeches to ancient Rhododendron and Abies forests, finding remarkable spots to revisit with our India colleagues in the coming years. We even made it to the famous Sela Pass where Frank Kingdon-Ward, British plant explorer/spy, was arrested by the Tibetans in 1935 for illegally crossing into what they claimed was Tibet. Once again, the flora and remoteness of Dirang make it another prime location for future fieldwork.
Our time in India ended as it so often does at the Kolkata Botanical Garden to formally meet with the newly appointed director of the Botanical Survey of India. We spent the morning discussing collaborative fieldwork in the coming year, focusing on Magnolia documentation for the Global Conservation Consortium for Magnolia, which the Garden is leading, as well as a visiting scholar exchange this summer.
Paul and I returned home exhausted but incredibly inspired by all that we had seen and done — so much so, we are already planning our next adventure!
By MAXWELL KOTELNICKI
Not all plants growing in the Garden were purchased from commercial nurseries. Many were secured from the staff’s international travels, and grown and tested at the Gainesville Garden before putting down roots in one of the two locations.
The plants are the result of the Garden’s International Plant Exploration Program, established in 2016 to collaborate with international gardens and institutions to preserve plant species and evaluate new ones for use in southeastern U.S. landscapes.
Plants from southeast Asia have long been reliable components of southeastern gardens because of their comparable climates. The plant evaluation nursery at the Gainesville Garden monitors incoming plants for a variety of criteria, often for several years, before they find permanent homes in one of the two Gardens. Program staff evaluate each individual for hardiness, invasive ability, soil and light preferences, and horticultural merit. Once plants have passed those tests, new introductions to the Garden are placed thoughtfully among collections for guests to enjoy and the horticulture team to manage.
Here are a few plants the program has provided.
Magnolia foveolata, an outstanding member of the Garden’s magnolia collection, is an evergreen species featuring large creamy white-yellow flowers in spring. Native to Vietnam and southern China, this species can be found along the Camellia Walk and exhibits golden new growth each year.
Cymbidium goeringii, and its cultivars are members of the Garden’s growing collection of hardy orchids, predominately in Storza Woods accompanying many of the native azaleas. Fragrant green flowers splashed with red spots take years to mature and begin to bloom before winter is over.
▼ Felt ferns, Pyrrosia drakeana, have a native range from northeast India to Southeast China, often growing at high elevations along the Himalayan Mountains. One of the cold hardiest tongue ferns, this species remains evergreen at the Garden. Slow-growing rhizomes produce single-bladed fronds with a soft texture reminiscent of felt. The back of each leaf features a striking gold or coppery contrast to its blue-green leaf face. Its unusual composure graces the Japanese Garden.
▼ Cercis chuniana is a favorite tree featured in the Cascades Garden not far from the Earth Goddess. This redbud species blooms profusely each spring, featuring short racemes of white flowers that turn to pink as they expand and deteriorate over several weeks. Unlike the heart-shaped leaves of native southeastern redbuds, its leaves are asymmetrical, adding to its elegant allure. Native to southeast China, this species is a perennial showstopper.
▲ Sinopanax formosanus is a member of the Araliaceae or Ginseng family. Native to high-altitude forests of Taiwan, this fantastic small tree features large leathery palmate leaves. This species keeps its dark grey-green leaves through winter and can be found in Storza Woods among buckeyes and hydrangeas.
A newly discovered species of Arisaema has been named in honor the Garden’s Vice President, Horticulture & Collections.
Scott McMahan and a team of Vietnam scientific partners discovered the unnamed species while conducting field research in that country in 2024. The plant, recently recognized as a valid new species according to scientific peer review and DNA evidence, has been named Arisaema mcmahanii in recognition of McMahan.
In 2019, the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology team that typically collaborates with the Garden was on a field trip in southern Vietnam to study Aroids — the plant family that includes Arisaema. While collecting material, the team found a specimen that appeared different from those they were seeing in the area. A sample was collected and taken back to Hanoi to be studied. Based on morphological characteristics of the specimen, it was believed to be an undescribed species.
Five years later, the Garden’s International Plant Exploration team, which McMahan leads, joined their Vietnamese colleagues on an expedition to Gia Lai province. During this trip, the group again came across a group of Arisaema that looked identical to those found previously in Kontum province. This time, bulbs were taken back to both the Vietnam Academy of Science’s Biodiversity Station as well as the Garden.
DNA samples were collected and sent to Aroid experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London for verification. Kew acknowledged that the submitted sample was a new species to science.
