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Articles Investing for the Future: by Happy Hieronimus The garden developed by Rae Selling Berry and the second growth stand of Douglas fir and other native plants that partly surrounded it, five and a half acres in all, became The Berry Botanic Garden in 1977. This was thanks to a number of dedicated local plant people, led by Molly Grothaus and supported by plantsmen and horticultural organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom. Mrs. Berry's heirs did not want to maintain the property and since it was located in the desirable Dunthorpe area it would have been snapped up by developers. "Here come the tract mansions! There goes the plant collection!!" would most certainly have been the case. Fortunately, the plant people won out. Patricia Wessinger successfully led the drive to raise the funds to purchase the property. The priceless plant collection, built up during the 43 years Mrs. Berry lived there, was saved from the bulldozers thanks to the individuals, corporations and foundations who contributed to the cause. Molly, Pattie and Jane Youell, all members of the Portland Garden Club, signed the Articles of Incorporation April 7, 1977, and a new life for the garden began.
Mrs. Berry's collection included several specific groups: Alpines, primroses (Mrs. Berry's favorites), species rhododendrons and choice ornamentals such as magnolias and winter blooming shrubs. The plight of endangered native plants was just becoming a national concern, and it turned out that over 40 native species eligible for listing as "Rare," "Threatened," or "Endangered" were residing in the Garden. The Berry began life as a botanic garden already a sanctuary for imperiled native species!
The "threatened and endangered" refers to extinction of a plant species which can result from a number of different actions. Most, if not all, can be attributed directly to human activity. Loss of habitat is a major cause. From the clearing of large areas of rain forest for agricultural use to creating new housing estates in suburbia, USA, the cutting down, plowing up and paving over all take their toll. An increasingly serious threat is invasive alien plants, introduced accidentally or on purpose, crowding out the natives. The Scotch broom in the Camassia area, as well as all over the place, is a good, I should say horrible, example of this threat. In many areas in the west plants are endangered by grazing cattle who eat flowers along with grass so the plants never have a chance to set seed. Then we have the enthusiastic collectors who take from the wild large numbers of plants they consider choice. In some cases, such as certain cacti in the southwest, that population is collected all gone. This is particularly sad when the collector does not know how to create the appropriate growing conditions in the garden at home and the plants all die. The best solution, of course, is to prevent these things from happening, but in the real world construction of highways and housing tracts is going to go on as is cutting down and plowing up, so additional methods of plant conservation are needed in addition to on site protection.
Molly Grothaus was on the early Board of Directors and remained actively involved with the Garden until her untimely death. One of her many contributions to the Garden was the idea of creating a seed bank for the conservation of threatened and endangered native plants. She was familiar with the practice of seed storage for agricultural plants and knew of the seed bank for garden plants at the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. Why not use the same concept for endangered natives? Again Patricia Wessinger went to work and had no difficulty convincing the Fred Meyer Charitable Trust (now the Meyer Memorial Trust) that this was a very good idea whose time indeed had come. Thanks to the Meyer grant the Berry Botanic Garden Seed Bank for Rare and Endangered Plants of the Pacific Northwest came into being in 1983. In their announcement of the grant and the possibilities in store, Molly and Patricia listed two basic reasons for setting up the seed bank. The first was literally "banking" the seed as insurance against a species becoming extinct. The second was raising plants from the "banked" seed for reintroduction to areas where those plants once grew and could successfully grow again. The initial source of seeds going into the bank was from plants listed in " Rare, Threatened and Endangered Vascular Plants in Oregon -- An Interim Report," by Jean Siddall, Kenton L. Chambers and David H. Wagner. Now the Garden's collection priorities are based on lists from the Heritage Programs in Oregon and adjacent states and on regional and national lists compiled by state and federal agencies and the Center for Plant Conservation. The BBG Seed Bank was the first one in the United States devoted to the preservation of threatened native species.
