UCSC Greenhouses

Please support our Plant Conservation and Randall Morgan Trifolium collections fundraiser today! Your gift will empower the next generation of botanists as they complete meaningful work to save plants. One of our projects this year is to catalogue and properly preserve the late Randy Morgan's comprehensive collections of Trifolium seeds. Help us make this possible! https://tinyurl.com/PlantConserve

It’s Giving Day! Come by the Red Square if you are on campus. Plant Conservation Interns Moss and Helena have some plants available in exchange for your support.

Welcome back Slugs! 🥳 We had so much fun tabling alongside the Plant Sciences Club at Cornucopia yesterday.
If you missed us there, here is our message to you:
🌱Come visit our fabulous collection of plants on the rooftop of the Thimann Labs building. 🌱 Email Laura ([email protected]) to join our Greenhouse Volunteers email list. 🌱 Join the Plant Science Club listserv to hear about rad community events, plant lab research opportunities, and more!

There are just a few spaces left in the 8-week summer session Introduction to Horticulture class! Enroll in BIOE 16 to boost your plant knowledge and growing skills. 🥬🌻🌵

The pink-flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum var. glutinosum) is one of our favorite plants for both its showy winter bloom and for the ecosystem services it provides. Plant one of these in your garden for the hummingbirds and numerous species of bees 🐝 that will enjoy the flowers as much as you do! Once the flowers have finished, songbirds 🪶 relish the pendant dark berries they produce. Many thanks to artist Anna Schacker ✨ for sharing her artwork! This is a piece she produced while taking ENVS 18 - Natural History Illustration during the Winter Quarter. 🤩

Rare Plant Conservation interns Helena, Davis, and Ava transplanting seedlings of an endangered Astragalus species. This plant is being grown for conservation seed-amplification.

Its Giving Day! Donate today to our one day fundraiser to help us save Santa Cruz's unique plants from extinction!

Give here: https://givingday.ucsc.edu/amb/RarePlants

We are fortunate to have an anonymous donor who has generously pledged to make a matching gift for our campaign. Your gift today will be doubled!

Santa Cruz County is home to some of the highest plant biodiversity on the planet. Unfortunately, the impacts of human land use, invasive plant competition, and climate change have put many species at risk of extinction. Saving these plants in the wild can be complicated and political—but saving their seed in seed banks is a doable and important safeguard against permanent extirpation!

The UCSC Greenhouses are working to grow and save seed from local plant species that are on the brink of disappearing. We do this in collaboration with local botanists and ecologists, and involve UCSC students in the entire process! These seeds are conscientiously collected in line with conservation protocols, and will be frozen in seed banks for future restoration, reintroduction, or research projects.

This is our third year running the Plant Conservation Internship, which propels students deep into plant conservation projects. Interns receive a stipend for their work, and learn horticultural skills which prepare them for future careers in this field. Last year’s Giving Day fundraiser enabled us to do meaningful conservation work while providing in-depth hands-on learning opportunities for seven undergraduate student interns. With your financial support, these students grew hundreds of local plants (including some rare ones!), collected thousands of seeds, and gathered data to inform future growing efforts of these plants. This has been a life-changing and meaningful experience for these students, who represent the future of conservation in California.

With your support, we can continue this work to conserve many more local rare plants in seed banks, and we can elevate a new crop of budding plant scientists into passionate conservationists. Please support our work today!

In bloom now: Gnetum gnemon! (Say that 10 times fast…) 🤪 This is a plant that is as odd as its wacky name! Despite its broad, flat leaves, this tree is actually grouped with conifers🌲, cycads , and Ginkgo trees in the Gymnosperms group. Unless you saw these strange strobili, you might never guess that this isn’t an angiosperm, or flowering plant. 🌺

This tree is dioecious, which means that each plant grows either male or female reproductive parts, but not both. Our plant here appears to be a female, which cannot reproduce without a compatible male plant nearby.

Gnetum gnemon hails from India, Southeast Asia, and some Pacific Islands, where it has been used as a fiber and food plant by indigenous people.

See this plant in our Tropical Greenhouse at the Jean H. Langenheim instructional Greenhouses, on the rooftop of the Thimann Labs building. We’re open Monday through Friday from 9am-3pm.

Happy New Year, Slugs! We’re staying closed today due to the huge amounts of water being dumped by this storm! We look forward to welcoming you back as the quarter begins. Stay safe!

Its Giving Day! You can support our work to conserve local rare plants by contributing to our campaign here: https://givingday.ucsc.edu/giving-day/58746/department/58807 No gift is too small. Your gift will enable ex-situ conservation seed amplification and seed banking of more rare plants, while also training and inspiring a new cohort of student plant scientists!

Its Giving Day! 🌿 Today is the day--YOU can help save local Santa Cruz County plants from extinction! 🌼 Click here to support our work today! https://givingday.ucsc.edu/giving-day/58746/department/58807 Santa Cruz County is home to some of the highest plant biodiversity on the planet. 🌎Unfortunately, the impacts of human land use, invasive plant competition, and climate change have put many species at risk of extinction. Saving these plants in the wild can be complicated and political–but saving their seed in seed banks is a doable and important safeguard against permanent extirpation! The UCSC Greenhouses are working to grow and save seed from local plant species that are on the brink of disappearing. We do this in collaboration with local botanists and ecologists, and involve UCSC students in the entire process! These seeds are conscientiously collected in line with conservation protocols, and will be frozen in seed banks for future restoration, reintroduction, or research projects. Last year’s Giving Day fundraiser enabled us to do meaningful conservation work while providing in-depth hands-on learning opportunities for 8 undergraduate student interns. With your financial support, these students grew hundreds of individuals of 12 species of locally rare plants, collected thousands of seeds, and gathered data to inform future growing efforts of these plants. This has been a life-changing and meaningful experience for these students, who represent the future of conservation in California and throughout the world. As part of their Winter internship, one student team wrote an article about current efforts to restore the rare and endangered Santa Cruz Tarplant–including an important seed germination study that they worked on! Read their article here, in the Spring newsletter of the Santa Cruz Chapter of the California Native Plant Society: https://cruzcnps.org/2022/03/newsletter-spring-2022/ With your support, we can continue this work to conserve many more local rare plants in seed banks, and we can elevate a new crop of 🌱 budding plant scientists into passionate conservationists. Please support our work today!

Are you a 🍫chocolate ❤️ lover? Have you ever seen a fresh cacao fruit? Drop by the Tropical Greenhouse to check it out! The whole greenhouse is a sight to see, with many familiar-yet-unfamiliar plants that you may use frequently without even realizing it. (At the Jean H. Langenheim greenhouses on the rooftop of the Thimann Labs building.)