New Year Brings New Opportunities
Out with the old and in with the new! In recent years, saying goodbye to one year and looking forward to the next has been a stronger sentiment than usual. Resilient, like plants, we hopefully look forward to the new year and all it promises. In 2023, I’m looking forward to a monumental sculptural exhibition by Steve Tobin called Intertwined, a spring wildflower display, and March with Monarchs tracing the migration experience from Michoacán to Michigan.
This winter, our freeze came early, so this mantra might hold added meaning for our gardens that we Houstonians don’t often experience. We first need to remember that not all brown is lost and have patience and understanding, remembering how our bananas came roaring back after the last freeze.
I know there’s a lesson for the rest of my life, too! I know that I was blown away by the resiliency of the Garden after the heartbreak of Uri, and I can now see the winter Garden with the potential and excitement for what it will become.
And, yet, two hard freezes without a hardening-off period feels like a trend we should pay attention to, learn something about, and make some changes in the wake of. As Fran de la Mota, Director of Horticulture, says, plant loss due to a freeze teaches us about plants. We now know more than we did before about how different species survive and thrive, or don’t. The Garden will take those lessons to heart and learn from them, choosing not to replace plants that did not withstand Uri or the 2022 freeze. The exciting thing is that it opens space for new additions and trials to learn more about other plants. We are capturing all of this data in the Garden’s plant database to help inform scientists and gardeners as we build a bigger body of knowledge about the plants around us. And now I have an excuse for that new plant I have been wanting to try out in my backyard, too…What a fun opportunity!
Claudia Gee Vassar, President & General Counsel
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Read the January 2023 e-newsletter for more, including an update from our director of horticulture on how the Garden fared during the December 2022 freeze, horticulture help for pruning, an interview with the artist behind the new Steve Tobin’s Intertwined: Exploring Nature’s Networks exhibition, and photos from a western-themed wedding held in the Woodland Glade.