Montgomery Botanical Center

The 120-acre Montgomery Botanical Center was described as an “old-school arboretum” by some on the tour because of its focus on the display and preservation of palms and cycads. The nonprofit botanic garden focuses on conserving and researching rare species of the plants from Madagascar, Haiti, Mexico, Guyana, Belize, Brazil, the Bahamas and more, and educating the surrounding community about their importance. During our visit, Dr. Patrick Griffith, executive director, showed us a wide range of rare palms, including a 14-year-old Acrocomia aculeata from Puerto Rico with menacing, sharp spikes coming out of its base. We also saw conservation efforts in practice with one of the rarest palms in the Americas, Attalea crassispatha. Because of deforestation in Haiti, there are less than a few dozen of these left according to Griffith, and 12 grow at Montgomery. The center is sending seed to Haiti to try and recover the species. There are also Attalea cohune palms on the property, which have fronds that grow up to 33 feet long. Dr. Griffith referred to Gaussia gomez-pompae as “palms of the future” because of how fast they grow. We also saw the opposite end of the spectrum with the 34-year-old Coccothrinax ekmanii, which was about 6 feet tall but had an intricate design on its trunk.

Costa Farms Trial Gardens

Although we didn’t get a behind-the-scenes look at tropical plant production at Costa Farms, which grows more than 1,500 varieties of houseplants, we did have the opportunity to tour Costa’s plant trial grounds to get a sneak peek of varieties that are slated for 2017, 2018 and 2019. Participating breeders with plants in the trial gardens can monitor their varieties regularly, as Costa’s team shares weekly data with photos from its row beds. They also recently added a potted showcase to test how container combinations perform. There’s also an All-America Selections annual trial bed, one of more than 100 AAS trials implemented across the U.S.

The Kampong

A striking banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) stood at the entrance of The Kampong, which was once the home of horticulturist Dr. David Fairchild, who planted the tree in 1925 and introduced 30,000 plant species and varietals to the U.S. throughout his lifetime. Over the years, aerial roots that hang like willow tree branches have slowly developed into woody trunks, resulting in the giant towering tree that, because of its size and location near the road, is difficult to truly capture and photograph. The property is on the National Register of Historic Places, and features varieties from Southeast Asia, Africa, India, and Central and South America, to name a few. It is also the only National Tropical Botanic Garden in the continental U.S., and houses courses for university and college students. Notable plants include candle fruit, peanut butter fruit, cocoplums and more than 50 varieties of mango. Plants large and small captivated the attendees’ attention, including the tough, drought- and wind-tolerant Allspice tree.

R.F. Orchids

While the fact that Florida has the most native orchids compared to any other state in the continental U.S. may not be surprising, Robert Fuchs, president of R.F. Orchids, shared a tidbit that many on our tour did not realize — 49 states in the U.S. have native orchids; Hawaii is the only state that does not. Fuchs, who joined his family’s business in 1970 and restored the nursery after his father experienced health issues and passed away the year before, gave us a history of the property, which had to be rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew destroyed most of the property except for the house on the grounds in 1992. There was no evidence of this destruction during our visit, however. Fuchs showed us a range of orchids, from tiny Oncidium to giant Cattleya, which were displayed on tree trunks and branches that towered over beautiful gardens. We also got to peek into growing operations and see plants other than orchids on the property, including a vanilla orchid and a Zombie palm, (Zombia antillarum), which is native to Haiti and has a very distinct look, as it’s covered in spiny leaf sheaths.