In recognition of the Garden’s commitment to their long-time partnership, the Vietnamese researchers named the species in McMahan’s honor, and the discovery will be published in the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology Academia Journal of Biology.
Fire and a new approach to restoration bring Florida wetlands back from the brink
By JEFF TALBERT
312 acres. The number in context could be either large or minuscule, a gain or a loss, the difference between survival or extinction.
For the Garden’s Southeastern Center for Conservation, the number represents a monumental conservation success — 312 acres of critical habitat restored at Deer Lake State Park in the Florida Panhandle over the past decade through a valued partnership with the Florida Park Service.
The coastal wetlands surrounding the globally rare and imperiled coastal dune lake ecosystems of Walton County are some of the most biologically diverse habitats in the United States. Yet the wetlands have degraded over the past 80 years, largely because natural fire was kept out of the landscape. Once teeming with unique wetland plants and abundant wildlife, the wet prairies were overtaken and shaded out by a dense overstory of hardwood trees that thrived in the absence of natural fire, a change that created ripple effects across the landscape.
Without healthy wetland ecosystems, the coastal dune lakes that relied on the nearby wetlands’ natural water filtration were in danger, with domino effects for migrating shorebirds that rely on the dune lakes for food and nesting habitat. Recognizing that critical ecosystems were in urgent need of protection, the State of Florida acquired large parcels of land and worked with the Southeastern Center for Conservation to secure funding to restore more than 300 acres of degraded wetland habitat. Through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund, funds set aside from the 2010 BP oil spill, Center scientists and the Florida Park Service developed a plan to restore the precious habitats and bring back ecological balance to the coastal wetland ecosystems.
Key to the restoration of Deer Lake’s wetlands was, paradoxically, fire. Attitudes towards fire have shifted over the years, and what was once seen as a threat to humans and profits is now believed necessary for healthy, functional ecosystems. Many of these coastal ecosystems are adapted to withstand natural fire, which burns more slowly and at a lower intensity than what is considered “wildfire.” Many of
Collaboration
through public and private partnerships helps advance the conservation of endangered plant and animal species.
Deer Lake’s wetland plant species rebound after burning and woody vegetation is kept at bay, maintaining the open habitat characteristic of the park’s wet prairies. For those reasons, the restoration process included reintroducing carefully managed fire at one- to three-year intervals to replicate a more natural cycle of burning and regeneration.
Still, some hardwood shrub thickets that had grown to the size of small trees were too large to be burned safely, and project partners recognized that prescribed fire alone would not restore the wetlands. Implementing a novel approach to a restoration of this size, the project brought in heavy machinery to remove the thickets mechanically rather than through applying vast quantities of herbicide across the 312 acres.
As the restoration progressed, the Center secured additional funding from the Environmental Protection Agency to study how the ecosystems were bouncing back,
turning Deer Lake into a living laboratory for wetland restoration. Scientists continue to study the return of life to the wetlands, identifying more than 327 species of amphibians, plants and insects. Among them is the critically endangered bog dwarf salamander, Eurycea sphagnicola These weren’t just wins for biodiversity but also important data points highlighting the positive impact of the restoration’s novel approach.
Deer Lake’s restoration successes showed other land managers in the region that when using these methods wetland restoration of this scale is possible. The scientists were careful to document the process so that future projects can replicate its techniques, and the Center is actively seeking funding to repeat its restoration work on 580 acres of wetland in nearby Grayton Beach State Park.
Completion of this project will have a long-lasting impact on the wetlands of the Florida Panhandle, providing a proven approach to restoring them.
By LORIN BOREN
Walking around the Garden on a Tuesday, guests will notice a volunteer, dubbed the “resident mermaid with perfect mermaid hair,” busily making the Conservatory pond look beautiful. For the past 20 years, Raenell Soller has been an essential part of the horticulture team, responsible for maintaining the aquatic plants in various ponds and pools.
Donned in waders and a sunhat, she prunes and weeds the waterlilies. And with patience and kindness she pauses any task at hand to answer questions about the lotus flowers or direct children’s eyes to the darting minnows. In doing so, she’s inadvertently become part of the guest experience.
A scientist and educator, Soller considers her volunteer work to be most meaningful. “The Garden is beautiful and grounding,” she said. “People are happy here at the Garden, and I get to help cultivate that happiness.”
Soller is not unique in her willingness to give of her time to promote the Garden’s mission. In fact, she is part of a 50-year tradition of service — the Garden was founded in 1976 by a core group of enthusiastic community volunteers with a determination to create a public garden.
