INDEX
New AHS Award in 2000 
Plant a Row for the Hungry 
AHS Encyclopedia Honored 
Southern Gardening School 
Plant Kingdom Overthrown? 
Member Focus
 

New AHS Award in 2000 

In recognition of her pioneering contributions to the field of youth gardening, Michigan State University horticulturist Jane L. Taylor has been honored as the namesake for a new AHS Great American Gardeners Award that will recognize excellence in youth gardening. Appropriately, Taylor has also been declared the award's first winner. In 1987, Taylor founded and served as first curator of the Michigan 4-H Children's Garden, located on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. The first of its kind-and a hit since its inception-the 4-H Children's Garden has served as the design model for youth gardens at public garden sites nationwide. Although now retired from her curatorial duties, Taylor continues to serve as an adjunct faculty member in the university's Department of Horticulture and is at work on a book about designing interactive gardens for children and families. "There is a desperate need for public gardens to present plants in a special child's area in a creative, fun way, to emphasize the importance of plants in a child's everyday life," she says. Taylor, who also serves on the AHS National Children and Youth Garden Advisory Panel, will receive her award during the opening banquet at this year's AHS National Youth Garden Symposium, June 8 to 10 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. For more on the symposium, or visit the youth gardening section of the AHS Web site .

Plant a Row for the Hungry 

As you start preparing your vegetable garden this spring, think about joining gardeners around the country in supporting the Plant A Row For the Hungry campaign. This nationwide program, initiated and sponsored by the Garden Writers Association of America (GWAA), encourages gardeners to set aside space in their garden to grow fresh vegetables and fruit to be donated to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and other community-based organizations that feed the hungry. Vegetables harvested from the Plant A Row (PAR) garden at River Farm last year benefited a local soup kitchen in the Alexandria, Virginia, area. Our staff, interns, and volunteers are already planting early spring crops for this year. Before planting, it's a good idea to discuss your plans with the group to which you will be donating the food to find out what produce is most useful. If you are not sure where to donate produce, contact your local chamber of commerce or community service organization, or call PAR's toll-free number, (877) GWAA-PAR. For more information about the Plant a Row program, visit the GWAA Web site at www.gwaa.org.

AHS Encyclopedia Honored 

The American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, published in 1997 by Dorling Kindersley in New York, has been named the official plant reference guide for the internationally acclaimed Philadelphia Flower Show. The encyclopedia will be used as the official general standard for all horticultural entries at the show, hosted annually by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. This year's flower show is being held March 5 to 12 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

This spring, AHS and Southern Living magazine are once again co-sponsoring a series of gardening schools at prominent garden destinations in the Southeast and South. Taught by Southern Living gardening experts, the schools are hour-long lectures on topics such as landscape design, use of color in the garden, and plant selection. A complete listing of garden schools--including dates and ticket information for individual schools-can be found in the ad on the back cover of the American Gardener magazine.

Plant Kingdom Overthrown? 

Based on a better understanding of the genetic makeup of plants, an international group of researchers has proposed radically altering the structure of the plant family tree, splitting the plant kingdom into three parts. 

Five years ago the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group-better known as "Deep Green"-set out to examine the evolutionary relationships among green plants. Two hundred scientists from 12 countries contributed to this effort to develop an accurate family tree for green plants, merging molecular, fossil, and morphological data. 

The initial findings of the project were presented last August at the 16th International Botanical Congress held at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. The project's findings challenge long accepted notions about the relationships among plant species. Limited by the information available to him 250 years ago, Carolus Linnaeus based his classification system for plant groups primarily on the number and arrangement of reproductive organs. 

In contrast, Deep Green delved into the genetic make-up and microscopic internal structures of plants to better understand how they are related. Employing recent advances in cladistics-comparing evolutionarily relevant traits among organisms-and genomics-tracking genetic changes over time-the project made some surprising discoveries. 

Among the most important of these is that relationships among organisms should be viewed as "nested" according to their genetic similarities rather than "ranked" according to an artificial, superimposed order. Based on this new analysis, the Deep Green team proposes that plants should no longer be considered as a single kingdom. Instead, they should be divided into three kingdoms: green plants including all land plants, red plants, and brown plants-the last two representing primarily algae and seaweeds. 

Research indicates that each kingdom developed independently, descending from a different single-celled organism. Investigations also revealed that fungi, formerly classified as part of the plant kingdom, are more closely related to animals. The evolution of flowering plants has long baffled scientists. In an effort to throw some light on the conundrum, Deep Green researchers studied three common, rapidly mutating DNA sequences in chloroplasts-cells in leaf and green stem tissue that are the sites of photosynthesis-that serve as useful tools for differentiating species. 

According to Brent Mishler, professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley and co-principal investigator of the project, this research identified a little-known shrub from New Caledonia in the South Pacific called amborella as the closest living relative of the first flowering plant. Working independently, three other research teams confirmed this finding. 

