Some Super-Cool Stuff

For the past ten years or so I’ve worked to try to transfer information about horticulture to people.  It sounds simple, but it actually took a lot of time and effort to figure out the best way to do it, and I’m still not there yet — and probably never will be.  The reason that I mention this is because I appreciate it when another horticulturist, such as my fellow garden professors, work to get information about horticulture out to the public.  So yesterday we had a speaker come to our depoartment to give our annual end of the year lecture — It’s kind of a big deal for us — We usually have a big name person (horticulturally speaking of course) and pay him or her pretty well and have a reception.  It’s nice.  We also hand out scholarships to our undergraduates who earned them and any awards which we have to give.  But anyway, back to the speaker.  This year we had a guy come in who I’d never heard of before besides some strong recommendations from some of my colleagues here in the department.  I also did a cursory check of his website.  I liked what I saw, but I wasn’t blown away.  Sometimes I’m such a dingbat.  Simply put, this guy gave one of the top two or three horticultural (actually I should say botanical — it’s more botany than horticulture) presentations which I have seen.  His name is Roger Hangarter and he is a professor at Indiana University.  In a nutshell he films plant’s moving using time-lapse photography to demonstrate important concepts.  Here is one of his websites:

http://plantsinmotion.bio.indiana.edu/plantmotion/starthere.html

But if you do a google search for him he has a lot of other things on different sites.  He has even created a traveling display for museums called slowlife.  Very, very cool.  There aren’t a lot of people who I’m in awe of — but this guy is one of them.  If you have a garden club or run a master gardener program you NEED to get this guy on your calendar if you can.