Holden Duckworth sits down with UConn Conservatory Employee Cole Geissler, who manages the Tropical Greenhouse. The two talk various topics from what warmer weather means for the greenhouses, the rare collection of ginger plants, and the state of the facility and its need for renovations.
Transcription
Holden: Hello, my name is Holden Duckworth and I’m here at the UConn Conservatory.It’s one of the only places during this dry weather that you can see an abundance of green plants. I’m here with Cole Geiseler and he’s one of the full time employees here. So just starting off with some personal questions. How long have you been an employee here and how did you end up working here?
Cole Geissler: Yeah, so I’ve been here for a year and a half now. I started October, not this past October, but October before. So I don’t remember. What is that, 2024? 23.
Holden: 23.
Cole Geissler: 2023, yeah, so I’ve been here for about like a year and a half. Ish. I actually moved up here from Pennsylvania for the job. I was a horticulturist down at Longwood Gardens for a year doing ah, conservation, horticulture and collections work. and yeah, and so I really liked the collection here at UConn and, the tropical horticulture position was open so I applied and here I am.
Holden: So what sort of work do you do around the conservatory?
Cole Geissler: So I take care of the entire tropical collection, at the conservatory.
So a lot of it is just making sure that the plants are still happy and healthy. I mean usually my day starts off with watering, spraying down the plants to increase the humidity in the greenhouses, make sure nothing is kind of on the verge of dying. And then from there my day can kind of differ from repotting and propagating and weeding to supervising some students that we have, we have a volunteer program, to getting plants ready for class use, all sorts of stuff. I do a lot of tours as well for students and people outside of UConn.
Holden:, and what drew you to the tropical greenhouse?
Cole Geissler: So I’ve always kind of been kind of a tropical grower, for me, partially just because I grew up in Pennsylvania where it’s like you got the cold weather and you’re not going to see tropical plants unless you go to someone’s house who grows them or you go out into the tropics. so I’ve always been interested in growing tropical plants. and then I started getting more focused, in orchids. and so m, my kind of specialty has been orchids, for the past couple of years. but the tropical role I enjoyed a lot because really there’s no end to the season sort of. I mean there’s a Growing season when you live in an area that has a winter and a summer and stuff like that, but there’s still something year round that’s happening with the plants. They don’t really go dormant. so that’s kind of what I really enjoy about the tropics.
Holden: What I really wanted to know about was that we’re about to go on spring break
and then when we come back, it’s spring. and so with warmer weather, what does that mean for the greenhouse? What do you guys start to do as you get into this new season?
Cole Geissler: Yeah, so spring is very exciting here. so we’re here year round. We Don’t stop during breaks or we hear winter break, summer breaks, break, all that. But spring is very exciting because Connecticut winters are cold and wet, and dark. And because we have an old facility, the plants really feel it. We have drafty windows, we have leaky leaky ceilings and stuff like that. But even if we did, in general, tropical plants are kind of like, don’t really want to be super cold. They Don’t want to be wet year round. , they don’t want to be cold and wet. I should say that they love moisture. But like, if you think about the tropics, it’s warm there year round and there’s abundant rain. But it’s also, they have good light and good drying times. so in the winter things are kind of languishing and just some of them wilt out, some of them will drop a lot of leaves. Some of them won’t do anything. They’lljust sit there. But once spring happens, which actually happens a lot earlier in the greenhouse than it does outside, we call it, greenhouse spring. Because the temperatures here are already warmer. So like yesterday it was only 50 someoutside and it was already like 85 degrees in the tropical greenhouses. You can really see it in the plants. They all start pushing new growth. a lot of them start flowering. Cause they’re kind of like waking up for the season. and we can start doing more things with the plants. With regard to propagating, repotting, we try to avoid doing a lot of that during the winter because they’re kind of sitting there. We don’t want to really disturb them. They’re kind of in a holding pattern and we kind of want to give them their time to rest and kind of not try to do a lot of stuff during the warm growing season. Worst part of the growing Season. So once spring happens and things wake up, we get a lot busier. not just inside the greenhouse, but also
outside. We also have an outdoor garden. and when spring hits is when we start doing more cleanup. We start preparing the ground beds
Cole Geissler: and the raised beds for planting. that’s going to happen later in May. and it’s, it’s just definitely a lot more work. But it’s very exciting because things really kind of come alive in the spring.