Over the last half-century, much has changed, but the Garden’s reliance on volunteers has remained vital to its success as a worldwide institution. Of the current 460 active volunteers, 130 support horticulture and 45 the Garden’s conservation efforts. Gardenwide, they along with volunteers in other departments contribute about 32,000 hours annually. Many are retirees from various backgrounds, others
are college students, but all work together to beautify, conserve and educate others about the Garden’s plant collections.
Like Soller, volunteer Morrine Wilson helps care for plants — but behind the scenes in the Seed Bank, where she prepares a batch of seeds for the conservation team’s next round of germination testing. She holds her breath while counting dust-fine embryos before cleaning and sorting them for use in experiments.
“Supporting local research and conservation is something that is really special to me,” she said. “I love being able to be part of such a cool scientific community so close to my home.”
Similar to the seeds she works with, Morrine is just starting her service at the Garden. A senior at Lambert High School in Forsyth County and member of the Garden’s first group of summer youth volunteers, or SPEAK (Students
Promoting Environmental Awareness & Knowledge) program, the enthusiastic teen was recruited to remain last fall as an unpaid Southern Seeds Intern, collaborating with the conservation and education teams to assist in the seed bank lab.
As with the founding volunteers, her work and enthusiasm indicate the Garden is in good hands. While it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, volunteer manager Josh Todd said, it is worth remembering the service of those that have made this milestone possible. ”Volunteers are essential to the success of the Garden, providing guests with exceptional experiences and assisting staff as they work to protect and conserve our natural world,” he said.
How one dog is helping scientists sniff out orchids hidden underground
In the dawn light, the Blue Ridge forest stirs with the familiar chorus of birds and insects. Then comes an unfamiliar sound — the soft jingle of a dog collar bell.
Through the cool mountain mist, DJ, a Belgian Malinois, moves with purpose, nose to the ground and paws whispering over the leaf litter. His trainer, Missouri biologist Karen DeMatteo, PhD, follows close behind, watching for his signal — a sudden heel, a prod with his snout, a hopeful glance and a wag of the tail.
Somewhere beneath the soil may lie one of the Southeast’s rarest orchids, and DJ is helping scientists find it.
The small whorled pogonia, Isotria medeoloides, is an endangered orchid that can vanish underground for years at a time. For plant conservationists, that makes it nearly impossible to know where to look. That’s why the Garden turned to DJ for help.
With support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the Garden’s conservation and research team partnered with DeMatteo to train DJ to recognize the scent of the orchid’s roots, allowing him to locate them even when no part of the plant is growing above ground. Each discovery helps researchers understand where the orchid lingers unseen and explore ways to encourage more active growth.
The research matters because many native wildflowers can “skip” above-ground growth when conditions aren’t right — after a drought or as forests mature and sunlight on the forest floor fades — but their roots usually remain alive below. Finding those hidden individual plants helps conservationists identify struggling populations before it’s too late.
Detector dogs like DJ offer a gentle, efficient way to search for rare plants, reducing the need for digging and revealing new ways to understand what lives beneath our feet.
Early fieldwork in the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia shows promise. DJ’s alerts have guided the team to new clues about dormant orchid plants, refining how people and dogs can work together for plant conservation.
The project is still in its early stages, but every success adds to a growing tool kit for rare plant detection. During one of the dog’s training days, human surveyors and DJ made an unexpected find — an actively growing small whorled pogonia population in Rabun County, Georgia, the first seen there in 28 years.
The rediscovery was a thrilling reminder of how easily rare species can go unnoticed, and how every effort — human or canine — helps bring them back into view.
Trainer
and
demonstrate his prone position, the signal for positive scent location.
LOY XINGWEN, PhD, is a Research Scientist, Ecology.
Horticulturists act as ‘nocturnal pollinators’ to grow gigantic Victoria water lilies
By JIM SMITH and TAYLOR POLOMSKY
The Victoria water lily — the queen of the pond — is a marvel to behold in the plant world and the subject of one of the fiercest annual competitions among botanical gardens and hobby gardeners around the globe.
The water lily, discovered in the mighty Amazon River by English botanist John Lindley, was named in honor of Queen Victoria in 1837. Today, nearly 200 years later, gardens flex their horticultural muscle by vying to grow the world’s largest water lily.
But what does it truly take to grow generations of this plant giant? Because of its size and being native to the tropics, the plant will not thrive in Atlanta’s cold winters. And it’s not possible to move it into the warmth of the indoors each year. So every year horticulturists must start over from tiny seeds that rapidly grow into giant 6-foot-wide platters each summer.
