From: una@phy.duke.edu (Una Smith)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Fairchild Tropical Garden
Date: 9 Sep 92 15:40:49 GMT
Organization: Duke University Physics Dept.; Durham, N.C.

Newsgroups: bionet.plants
Subject: Fairchild Tropical Garden
Summary: NY Times article on Hurricane Andrew's effects
Followup-To: 
Distribution: world
Organization: Duke University Physics Dept.; Durham, N.C.
Keywords: 

There was a brief mention of the Fairchild Tropical Garden in
the New York Times newspaper over the weekend, and a much longer
article (approx 75 in^2 or 470 cm^2) by Anne Raver in the Tuesday
paper (Sept. 8, p. D13).  Here are some extracts from that article:

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"Scientists from all over the world are converging on the Fairchild
Tropical Garden, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed
75 percent of the garden's 5,000 species.  Before the storm, it held
the world's largest collection of palms and cycads [...].

Botanists and arborists from more than a dozen botanical centers,
including the New York Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Garden
at Kew [...] are racing to save the few plants that remain.  They are
also there to gather material from damaged roots and growing tips, 
bark and fallen fruit.  [...]  "We're in a massive rescue operation,
not only of the trees, but of the information that's contained in
these plants," said Director William Klein, who helped rally scientific
forces.  [...]  Representatives from the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia,
the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in France, the Missouri
Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Mounts Botanical Garden and Gemini
Botanical Garden, both in Palm Beach [Florida], and half a dozen
other gardens are also part of the rescue effort.

[According to] Don Evans, the staff horticulturist, [...] "We
probably had 700 species of palms, but most are horizontal now."
[...] "We'll try to stand some of them up and get fungicides on the
growing tips so that disease won't set in."  [...] It won't be clear
for years just what the long-term effects of the storm are, said
Dr. Klein.  "In some cases, the roots of all these plants are very
heavily disturbed, and these disturbances operate as entry points
for disease -- so we'll be losing trees for years."

To shed light on how palms and other monocots grow, the garden's
anatomist, Dr. Jack Fisher, has been collecting samples of growing
tips and roots from the plants that can not be saved.  [Scientists
and horticulturalists elsewhere have begun to collect plants for the
garden;  volunteers have donated time and equipment, including a
crane, to set up fallen trees;  and logs will be harvested from
fallen trees that can't be saved.]

The garden has set up two funds, the Fairchild Restoration Fund,
for the garden itself, and the Fairchild Relief Fund, to help staff
members who lost their homes in the storm.  The address for both is

                   The Fairchild Tropical Garden
                   10901 Old Cutler Road
                   Coral Gables, Florida  33156


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-- 

Una Smith   una@phy.duke.edu    Department of Biology
                                Yale University
                                New Haven, CT  06511-7444
Newsgroups: sci.bio