This seemed to be the place to post Botanic Garden feedback, so here it is. During my visit to the Garden yesterday, I noticed both a lot of Convolvulus arvense and a few purple loostrife in the BC native plants garden. Although I can tell that regular maintenance is done throughout the Garden, these thugs are still very much in need of attack. Perhaps a few energetic undergrads could be conscripted to address these guys before they grow out of control? -Nathan Miller Newberg, OR
Hi Nathan, I've sent your comment along to the folks here in charge of this. I do need to mention that the garden benefits from having skilled and unionized employees. While it might seem that pulling a few weeds is something that doesn't require a lot of skill, there are corollary tasks that go along with weeding in a botanical garden: checking that the nearby non-weedy plants are properly labelled, looking for damage or disease, maintaining a horticultural familiarity with that area so that trends can be monitored (e.g., a particularly valuable accession is declining year-after-year because of increasing shade), and so on. In a perhaps-counterintuitive way, conscripting undergrads would actually be less efficient in the big-picture care of this garden.