To ensure they have seeds for restarting the plants, staff act as nocturnal pollinators during several summer nights. Victorias are unusual in the plant world in that they open their beautiful flowers in the cover of darkness over the course of two nights. On night one, the flower is female-presenting with beautiful, solid white petals and permeates an overtly sweet, tropical fruit scent that attracts pollinators.
Developing and maintaining plant collections for display, education and enjoyment helps connect people with the environment.
The next day, the flower closes, only to reopen on the second night presenting as male with mature pollen and a now unreceptive pistil, the female organ. A shift in flower maturity then causes the flower to flash brilliant pink.
This second night is when the horticulturists step in to help out. After carefully opening the flower with surgical scissors, the tiny golden pollen grains are collected from a male, second-night flower. Then, a female first-night flower must be located to carefully distribute the pollen on its receptive pistil within 24 hours of harvesting. After pollination, it’s important to close the flower back up, keep it dry and cover the whole flower in a light mesh satchel which after several months of maturation will eventually collect the seeds, preventing them from scattering on the bottom of the pond.
Toward the end of the summer, the former flower swells full of seeds inside its satchel. When fully mature, the seed pod rots off and sinks to the bottom of the pond. In nature, this would start the regeneration of the mighty Victoria water lily, but in Atlanta’s climate, seed pouches must be collected and seeds started in heated aquariums in the greenhouses.
Some species require the temperature of the water to be greater than 90 degrees before the marble-sized seeds begin to germinate.
After germination, it takes only a few short weeks before leaves form and grow to the size of a plate; a few short months later, the now-large platters have spread wider than a person is tall.
Last year, the Garden entered a Victoria ‘Longwood Hybrid’ specimen in the Water Lily Weigh-Off — a social media competition among gardens and zoos led by Denver Botanic Gardens — with 52-inchwide pads capable of supporting 77 pounds, coming in 12th place. The winner? A Florida garden with a 61-inch wide behemoth that held a whopping 183 pounds!
The Garden’s participation in the Water Lily Weigh-Off social media competition led by Denver Botanic Gardens has earned more than 600,000 online views in the past three years.
By JOE STOCKERT and CARRIE RADCLIFFE
Eerie boneyards of broken trees. Landslide slashes across mountainsides. Washed out riverbeds. Landscapes across the Southeast still bear the scars from Hurricane Helene, which tore a path from the Panhandle to the Carolinas more than a year ago.
It’s hard to forget the tragic accounts of devastation wrought by Helene on the mountain communities of Southern Appalachia, where rains fell in a thousand-year deluge. The Southeast has yet to fully grasp the scale of damage to forests and wetlands or the implications for its most vulnerable non-human neighbors. But for the past year, researchers from the Garden’s Southeastern Center for Conservation have been observing how the storm impacted rare plant species across the Southeast.
One of the species that worries conservationists is the Roan Mountain Bluet, an endangered wildflower that grows only on rocky high-elevation balds in North Carolina and Tennessee. In July, staff traveled to Roan Mountain to continue a multi-year study of the bluet. They were met with scenes of total destruction — the spruce-fir forest along the ridgelines was completely leveled by the storm. Fortunately, the bluet population was spared from direct damage, sheltered by the rocky cliffs they grow on. Still, the loss of nearby forested areas may drive the bluet’s mountain habitat out of equilibrium.
Several species were not as lucky as the bluet. The Miccosukee Gooseberry, which is found only at two small sites in Florida and South Carolina, fared worse. At its South Carolina habitat, large trees growing directly above the gooseberry were felled by wind gusts and saturated soil, crushing gooseberry plants or ripping them from the ground. The trees also left behind large gaps in the canopy, and aggressive introduced species have quickly invaded gooseberry habitat to take advantage of the sudden burst of sunlight. Using data collected over the past four years, staff estimate that the population declined by 15 percent as a direct result of Helene — a staggering loss for a critically imperiled plant.
Helene’s disturbance has given some native species a competitive edge, however. Staff visited Chimney Rock State Park in North Carolina after the hurricane. The White Irisette, a rare grass-like flowering plant almost entirely restricted to the state park, thrives mostly in disturbed areas, such as roadsides. Massive landslides in Chimney Rock caused by Helene’s record rainfall may give the irisette a chance to capitalize on the newly available habitat before the forest closes back in.