Patch of Heaven Gardens

Patch of Heaven Gardens has elements that are rare and unusual not only in the U.S., but worldwide. It features 11 acres of native, old-growth tropical hammock forest, and the owners are growing several varieties of cacao commercially. Pine rock-land, tropical gardens and historic statues of exotic animals also adorn the 20-acre property established by the Matheson family in the ‘60s and now owned by Bruce and Joyce Chesney. During our visit, we learned more about cacao production — it takes 11 years for the trees to fully mature and produce a lot of fruit, they need an understory for optimal growth, they’ll keep fruiting if it’s 65 degrees or more and it takes about 40 pods to make 1 pound of chocolate. Midges pollinate the trees, and they do not use chemicals in production. The grounds are full of surprising and beautiful features, including a hand-sculpted Lychee tree root from Bali at the entrance of the tropical hammock that has carvings of birds, fish, turtles and more, and a walkway lined with banana trees with a shallow, narrow pool of water at the center of the path. Euphorbia, bromeliads, orchids, ferns and a stunning Royal Poinciana are just some of the featured plants on the grounds.

Independent garden center retailers are busy and have to-do lists that seem never-ending. There is one way to streamline your workload while also increasing productivity, strengthening operations and enhancing sales. Some independent retailers, however, haven’t caught up with this reality and as a result, are not reaching their full potential as merchants. It’s reported that 64 percent of independent retailers still do not use a point-of-sale system, and 74 percent of retailers are looking to incorporate software that would help with inventory management, according to Justin Guinn of consultancy firm Software Advice.

According to the 2016 State of the Industry Report published by Garden Center magazine, 60 percent of IGCs have POS systems, 6 percent are currently implementing one, and 33 percent reported that they did not use one. Our research shows more IGCs are implementing systems than in the past. For example, in the 2014 report, 43 percent of those surveyed said they did not use POS systems.

Georganne Bender, internationally recognized retail expert and one half of retail speaking duo Kizer & Bender, explains that POS systems can offer benefits beyond just inventory management — welcoming opportunities for retailers that they may not have even known existed.

“A good point-of-sale system is invaluable because it keeps track of inventory in real time and lets the retailer know what and when to reorder across multiple buying avenues, including in-store and online,” Bender says. “Additionally, POS can maintain loyalty programs, monitor sales, help with payroll and so much more in addition to inventory management.”

Expanding on this, consider the following advantages POS offers independent retailers.

Enhanced data

Human touch is undoubtedly a huge factor in creating store success, however human touch alone is not able to accurately manage the details of inventory and customer behavior. Thanks to sophisticated and detailed data collected via POS, retailers can identify best-selling products, slow moving inventory, favorable time periods of products sold, successful or failed promotions, employee sales and more — including real-time data. These key details are essential for merchants to make future buying decisions — ultimately leading to stronger store success. Without this data, however, retailers are unable to see their store performance as clearly. Before implementing a POS system, determine your sales goals, and measure them using the new program.

Stronger employee management

With part-time employees, seasonal employees, occasional store help and the everyday chaos of keeping a store alive and thriving, it’s easy for mistakes to be made when tracking inventory, managing customers and overseeing the operations of a store. With a POS system, however, there is less room for human error and more accuracy thanks to the automated details. From checking in employees upon their arrival and departure to tracking sales made by each employee to identifying who enters key inventory details and more, it’s an advantage for retailers to know who does what and when while working in your store. Through POS, you can do this — while also helping to make your employees feel more confident in their actions supporting your business. As ExpertMarket.com says best, “not only will POS help boost staff confidence, it will also save the company money if previous mistakes have led to employees under-charging customers.” Staff can also swap shifts with a set of guidelines, instead of constantly needing a manager to oversee it.

Improved mobility

Thanks to cloud-based POS companies that include Square, Vend, ShopKeep, Lightspeed, Brightpearl and more, retailers can confidently process consumer transactions from anywhere at any time. Whether via mobile, ecommerce, in-store or via an iPad, retailers can connect all their avenues of customer transactions through one consolidated system. Having this implemented into your own business can offer countless advantages, including having more accurate inventory management, ease of management and the ability to check in on sales, inventory, data and more. Plus, to manage long lines during the hectic spring season, employees can use tablets in outdoor nursery areas to help move traffic. Additionally, many POS systems can overlap between traditional retail and other operations — like IGC restaurants, the topic of this month’s cover story on page 16 — lending even more flexibility and adaptability to their operations.

