News

Instead of spending their summers lounging by the lake or binging the latest hit show, undergraduate students from across the country arrive on the Saint Paul campus with a mission. Now, as they return home for the final years of their undergraduate programs, these students share the highlights of their summer research – the good, the tough, and the eye-opening.

When it rains, it pours.  For the first time in many years, we have two faculty leaving the department for different greenery. We say farewell to Brian Horgan and John Erwin as they begin new chapters of their careers. 

The Learning Garden for Horticultural Science comes into a new era with a new name.

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.