Holden:, and then what sort of stuff goes outside? Is it like all the types of greenhouses or is it more focused on one specific thing?
Cole Geissler: Like, yeah, we don’t tend to put a lot of the stuff that’s in the greenhouse outside. There’s only a few things that might go outside, like some of the temperate carnivorous plants. We have a little bog area set up. but most of the time we like to just kind of. It is a research garden. So we do have faculty, research.They sometimes bring plants down from the rooftop facility on biophysics. so they bring down some mimulus plants and plant them out in the garden. But a lot of the time we have a lot of extra space. and we all kind of have a different thing that we like to work with. Matt, Opal, our collection scientist, he really likes to grow,produce, vegetables, fruits outside. Megan Moriarty, our collection manager,my boss, she loves cut flowers. So we usually plant a really good selection of really beautiful flowers that last a long time, have a lot of intrigue throughout the summer and fall. and personally myself, I love putting tropicals outside because you can really push them to see what they can do. Because even though we are in a greenhouse, there’s no substitute for a nice, like, outdoor vacation for some of these plants. , and actually this upcoming season we’re planning a fiber and like, dye
garden outside. We’re doing a collaboration with Connecticut Natural HistoryMuse. and so I’m planning on planting some interesting fiber plants. The Chinese silk plant. I’m going to be putting out some cotton plants. and then just some other fun tropicals. Like I have a bunch of, I have a bunch of sugarcane thatI’m going to put outside because in the greenhouse they can only get so tall before they hit the ceiling and then I have to prune them. But if they’re outside, I can see how big and tall that they can get. And so it’s fun putting tropicals outside and just seeing how much you can push them. So that’s what I like to do then.
Holden: In regards to, like, inside being an issue over the winter, do you foresee anything soon happening to help refurbish the greenhouse?
Cole Geissler: Yeah, so actually, during spring break, we have some people that are going to be coming around and looking at the roofs again. It’s been an ongoing process. We have such a facility that’s old. It’s built in the 50s, and it just needs a lot of work. Ideally, we would have a whole new facility, but of course that costs money. but yeah, we’re looking into getting the roof replaced or at least refurbished, so that there’s not as many leaks in the ceiling. Hopefully we can get some of the side vents replaced, because in the spring we have to open and close them pretty much daily, just because it’s too cold in the nighttime, but too warm in the daytime. So we have to open and close them before we can get to a stable point where we can open them for the season. And some of them are really old and rusted shut. So It’d be nice to get that kind of fixed up. but there’s always work to be done on the facility. There are some things that we, as the horticulturists here, can maintain.
, but a lot of it is out of our expertise when it comes to, like, plumbing, electrical engineering. So we kind of have to rely on others. But, yeah, we’re trying to, like, raise some more money, find some more funds to kind of boost the conservatory.Because we have a really important collection of plants here, and a healthy and strong facility will provide a healthy and strong collection.
Holden:, and then you had mentioned collabing, with the muse. , but Ialso know that you guys do, like, trading plants with other locations. So you want to talk a little more about that?
Cole Geissler: Yeah. So conservatories, a lot of times acquire plants through other conservatories, other botanical gardens, as a way to, one, collaborate and create good relationships with other horticultural institutes. but it’s also a really important way to practice conservation. So when a lot of people think conservation, they think protecting plants out in the wild, reestablishing plants in the wild, planting things out. But a lot of the times, the reason why plants might be endangered or extinct or threatened in the wild is because of a lot of environmental impacts. And a lot of those hanimpacts are still around. So it doesn’t quite make sense to put those plants back out there if they’re going to get damaged again. So conservation and action in kind. The Scope of what we do as conservatories is we propagate, we repot, we divide, and we like to share other material with other conservatories and gardens and other institutions as a way to just kind of spread their wealth and spread these really cool and fun,important plants. and then also make sure that there are backups. Basically.
