February Newsletter

While many of the plants and animals slow down during the winter months, work at The Arboretum continues year-round. Our administrative staff and interpretive team are extra busy with guest lectures and educational programming during the school year, along with planning and delivering our regular events, workshops, and media. Greenhouse operations continue year round so that we can prepare for the next growing season. The removal of hazardous dead trees also keeps us busy, especially as we have to deal with the impacts of emerald ash borer on our canopy. Winter is the ideal time of year to do certain jobs, like grafting, pruning, and some of the indoor work that we are too busy to do during the summer. We are also perpetually busy with snow removal around our buildings! To give you a more in depth idea of our winters, some of our horticultural staff have written about some of the things they're working on right now.
colour photo of a split rail fence in a snowy feel

A snowy field outside of the Nature Centre, photo by Chris Earley.

Cael Wishart, Head Gardener

I think out of all the questions I get asked since working full-time at the Arboretum, the most common one seems to be “what do you do in the winter?”. To many, it might seem like we have little to do in the winter because plants go dormant, and many of the jobs we take on in the growing season simply can’t happen in the winter. But the winter is perfect time to do so many things we just don’t have time for from spring through fall. For myself as the gardener, much of my garden planning and design takes place in the winter. The last few years we have taken on several different garden projects, including renovations to our Gosling Wildlife Gardens, and recently our English Garden and Japanese Garden. This is perhaps one of my favourite parts of gardening. It takes a considerable amount of time to plan these gardens. This includes things like creating suitable plant lists, figuring out the placement and number of plants needed, visualizing how they will look together, and imagining in 4-5 years when plants and the landscape matures. There are so many factors to consider in garden design that having a thoughtful plan and approach before the growing and planting season starts is crucial for its success.

Aside from garden design, we also look to update our inventory lists at the end of the year to record what has been removed, and what has been planted in. This effectively keeps a detailed record of the plants growing in The Arboretum, which is a key part of our mission. Much of our label production happens in the winter as well (more about this below), and this year I’ve been working on producing labels for our Gosling Wildlife Gardens that will help visitors identify perennials, trees and shrubs planted there. They will also display small icons to identify whether a plant is a pollinator species, larval host plant, shelter provider, food producer or native to Ontario. These labels will help visitors learn about the plants in our gardens, while also highlighting the benefits they provide for wildlife.

Snow removal, teaching workshops, winter pruning, and tree work are among some other tasks I take on during the winter as well. So, even though it may seem like things slow down in the winter at The Arboretum, there is still plenty of work, and the opportunity to take care of the things we often don’t have time for during the growing season!

Polly Samland, Horticultural and Plant Records Technologist

During the growing season, there are so many things for us to do outdoors at The Arboretum to maintain and improve our grounds. When the outdoor work slows in the winter months, we have the opportunity to work on the tasks we need to complete before the next spring. One of the things winter allows us to work on is updating and creating new labels for our specimens.

As an accredited arboretum, labels are an important part of our record-keeping and visitor interpretation. Ideally, a label would last forever once placed beside its tree. Our labels are made of a very durable coated aluminum, even so they get weathered by years of exposure to the elements, damaged by equipment, stolen, or enveloped into the trunks or roots of fast-growing specimens. Also, plant names and families are constantly changing and being re-assessed as new technologies uncover the hidden relationships between plants. So new labels must always be made.

The technology to make labels has evolved. In my time here (since 2010), we have gone from using a motorized embosser that stamps into tags and a rotary engraver that scours the metal with a diamond tip, to our current laser engraver. The embosser dates back at least to the 1950’s. It was a military machine, used to stamp ID tags (dog tags). Its keyboard is only numbers and capital letters (no proper botanical Latin, with italics and lower-case). The rotary engraver was modern enough to be connected to a computer, but details of each label had to be manually entered into the template, labels engraved one at a time.

Our old Graphotype embosser. Photos by Polly Samland.

Our new co2 laser engraver can burn high-definition details into a range of materials. It can print batches of multiple labels at once, the details directly imported from our plant records database. We can also add in symbols and graphically enhance what information fits into each label. With these expanded capabilities, is exciting to plan new label formats for the gardens and collections.

New labels printed with our laser engraver. Photo by Polly Samland.

While late winter is the best time for some outdoor work, like pruning, making labels is one of the many indoor tasks that frozen, snowy weather gives us the opportunity to focus on and catch up on.

Sarah Farquharson, Greenhouse and Nursery Technician

As the winter sets in at The Arboretum, the staff still stay busy on the grounds, as well as within the greenhouse and at our computers. One of our tasks is to work through the abundance of seeds that have been collected throughout the growing season. These seeds are cleaned and processed for either storage or to be grown immediately into new plants.
colour photo of a the inside of a paper bag with white berries in it

colour photo of a the inside of a paper bag with white berries in it

colour photo of a table covered in paper bags

Just a few of the seeds collected this season. Each paper bag contains a different type of seed, like these white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda) berries. Photos by Sarah Farquharson.

A wide variety of seeds are amassed from many different plant species, each requiring its own unique method of cleaning. Every brown paper bag of seeds that we have brought in during the fall must be opened and its processing decided. These methods range from simply popping open the dry seed pods of a redbud (Cercis canadensis), to using a blender to remove the fruit from the hard seeds of the hawthorn (Crataegus sp.). The oily fruits of magnolias must be soaked in a water bath with a little bit of dish soap to help soften their water resistant fleshy mesocarp. Some of the most difficult seeds though, are the tiny seeds. Birch catkins are a good example; their seeds are attached to tiny scales that are similar in size to the seed, and therefore we cannot use a sieve to separate the seeds from the scales. Some of the seeds that are encased in a soft fruit need to be refrigerated so they do not decay prior to processing, while other seeds need to start to decay a little bit before they are processed so that they will germinate more readily. There is no standard process that works across the board.
colour photo of red jack in the pulpit berries on a table

colour photo of red jack in the pulpit berries on a table

colour photo of a hand holding some orange berries attached to a leafy stem

Some seeds waiting to be cleaned. Right: gloves need to be worn when removing the poisonous pulp from these Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) seeds. Left: Both the pink outer capsule and the fleshy red-orange aril need to be removed from these running strawberry bush (Euonymus obovatus) fruit. Photos by Sarah Farquharson.

Cleaning seeds is only the first step towards getting them ready to germinate. Some of the seeds need further specific treatments. Many legumes, for example, members of the pea family (Fabaceae) need to be soaked in hot water before they are ready for germination. Others need to be soaked in acid to mimic being passed through the digestive system of an animal. Pre-germination treatments are all about replicating similar conditions that a seed has evolved to need in the wild.

Most seeds found in our northern ranges have genetics that lock in their embryo to keep it from sprouting until the winter has passed. This makes it tricky to get them going in our greenhouse when they have been stored at room temperature, and so we put them through a ‘false winter’, known as stratification. The stratification process is simple, the seeds go into a bag with a sterile mix of moist substrate and are put into the fridge for a species-specific amount of time. As early as January some of these seeds are ready to be sown in the greenhouse. Their winter has been achieved and off they grow! These tasks add up when they are compounded over hundreds of different batches of seeds, and by the time we are through all the processes, spring is right around the corner.