Understanding the genetic relationships among organisms provides researchers with clues that are helpful in locating useful products in unknown organisms. "It's like a roadmap to biodiversity," explains Mishler. Potential applications include identifying likely sources of new medical compounds in plants, engineering for useful traits such as drought tolerance, identifying disease-causing organisms, and controlling invasive species. 

Deep Green's findings may soon change the way taxonomy is taught in the classroom. Mishler has already adopted the phylogenic approach to classification in courses he teaches at Berkeley. He reports that response to this taxonomic revolution has in general been quite positive. 

For more information about the Deep Green Project visit its Web page at http://ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu/bryolab/greenplantpage.html

Member in Focus 
Frank Cabot: AHS Award Winner 
by Margaret T. Baird

On paper, he describes himself simply as "a horticultural enthusiast who has gardened in Cold Spring, New York, and La Malbaie, Quebec." Period. If you aren't acquainted with Frank Cabot, that modest assessment of his botanical career might conjure up a vision of the average weekend gardener puttering about his backyard. And when we tell you that Frank Cabot has been honored as the 2000 recipient of the American Horticultural Society's Liberty Hyde Bailey Award, given for all-around horticultural excellence, it might really set you to wondering: What could make the gardening accomplishments of this "horticultural enthusiast" so noteworthy?

Not-so-average gardener

It's a good thing Frank Cabot's deeds have been recorded by other than his own hand, for Cabot is no mere enthusiast, and he's certainly no average gardener. While Cabot's interest in gardening developed from his family background-two of his uncles were landscape architects-he received no formal training in horticulture. 

Besides his long-held leadership positions in horticultural organizations in both the United States and Canada-the U.S. National Arboretum, the New York Botanical Garden, Wave Hill, and the Royal Botanic Gardens among them-both of the places Cabot has "gardened" are also private-turned-public gardens: Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring, and Les Quatre Vents in Quebec. 

In addition, he's the founder and chairman of The Garden Conservancy, a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of exceptional private gardens in North America. In that role, Cabot has championed the conservation of eighteen historic, private landscapes in eleven states-all of which now open their gates to visitors at various times throughout the year. 

The site of Cabot's original brainstorm-and what became the Garden Conservancy's flagship project-is the Ruth Bancroft Garden, an extraordinary, four-acre private collection of succulents and cacti in Walnut Creek, California. 

Cabot's introduction to the garden was an impromptu visit on the way to a plant society meeting. What Cabot found there was most unexpected. "It's a dry garden-mostly cactus, and I'm not a cactus person at all-but I found it terribly exciting," he says. "The way it all fit together was so beautiful! I'd never seen anything like it, and I literally felt shivers run up my spine as we walked through." 

On inquiry, Cabot realized that the garden's elderly owner, Ruth Bancroft, had no one to help with its upkeep. "I thought: I've got to figure out a way to help her preserve this poetry, this artwork, before it's lost forever." That was back in 1988. Now 6,000 members strong and entering its eleventh year, the Garden Conservancy, headquartered in Cold Spring, continues its mission of locating and preserving fine American gardens. "Frank thinks large," says colleague Richard Lighty, the 1999 winner of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award and former director of the Mt. Cuba Center for the study of Piedmont Flora in Greenville, Delaware. "Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the Garden Conservancy at first-wondering if it could ever go national. It's clear now it's really a movement that's continuing to expand." A

ccording to another long-time Cabot colleague, Marco Polo Stufano-director of horticulture at New York City's Wave Hill and also a 1999 AHS award winner-Cabot "is the consummate plantsman. He's so respected in horticulture in this country," says Stufano. "I can't think of any single person anywhere who has influenced American gardening more-in a hands-on, down-to-earth sort of way. And he's a bit of a madman, really! Everyone wonders when he's going to stop, but thank goodness he hasn't yet."

Forging ahead

The 75-year-old Cabot continues to travel extensively, satisfying his penchant for alpine flora and checking in on pet projects. "I'm just a promoter by nature," he explains. He's in the process of writing a book about Les Quatre Vents, his garden in Canada, and he is involved in a new garden rescue across the Atlantic. 

He and his wife, Anne, have been the catalysts in saving the gardens at Aberglasney, a 16th-century estate in Llangathen, Wales. "We've got Graham Rankin, the best gardener in Britain, taking care of the eight-acre garden and its two acres of walls," says Cabot. Previously abandoned for 75 years, the historic garden's infrastructure-and popularity-has now been restored after a four-year effort and is the subject of both a recent BBC documentary and a book co-written by Penelope Hobhouse. Just another feather in Cabot's already crowded cap of achievements. "Frank is certainly one of 20th-century America's greatest and most generous gardeners," Lighty states unequivocally. "And," he adds, "he should be one of the most celebrated." 

Margaret T. Baird is communications assistant for The American Gardener.