Cole Geissler:, we have multiple backups of the same accessions of the same species, in our own location. But it’s always good to have backups of backups.there are plenty of times where we give a plant to someone and then we might have a particularly rough growing season in our plant is just not happy or does die, but someone else has that plant and it’s the original plant from what we had, so we can get that plant back. and it’s also a really fun way to see how other people are growing things. Usually when we trade material, we visit or someone visits us. We just kind of go around, talk about the plants that we have, talk about our experiences growing them. And it’s always good to share and trade information. You’re always learning something new, especially if it’s a plant that you haven’t grown before. It’s always good to talk to whoever has experience growing it. That way you can learn how to better grow it.
Holden:, and then I understand that you guys have some research plants here. The ginger collection, right?
Cole Geissler: Yes. so we have a collection of plants, we call it the CrestCollection. it’s a, they were donated by John Crest, Dr. John Crest at the Smithsonian Institute, in Washington D.C. they are a collection of wild collected ginger relatives and their allies. so, we have a large, I think, oh, gosh, at least 200 different accessions, of these relatives that we got from the Smithsonian.
A lot of them are new to science, which means that they have never been described before. So a lot of them are just listed as Zjimber Spa. so sp, which is like the abbreviation for species. We don’t know what it is yet. we don’t know if it’s something that’s been found before or if it’s something brand new. A lot of them are brand new. There are a couple of them in the collection that are named after JohnCress because he was the first one to find them. and so a lot of them are just really cool, interesting plants. Some of them grow really big, some of them grow really small.They’ll have these like beautiful flowers. and that’s another example of conservation in action. A lot of these plants, like I mentioned, like, they’re new to science, they’re wild collected. and so a lot of these plants might have been endangered. Some of them are just like these. The only plants that are in cultivation are from this crest collection. and it’s just a really good way to kind of maintain other people’s collections, do more research. So we have this collection if someone wants to do research and describe these species. and it’s just a really good resource. It does take up a lot of space because ginger plants are really big. Some Of them are smaller, but a lot of them are really big. but we have a dedicated section to these plants. And, they do go through their seasonal changes too. Wehave, a deciduous collection and then an evergreen collection. So the evergreens,they’re always growing and the deciduous ones kind of go dormant for the winter. Andso actually right around now they’re starting to pop up. So you’ll see some new leaves and new growth and start to emerge, which is always good because it can be a bit tricky to grow them in the winter.
Holden:, and then just wrapping things up, you talked about how some of them are new to science. And I just understand that you guys have a lot of plants here.about 2,600 species.
Cole Geissler: Yeah. Around there?
Holden: Yeah. Around 300, 250ish families.
Cole Geissler: Mhm.
Holden: I’m just wondering how, with how much like new plants you probably get often, if it ever is like a challenge to figure out how to take care of these in this space, it.
Cole Geissler: Can definitely be a major challenge. , we actually had a tour yesterday and someone asked like why we don’t have like automatic watering. And,it’s because we have such an incredibly diverse collection. that thing, every single plant kind of gets its own individual care. It takes a lot of studying of these plants, a lot of experience in working in a greenhouse to kind of read the plants as I call it, see what they’re asking for. Know that even if they’re not asking for something, that they need something. so a lot of the time it comes down to, getting experience from other horticulturists. So, if we acquire a new plant, we always like to talk to whoever is giving us a plant because obviously they’ve had success in growing it if they’re able to give it to someone else. so we always talk to them, see how they grow it. but we also have to keep in mind that just because they grow it a certain way in their conditions doesn’t mean that exact way we’ll work in our conditions.every plant is unique. Every plant in every location and with every different grower is unique. So we have to kind of, with new plants, we do research online, we talk to other
growers, we look at reference text, we look at where the plant came from and what the climate is like in those regions, and we try to kind of simulate that environment in our own conditions. And then we just see how the plant likes it. A lot of it is kind of a waiting game of we give it something, we see how it reacts
Cole Geissler: to that. If it likes that, great, we’ll continue doing something else. If it doesn’t really do much, then maybe try something else. And if it really doesn’t like that,then we got to figure out something else. So it can be very tricky, but a lot of it comes down to, experience, many years of growing plants, talking to who’s been growing them before, and just doing your research.
Holden: Well, thank you so much for your time. Of course. So I’m HoldenDuckworth.
Cole Geissler: I’m Cole Geissler.
Holden: and this was the UConn Conservatory.
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