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| Vol. 18, No. 7 | Oct. 15, 1998 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 7 | Oct. 15, 1998 |
It's a year-round, seven-day-a-week job. Lucky for me, I have help," Paul Dennison, greenhouse manager, said. The 1969 UD alumnus, with a degree in ornamental horticulture, is responsible for the maintenance of five greenhouses, located behind Townsend Hall, and the 10-acre Botanic Garden, which faces South College Avenue.
"I assign jobs to the staff and to the agriculture students," he said. "We now have a several assistants- including Rebecca Dean, a year-round graduate intern, Teresa Holton, a full-time staff assistant, and Susan Foster, a part-time miscellaneous wage employee-and I am hoping that we can now move forward with new projects. In the summer, we also employ student interns to keep up the gardens."
The Fischer Greenhouse Laboratory, one of five greenhouses on campus, is "state-of-the-art," Dennison said. "It is a Dutch greenhouse that was shipped from Holland eight years ago. It is almost entirely computer controlled." The specially designed software, he explained, controls heating and cooling vents, plus exhaust fans, pumps for the cooling pads, a shade curtain and a heat retention blanket.
"I need to keep all 120 motors in the Fischer Greenhouse running," Dennison said. "I coordinate all repairs to existing equipment as well as overseeing all new construction. It is a good thing the computer is able to run indefinitely without input, except when the clock needs to be changed for Daylight Savings Time. It even has an astrological clock so it can make changes according to what season it is."
In the Botanic Garden, Dennison orders supplies and coordinates staff, students and volunteers from the University Botanic Garden Friends group.
The basic tasks involved with the garden are hand weeding and the spreading of mulch, watering, pruning and planting. It takes the student interns two full days a week all summer to mulch the Botanic Garden, which includes about three acres of planing beds and it uses about 500 cubic yards of mulch for cover, he said.
The outdoor gardens are used for teaching, Dennison explained, and they feature unusual plants that grow well in the immediate area, as well as one section devoted strictly to plants native to Delaware and surrounding states.
"The greenhouses are used for three reasons: teaching, research and production. For example," he said, "in plant pathology the goal is to start with healthy plants, inoculate them with specific plant viruses and learn to determine the virus by the resulting plant symptoms." Dennison assigns space in the greenhouses to researchers.
Plant production takes place year-round and some are used for the plant sales at the University. "Plants with longer production cycles are now being grown for the year 2000," Dennison said. "Coordination of the staff for the hand-watering that takes place three hours, twice each day, every day is quite a task," he said.
-Gail E. Walford