Plants anchor every habitat we depend on, and protecting them is central to climate resilience and economic stability. Yet, despite their importance to ecosystems, plants receive only a tiny fraction of conservation resources.
That discrepancy has only intensified since January 2025 when federal funding cuts terminated research initiatives and forced layoffs at key federal agencies. Those impacts were felt across the plant conservation world, including at the Garden, which historically has received 85 percent of its conservation funding from federal sources.
In response, the Garden’s Southeastern Center for Conservation in August co-hosted an inaugural Plant Conservation Leadership Summit. The event brought together the nation’s top scientists, botanical garden leaders, policy experts and conservationists from more than 70 organizations to chart new directions for funding and advocacy. The Garden partnered with the field’s largest, most influential professional organizations — the Center for Plant Conservation, the American Public Gardens Association and Botanic Gardens Conservation International U.S. — to organize the groundbreaking meeting, positioning Atlanta at the center of a national effort to reimagine plant conservation in the United States.
WHY IT MATTERS Federal support for conserving native plant species is more critical than ever as climate change spawns more frequent and intense environmental disasters.
Tangible groundwork was planned around “thinking differently about moving forward,” said Valerie Pence, PhD, Director of Plant Research at Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife. “Not just potential ‘whats’ but ‘hows’ as well.”
Conservation scientists have much to learn about native plants’ response to cataclysms, and Hurricane Helene has served as a powerful case study. With human-driven climate change already causing more frequent and intense natural disasters, the Garden’s mission to conserve native Southeastern flora is more important than ever.
JOE STOCKERT is a field biologist and CARRIE RADCLIFFE is Director of Conservation Partnership.
In October the group launched the U.S. National Strategic Action Plan for Plant Conservation, a roadmap to guide the nation’s coordination of botanical gardens, plant conservation programs, policy and research.
The Southeastern Center for Conservation will continue co-leading that initiative. “This is a defining moment for conservation leadership,” said Emily Coffey, PhD, the Garden’s Vice President, Conservation & Research, who heads the Center. “When federal programs shift, when funding contracts, when uncertainty becomes the norm, our responsibility is to step forward.”
Encephalartos
CLASSIFICATION & EVOLUTION: Encephalartos is a genus within the plant order Cycadales (Cycads), an ancient plant group that evolved in the early Permian period around 300 million years ago on the supercontinent of Pangea.
Cycads are gymnosperms (conifers) which predate the dinosaurs and flowering plants by millions of years. They later dominated Pangea at a time known as the “Age of the Cycads,” when they shared the landscape with giant dragonflies, scorpions and millipedes.
Today, there are about 70 species of Encephalartos endemic to Africa. The name “Encephalartos” translates to “bread from the head” because the plant was used to make a bread from the pounded stems.
HABITAT: Encephalartos occur in open, dry, rocky, woody tropical to subtropical landscapes in central and southern Africa.
MORPHOLOGY: Encephalartos have a thick, sometimes branching trunk up to 10 feet high and a dense rosette of long, spiny palm-like leaves, thus the common name “Sago Palm.” These plants are extremely slow growing with some species taking up to 10 to 20 years before producing cones; they can live beyond 1,000 years. All species are dioecious, or having separate female and male plants. It is believed that they were some of the first to be pollinated by both insects and wind. Once pollinated, the female will produce a large cone of colorful seeds which are distributed by animals and birds.
CONSERVATION STATUS: All cycads including Encephalartos are listed as Endangered or Critically Endangered because of habitat loss and poaching. If you purchase a plant, make sure it comes from domestic-produced stock.
TRADITIONAL USES: Sometimes called “bread palms,” these plants were historically used as a survival food in parts of Africa. During times of scarcity, stems were buried to remove naturally occurring toxins, then the remaining starch was pounded into a dough for baking. Extracts from Encephalartos species, which can have intoxicating or narcotic properties, have also been used in certain traditional medicinal practices and cultural ceremonies.
HORTICULTURE, LANDSCAPE USES: Cycads, including Encephalartos, make excellent landscape plants in dry, frostfree regions and conservatories. Many species have deep blue foliage, such as Encephalartos horridus ‘Eastern Cape Blue Cycad’, E. trispinosus or E. ferox ‘Jagged Toothed Cycad’ with its spectacular bright red cones. All of these species are extremely slow growing, very spiny and toxic to pets.
Explore the exceptional collection of Encephalartos species in the Desert House on a next visit to the Garden.
The mission of the Atlanta Botanical Garden is to develop and maintain plant collections for display, education, research, conservation and enjoyment.