News

Our 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award winner is Dr. John M. Dole. Dr. Dole will be presenting at the Kermit Olson Memorial Lecture on February 26th in Green Hall on the Saint Paul Campus. His lecture, “A Floral Journey – Discovering the Magic of Flowers” will discuss how flowering plants are the backbone of horticulture, to all of agriculture, and how the flowers they produce are integral to our society.

Medicinal plants have been used by many people over generations, all over the world. Yet medicinal plants have been undervalued in the medical community because their effects and chemical underpinnings have not been well understood from a western science perspective. Graduate student, Kate Sammons, wants to shift that perspective and make herbal medicine more mainstream.  

Graduate student Laise Moreira is researching table grapes for Minnesota in the hope of developing a grape that is seedless, cold-hardy, and flavorful. Most seedless cultivars currently on the market were bred for warm climates, dry conditions, or mild winters, making them unsuitable for Minnesota’s climate.

Summer is a time for growth for our plants as well as our students. This past summer, six undergraduate students all with passions in horticulture, took part in the first Landscape Arboretum Scholars Internship. The Landscape Arboretum Scholars worked on several projects throughout their summer at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

We spoke with Laura Irish, Garden Manager, about her time spent in the Learning Garden here on the St. Paul campus. She gives us some garden insight on the challenges for this past season and some end-of-season tips for the upcoming winter. 

Golf courses are often viewed as elitist playgrounds that consume land and require extensive inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, and water. They tend to be contained within a community and only perceived as valuable assets by those that use them for recreation. But what are the unseen benefits that golf courses contribute to the surrounding communities?

Mai Moua is no stranger to cover crops; but neither is she a follower. She’s an innovator growing a variety of vegetables and flowers for local farmers markets, food co-ops and the HAFA Flower CSA, and her practices helped inspire a collaborative research project between HAFA and Dr. Julie Grossman’s lab at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Horticultural Science.

With over 150 local breweries stretching from Luverne to Ranier, Minnesota might very well be the land of ten thousand beers. Combine Minnesota’s rich agricultural industry with dozens of breweries opening in rural and urban farming communities, and a unique collaboration opportunity arises. This graduate student is hoping to combine Minnesota’s love of beer and agriculture in an unlikely way: wastewater.

We’ve all been there - you are invited to a holiday party and tasked with bringing the wine, but where to start? We asked Drew Horton, enology specialist at the UMN Horticultural Research Center, and graduate student, Anna Underhill, their tips on the art of choosing the perfect wine.

It’s hard to think about learning horticulture without first learning how to propagate plants. HORT 1001 (informally known as “Plant Prop”) has been around as long as we have been teaching horticulture at the University. Many faculty have taught the course over the years, but the glue that has always held the course together is the lab, that is where the magic happens. . .