Increased security

There may be fear among some merchants in regards to losing the data their software collects and provides. While understandable, retailers can rest assured that trusted POS companies work hard to secure data collected and therefore, protect this data should a problem arise. For cloud POS systems, for example, merchants can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that their information will always be secure. This is because when using a cloud-based POS, information is synced electronically and can be easily restored if lost. For merchants, this means there is no need to worry about losing data due to a power outage, employee mistake, hardware malfunction or other unforeseen event. Additionally, security offered through POS often offers additional protection from viruses and breaches — something retailers can appreciate because the data collected within their POS is the heartbeat of their store.

Saved time

Saved time may just be among a POS system’s most favorable advantages.

“A POS system offers more than just helping to manage inventory and streamline your operations. It saves you time,” according to Kizer & Bender.

Finally, when you consider the value of POS for your unique store, consider what your retail goals are.

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure. A POS makes it easy to get the measurements that you need to make more money,” says Cathy Wagner, founder of RETAILMavens.com. “Any retailer who is serious about growth needs one.”

Nicole is the founder and publisher of Retail Minded, the co-founder of the Independent Retailer Conference and a regular contributor to various publications that include Entrepreneur.com. She is author of the book “Retail 101: The Guide to Managing and Marketing Your Retail Business.” Follow Reyhle on Twitter at @RetailMinded.

On Tuesday, April 25, Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries in Avon, Ohio, and incoming Chairman of the Board of AmericanHort, participated in a “farmers roundtable” in the White House’s West Wing, meeting with President Donald Trump, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, and other government executives and representatives of the agriculture industry.

The roundtable came the same day Trump issued his executive order titled, “Promoting Agriculture and Rural Prosperity in America,” and the day after the United States Senate confirmed his nomination of Perdue, who served as the governor of Georgia from 2003 to 2011.

Demaline discussed the roundtable discussion with Garden Center’s sister publication Greenhouse Management magazine.

Greenhouse Management: Have you ever met a president before?
Tom Demaline: No, not in a personal sit-down meeting.

GM: What was that like?
TD: It was an interesting event. Just having an opportunity to represent the nursery/greenhouse industry in that type of venue was an honor. President Trump was very engaged in the conversations, listened to what our needs were, and with Secretary Perdue in the room, acknowledged what areas we had issues with, and wants to move forward and fix as many problems that we can. 

GM: What are some of those issues?
TD: The roundtable group met on Monday night in a pre-meeting. I hadn’t met any of these people before — I don’t think hardly anybody knew anybody in the room. It was about an hour-long meeting, and talking through with the priorities of the group, the No. 1 priority for everybody there was labor. We all agreed that [labor] was our lead message that we needed to get out to the president, and that we needed to do something about fixing the labor problem for the green industry — for agriculture in general, I should say.

GM: What do you think specifically should be done with that, or are you open to suggestions?
TD: It’s a complicated solution and probably a long-term process. Willoway Nurseries has been in the H-2A guest worker program for 18 years now. We’ve dealt with the issues that come along with that program. There’s a lot of bureaucratic red tape and a lot of issues with DOL [U.S. Department of Labor] — you have to get approval through DOL and the USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Service] and all the subjective things for processing, which makes it difficult to get your people here on time. It’s also a costly program to use because of the wage rate you have to pay. Our starting wage rate — it’s called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) — is $13 an hour in Ohio. So, our lowest price labor person starts at $13 an hour. We have to provide transportation, housing and so forth. So, it has a lot of dollars tied up in applications and recruiting. That adds about another dollar an hour just in overhead. So, it’s not a source of cheap labor, but it’s a source of legal labor, and we’ve chosen to go down that route for the last 18 years, just knowing that we want to have a legal labor supply.

