On a sweltering August afternoon at a botanic garden in Richmond, Virginia, four twenty-foot box trucks arrive, overflowing with plants. The trucks drive slowly, both out of consideration for their cargo and sluggish after their fifteen-hour journey. Their wheels crunch deliciously over the gravel parking lot. It sounds cathartic, like the cracking of bones, and my own spine tingles in anticipation. I’ve gathered with the rest of the Horticulture department to help unload. There’s a discernable scent of anxiety in the air, but that could also be our body odor.
The plants we are about to receive are donations from sister botanic gardens across the U.S., meant to fill our new conservatory. Over the last two years the conservatory has undergone a dramatic transfiguration, doubling in size, with new rooms dedicated to tropical plants, Mediterranean plants, desert plants, and butterflies. The donated plants are hopeful, wedding-registry-style gifts. They are also a serious entrustment. Under our new collective care, the plants must not merely live but thrive, multiply. We must come to know them and their needs, quirks, likes and dislikes, as intimately as a friend. And while we are doing this learning and tending, we must show the public (and our donors) that they are remarkable, breathing exemplars of plant beauty, diversity, and conservation.
Summer in central Virginia is brutal. The heat wallops and the humidity smothers. By nine in the morning, we’re already sporting pit stains. In total, there are twenty horticulturists, most in the early stages of adulthood. We’re a loud group who frequently break out into song, dance, and sailor swearing. It is not uncommon to see two horts, as we call each other, drive by in a golf cart rattling with pruned tree limbs, belting “The Sign” by Ace of Base at the tops of their lungs.
Amongst the horts, I’m more on the reserved side, which suits my role at the garden. When people ask what I do for work, I tell them I’m a plant librarian, which feels truer and more descriptive than my title, “Living Collections Manager.” Like a librarian, my days at the garden are spent inventorying, researching, cataloging, labeling, and helping people find what they need.
For me, the new plants signal a daunting new vocabulary. A large part of my job is parsing out a plant’s proper Latin name, which is important for the legitimacy of a botanic garden’s collection. When plants arrive at the garden, the identifying plastic tags that accompany them are often bare abbreviations or colloquial English nicknames. Every plant has a formal Latin name that identifies it and, if you know the language, decodes and describes it. Plants are named using the binomial nomenclature system, which breaks a name into two parts: a genus and a specific epithet. A genus, equivalent to a surname, indicates a broad group of plants sharing various characteristics. A specific epithet is like a person’s first name. Together the two words describe a unique species.
Studying and researching names is one of the most brain-tickling parts of my job. Plant names are infused with literal and implied meaning. Take the name Symphyotrichum, for example, which is the genus for over one hundred species of asters, the majority of which are native to the United States. Symphyotrichum, which sounds like symphony and trachea—also known as a “windpipe”—which makes me think of breath and pipes—also known as “flutes”—which leads me back to symphony. This associative hopscotch is my own fancy, an indulgence of my love of words and their power for evocation. Botanically, Symphyotrichum is a Latin word with Greek roots whose components “symph” and “trichos” mean “to grow together” and “hair,” respectively. “To grow together” is fairly self-explanatory; “hair” refers to the many hairy flower structures that hold pollen.
As we begin to unload our new plants, I look for plastic tags. The labels are austere, even by the standards of an ancient language. Austrocylindropuntia, Weberocereus, Chiranthodendron: Monkey’s Hand Tree. Instinctually we form an assembly line to offload. One hort complains about the assembly line’s uneven spacing, triggering a hearty rendition of “Meet Me Halfway” by The Black Eyed Peas. As plants pass hands, they’re announced like beauty contestants taking center stage. “Okay Miss Variegated-Double-Fenestration from Naples, Florida! I see you!” We fawn over their beauty, extoll their rarity, curse their jabbing thorns and surprising heft, drop a few, apologize, and place them inside our overfull greenhouse. In a single day, our plant collection grows by hundreds of species and many hundreds of new individuals.
The sigh of relief comes for me at the end of unboxing. With our new plants unloaded, most of the horts have dispersed to tend to our existing fifty acres of garden. I have a clipboard in my hand but this is more of a prop, something to hold on to, to keep me from feeling overwhelmed. Working as a plant librarian is relatively new for me. I’ve been in this role for a year, but for four years before that, I worked directly with plants outside. I’ll always miss the feeling of touching damp soil with my bare hands, the mediative state that ministrative tasks such as watering and pruning induce. As satisfying as my current job can be, it is cumulative and slow-going. Once I figure out exactly who these plants are, I’ll need to comb through invoices, create electronic records, adjust garden maps, and engrave signage that helps horts and guests identify what they’re looking at. And if any of the plants multiply or die (as plants do) or are moved around (as horticulturists are wont to do) or have their names changed (as taxonomic botanists frequently do), I’ll need to document that too. And in this moment, as it does from time to time, being a plant librarian feels like a Sisyphean task.
So, instead of inventorying our new donations, I slip into an old wing of our greenhouse. It’s steamy inside and smells like stagnant water, soil, and vanilla, thanks to a number of blooming cattleya orchids. I walk past black anthuriums, pink euphorbias, and carnivorous plants with dangling pitchers that look like ripe red pears. I head for my favorite tropical plant in our collection, a thirty-five-year-old Jaboticaba. Native to Brazil, Jaboticaba (Plinia cauliflora) are slow-growing, multi-stemmed trees with peeling, mottled bark. The genus Plinia is derived from the Latin “plenus,” which means “full” or “plentiful,” while the specific epithet cauliflora means “stem-flower” or “cauliflower-like,” referring to the remarkable flowers and fruits that grow directly on the tree’s trunks and mature branches. This unusual growth habit is botanically known as cauliflory and is common in the tropics but rare in the northern hemisphere. In the United States, cauliflory is found in the Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis), a small tree cloaked in an edible jacket of pink flowers in early spring.
The jaboticaba specimen at the garden is six feet tall and adorned in glossy black, golf-ball-sized fruits. The fruit skins have a latex sheen and tautness that surprisingly conceal a succulent, white cloudy flesh. When visiting botanic gardens, it’s sound advice not to eat anything because of the high likelihood of pesticide contamination. I, however, have insider knowledge and know that this particular tree has only been treated with predatory mites. I pick a few fruits and pop them in my mouth. They’re perfectly sweet and taste like a cross between a lychee and a grape. I spit out the seeds and instead of throwing them away, I tuck them back into the soil around the base of their parent. Even with multitudes of new plants, there’s always room for one more.