The Meyer grant enabled the Garden to hire Julie Kierstead Nelson as its first Seed Bank Curator and to purchase the initial equipment and supplies. Julie was working for the Nature Conservancy when she heard of the opening for the new position. "I was delighted to be hired," Julie told me in a recent communication. She went on to say that she recognized two immediate needs. The first was research into the technology of seed storage and germination. Starting with a completely blank sheet, she had to design the whole thing, select the equipment, and establish procedures. Her investigation of liquid nitrogen for super deep freezing revealed that it required expertise and expensive equipment, both out of reach of the BBG at that time and now. More to the point, it wasn't necessary for what the Berry wanted to do. Information from Kew's seed bank at Wakehurst Place was very helpful. Based on the information and advice Julie was able to get, a home chest-style freezer set for 00F would do the job. In addition she needed a desiccator and a supply of silica gel to dry the seeds to the appropriate state since ice crystals formed in freezing the seed would severely damage or destroy it. A hygrometer is used to measure the relative humidity which should be 20%, according to accepted current practice. Once cleaned and dried, the seed needs to be placed in airtight, moisture-proof containers. Julie started with screw-top glass containers. The Garden now uses heat-sealed, metal-plastic laminate pouches.
The second need, according to Julie, was for a public relations effort to reach out to the plant conservation groups to make the seed bank part of the overall conservation effort rather than a threat to habitat-based conservation. It is intended to be one means to an end, not the end itself. Thanks to her connections with the Nature Conservancy and the Native Plant Society, Julie had good contacts in the area and went on to put a lot of time and effort into communicating with the Oregon and Washington Native Plant Society chapters and the state Heritage Program staffs. She says she wished she knew then what she knows now about federal agency budget processes and decision making! With the cooperation of Native Plant Society members, amateur and professional botanists, and government agency field agents Julie soon built up a very good collection of seeds of rare and endangered Pacific Northwest plants, improving various aspects of the program as she went. A note of interest to those who know her is that the first "deposit" in the seed bank was made by longtime Native Plant Society and dedicated BBG volunteer Louise Godfrey. With this promising beginning the Seed Bank was ready for the next development. Julie stated that germination testing was probably the trickiest part of Seed Bank procedures because there were no standards for conducting the tests for most wild species, as there were for crop seeds. Her goal was to establish a reproducible, successful germination treatment for each species in the Seed Bank. That work is still going on.
A very beneficial partnership was established in 1985 when the Berry Botanic Garden became a Charter Participating Institution of the Center for Plant Conservation, now based at the Missouri Botanic Garden. The CPC is a consortium of some two dozen botanic gardens and arboreta throughout the United States, dedicated to providing off-site conservation for our most rare and endangered species. The four important areas to this garden-based strategy were listed as creating a permanent record of American flora, providing direct aid to on-site conservation, creating a store of material for appropriate reintroduction, and having plants available for applied research, education and conservation. The BBG's area of responsibility for the CPC includes most of Washington, Oregon and parts of northern California. The Garden is also a member of the Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a global consortium of over 400 botanic gardens in 75 countries.
The Seed Bank's activities were not limited to seed collecting. When the Army Corps of Engineers decided to create a new navigation lock at Bonneville Dam, one of the candidates for federal Endangered Species Act listing was discovered on a rock face which was destined to be removed. Barrett's penstemon was a candidate because of its very limited and vulnerable range. BBG Seed Bank to the rescue! Cuttings were taken to be grown at Berry and reintroduced when the lock was completed. At a later date Julie went to Bonneville to collect seed of the Penstemon barrettiae and the Corps again provided equipment. When she was 60 feet up in the "cherry picker" bucket, the machinery failed and she and the operator were stranded. A second "picker" was summoned and the intrepid botanist and a somewhat embarrassed operator climbed across to the rescue bucket and were safely lowered to the ground. Except for that chilling episode, the Penstemon project was very successful with seeds safe in the Bank and cuttings growing nicely. The resulting plants have since been reintroduced.