Mr. Trump heard what we had to say about the bureaucracy and the issues with the program and is willing to look into it and see if we can smooth out some of the issues. The program works in concept, but it doesn’t work in practicality.

GM: Did you talk with Sonny Perdue at all?
TD: He was in our roundtable meeting, and then we had a meeting with him after the president left — sort of a recap meeting. He’s very well aware of our issues, and I think he’s a great choice for Secretary of Ag, and understands what ag needs to do to be successful and is willing to go out there and fix it with a common-sense approach. So, it’s refreshing to have somebody like him in the driver’s seat.

Mr. Trump — they kept joking back and forth — [that Perdue] has only been in the job for about six hours, and he already had a list about a mile long of all the things out of that meeting that Mr. Trump asked him to work on getting fixed.

GM: Who else was there?
TD: There were 14 people at the table from the industry. I was the only nursery/greenhouse person there. There was a secretary of ag from North Carolina and Iowa. They knew each other, so they represented the industry in general. The rest of the room was made up of somebody from timber, a couple cattle people, a vegetable person, a dairy person from New York. There were a couple other dairy people in there, cattle and cow calf operations and pig operations and so forth. So, it was a real wide group of agricultural interests represented from all over the country. There was a guy there from California who grows fresh market strawberries and some other vegetables out there. They’re all medium-to-large operations that employ a lot of people and trying to make a living.

TD: We had four areas of focus in our pre-meeting that we wanted to take to the White House. Like I said, labor was No. 1. The second one was trade and how to get more American farm products — now, this is more for general ag than it is for the nursery industry because we don’t ship out of the country — but for the beef, pork and poultry people and the corn and beans, they need a world market to participate in to get our products. We grow more than we consume, so we need to get it out there and be positive for trade. So, we talked about that.

The next one was regulatory issues — reducing the regulatory things that are just milking businesses. The cost of operation — a lot of the [regulations] aren’t directly related to us as an industry, but they’re built into the cost of just doing business. Just to get new pesticides registered, now they’ve got to go through way more jumps and hurdles and so forth to get that done. We’ve got the Obamacare thing to deal with — that’s an extra cost and burden on business. There’s more and more taxes [in the U.S.], and EPA [oversights] to worry about. So, there’s a lot of hidden costs. With Dodd-Frank, it costs anybody that borrows money about 30 basis points — 0.3 percent — just an additional cost to get a loan processed and for banks to do business. So, it costs everybody to do more business, and in the end, it just eats profit up to where the margins are pretty thin.

The fourth area was rural infrastructure and the ability to get broadband and cellular service to rural areas of America and improve our roads and invest back in infrastructure and the importance of that. We talked even about the future of farming and how to get people involved back in horticulture or agriculture to make it a viable industry, because the average farmer is 60 years old and the average nurseryman is about 60 years old, and we need to get [younger] people back into the industry.

GM: Is there anything else that you want to add?
TD: To summarize it, I think this opportunity for us to speak with the President — he understands our needs, and I think the door is open for us to move forward. It’s going to be a steep hill to climb, but not an impossible climb to gain back some of the things we lost over the last eight years. I think with Secretary Perdue in place, he understands agriculture and wants to take a common-sense approach to making things better for the American farmer, and he’s been empowered by the President to get this stuff fixed.

When we met with Secretary Perdue at the recap, he made it clear that some things can get done in rural and they can get them fixed. Other things are going to have to go through the legislative process. This is where we really need to engage the industry in general.

Patrick is the associate editor of sister publication Greenhouse Management.

American chestnut trees were once among the most majestic hardwood trees in the eastern deciduous forests, many reaching 80 to 120 feet in height and eight feet or more in diameter.

The “then boundless chestnut woods” Thoreau wrote about in Walden once grew throughout the Appalachian mountains. They provided habitat and a mast crop for wildlife, a nutritious nut crop for humans and a source of valuable timber. Because of their rapid growth rate and rot-resistant wood, they also have significant potential for carbon sequestration, important in these days of climate change.

