The Dry Garden: Raven at Rancho
Posted on | May 7, 2010 | 6 Comments
Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, at dusk in a meadow of irises, poppies and sage at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, where he was honored for his work on biodiversity last Sunday. “It makes sense that we’ll come to a point where we’re sustainable,” he told the audience. “The question we must ask ourselves now is how long it will take and what we will lose in the process?" Photo: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.
As the program had it, the ceremony at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont was to honor Peter Raven. But those who came away from Sunday’s event might be forgiven for believing that Raven, the man Time magazine called a “hero for the planet,” had come to honor Rancho Santa Ana.
For those unfamiliar with Raven, he is to plants what David Attenborough is to animals. He co-authored the seminal textbook “The Biology of Plants” and advised the Clinton administration on biodiversity. Under his directorship for almost four decades, the Missouri Botanical Garden (the oldest botanic garden in continuous operation in the country) became a lifesaver for the sweeping Flora of North America project. Soon Raven will be in London, at the Chelsea Flower Show, an American lecturing the English on the future of sustainable gardening.
Click here to keep reading about Peter Raven’s message about conservation in California in the Los Angeles Times weekly column “The Dry Garden.”
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6 Responses to “The Dry Garden: Raven at Rancho”
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May 7th, 2010 @ 9:35 am
Raven’s quote could be applied to just about every environmental/resource quandary in California…especially the Delta, Westlands, the Colorado, Salton Sea…what a wise man:
“It makes sense that we’ll come to a point where we’re sustainable,” he told the audience. “The question we must ask ourselves now is how long it will take and what we will lose in the process?”
I’m posting that quote on my screen.
May 7th, 2010 @ 9:51 am
Thanks Adan. I couldn’t agree with you more. And while I’m thanking you, let other readers know that Adan is the one who saw this coming a long time ago and began the BeWaterWise campaign for MWD.
May 7th, 2010 @ 10:09 am
Thank you Emily… that was 8 years ago… and we began the campaign, appropriately enough, with a news conference at RSABG…right where Dr. Raven spoke his words of wisdom.
May 7th, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
Emily – Thanks for rekindling some lovely memories. When I was a tyke, my sister and I used to shamble about gleefully in what we simply called “the botanic garden”. From the vantage point of childhood, there was no other.
May 7th, 2010 @ 1:25 pm
There still is no other. What a perceptive child you were!
May 8th, 2010 @ 9:45 am
[…] proximate cause of this morning’s musings was Emily Green’s post about the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens. It was just a few miles from my house, and Mom and Dad used to take my sister and I there all the […]