In 1987 the Seed Bank had the distinction of producing seedlings for the first experimental re-establishment of a federally listed native Oregon species into its former wild habitat. This was due to a contract with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to provide seedlings of an endangered annual, Stephanomeria malheurensis (Malheur wire-lettuce), for reintroduction in its very small range on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management in Harney County. The experiment involved planting the seedlings in four small, rodent proof enclosures built by BLM, each representing a different community type: rabbit brush, sagebrush, Great Basin wild rye, and cheatgrass. A botanist was hired by BLM to monitor the plants. Survival of the seedlings was better than anyone predicted, overall seed production was high and the results were very encouraging for that little lettuce. It grew best in the absence of cheatgrass and in the company of wild rye and rabbit brush
This successful first reintroduction coincided with the passage by the Oregon Senate of the Endangered Species Act, something Julie had worked for long and hard. That effort was one of the three facets of Julie's work, cited in the letter nominating her for the Chevron Conservation Award, which she was awarded in 1988. The other two were the rescue of Penstemon barrettiae and her part in reestablishing Stephanomeria malheurensis.
When Julie left the Seed Bank in 1989 to be Forest Botanist for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, she was succeeded by Ed Guerrant, PhD, then visiting Assistant Professor of Biology at Lewis and Clark College and member of the Garden's Board of Directors. Ed was very interested in conservation and was familiar with the Garden. Under Ed's direction the Seed Bank has successfully continued its operations and gone into new scientific directions. These include population studies and experiments in reintroduction of endangered plants, such as Lilium occidentale, a beautiful native lily. Old equipment has been replaced. Remodeling of the main building provided an opportunity to install a fireproof seed vault with a much larger freezer, now housing several million seeds of close to 300 Pacific Northwest plant species. A grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust helped make this possible. A grant from the Collins Foundation funded the inner chamber of the vault which resembles a walk-in refrigerator, and at 15oC and 20% relative humidity, provides optimal conditions for desiccating and processing seeds for long term storage in the freezer at -18oC (0oF). The seeds previously processed have all been removed from their old packaging, weighed, allowed to equilibrate in the vault, re-weighed, and resealed in new, thicker foil packets. A small percentage of stored seed is used for germination tests which are necessary to see if the seed is viable. A certain number of species are grown to maturity each year, partly to learn how to do it and to ensure replacement capability.
Ed stresses the concept that seed banking is not the solution to endangered plants, it is just one means to the end and needs to be used in conjunction with enlightened land management and specific site conservation measures. Also, he realizes that there is a loss of seed to the plant populations when seed is collected for banking, and takes care to limit that collecting. When asked what his goal for the Seed Bank is, Ed replied, "Working toward doing what we do better!"
Looking for a job that would get her back into botany, Andrea Raven began as a temporary summer Conservation intern and is now the Conservation Biologist at the Garden. Definitely Botany with a capital B! Andrea does much of the field research, works with the germination tests, uses her statistical analysis skills, does a lot of writing and loves working with students, both high school and college level. One of her goals is developing a data base of "how to's". How to germinate these rare plants, how to propagate them if seeds aren't available, how to grow them on to maturity, and how to successfully reestablish them when the need arises. She would also like to see the development of a rare plant herbarium for use by land managers, students, and conservationists. The herbarium would include samples of each plant in all stages: seed, cotyledons, juveniles, and adults in both fruiting and flowering form. Her ultimate goal for the Seed Bank? "To bank seeds from every wild population of every rare plant!" Why all the fuss about the loss of some wild flowers? Preserving plant diversity is probably the most significant reason. Most of the creatures on earth, including man, are dependent upon plants in one or more ways. One-third to one-half of the world's pharmaceuticals are derived from plants. Two Oregon natives, meadow foam and Lomatium, have turned out to be a source of high grade lubricating oil. And all those choice hardy perennials we cherish come from plants that were once wild species somewhere. It is very unwise to allow a species to disappear before its potential has been appraised. Extinction is a bad idea in any case.
Storing seed is a form of insurance against loss. The Berry Botanic Garden considers this feature of its operation a valuable regional resource. The goal is to develop the best possible collection of genetically representative samples of all species and populations of rare and endangered plants in its region. Should the need arise in the future, on site conservation efforts could be assisted by replacing or enlarging plant populations. First, try to save the site. Second, just in case, save the seed.
(This article first appeared in the Bulletin of the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon)
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