The species has a sad story to tell. Of the estimated four billion American chestnut trees that once grew from Maine to Georgia, only a remnant survives today.

The species was nearly wiped out by chestnut blight, a devastating disease caused by the exotic fungal pathogen Cryphonectria parasitica. This fungus was accidentally introduced into the United States more than a century ago as people began to import Asian species of chestnut. It reduced the American chestnut from the dominant canopy species in the eastern forests to little more than a rare shrub.

After battling the blight for more than a century, researchers are using the modern tools of breeding, bio-control methods that rely on a virus to inhibit the growth of the infecting fungus, and direct genetic modification to return the American chestnut to its keystone position in our forests.

To restore this beloved tree, we will need every tool available. It’s taken 26 years of research involving a team of more than 100 university scientists and students here at the not-for-profit American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, but we’ve finally developed a non-patented, blight-resistant American chestnut tree.

One genetic tweak

My research partner, Dr. Chuck Maynard, and I work with a team at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). We’ve tested more than 30 genes from different plant species that could potentially enhance blight resistance. To date, a gene from bread wheat has proven most effective at protecting the tree from the fungus-caused blight.

This wheat gene produces an enzyme called oxalate oxidase (OxO), which detoxifies the oxalate that the fungus uses to form deadly cankers on the stems. This common defense enzyme is found in all grain crops as well as in bananas, strawberries, peanuts and other familiar foods consumed daily by billions of humans and animals, and it’s unrelated to gluten proteins.

We’ve added the OxO gene (and a marker gene to help us ensure the resistance-enhancing gene is present) to the chestnut genome, which contains around 40,000 other genes.

This is a minuscule alteration compared to the products of many traditional breeding methods. Genetic engineering allows us to produce a blight-resistant American chestnut that’s genetically more than 99.999 percent identical to wild-type American chestnuts.

The next steps

One of the challenges of genetic engineering that is not faced by any other methods of genetic modification also serves as a safeguard. We must shepherd these trees through federal regulatory review by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. Our plan is to submit these applications as we finish collecting the necessary data; we expect the process to take three to five years. Once we receive (anticipated) approval, we will quickly make the trees available to the public.

This project is unique because it is the first to seek approval of a transgenic plant to help save a species and restore a forest’s ecology. Our forests face many challenges from exotic pests and pathogens. The American chestnut can serve as a model system for protecting our forests’ health.

Direct genetic modification will likely not be used in isolation. Integration might improve the outcomes of both the conventional hybrid/backcross breeding program of the American Chestnut Foundation and our genetic engineering program. Allowing crosses between the best trees from both programs will allow gene stacking — having multiple and diverse resistance genes in a single tree — with each working in a different way to stop the blight. This would significantly decrease the chances that the blight could ever overcome the resistance.

A unique aspect of the genetically engineered American chestnut trees is their ability to rescue the genetic diversity in the small surviving population of American chestnut trees. When we cross our blight-resistant transgenic trees to these surviving mother trees, directly in the wild or from nuts gathered from them and grown in orchards, we’re helping preserve the remaining wild genes.

Half the resulting offspring will be fully blight-resistant, while also containing half the genes from the mother tree. By making these crosses, the restoration trees will be ecologically adapted to the diverse environments in which they’ll grow. These trees could also be used to boost the genetic diversity of the hybrid/backcross breeding program, or used directly for restoration and left to fend for themselves, allowing natural selection to make the final determination of the effectiveness of our efforts.

The American chestnut was one of the most important hardwood tree species in the eastern forests of North America, and it can be again. This tiny change in the genome will hopefully be a huge step toward putting the American chestnut on a path to recovery.

For more: William Powell, www.esf.edu, wapowell@esf.edu; American Chestnut Foundation, www.acf.org.

William Powell is a professor in the Department of Environmental and Forest Biology, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He is a non-paid consultant to The American Chestnut Foundation. This article originally appeared in The Conversation.