Nearly a year after back-to-back hurricanes devastated both Puerto Rico and Florida, a partnership between two botanical gardens is tackling storm recovery in an unexpected way.
At the Naples Botanical Garden, a room of community officials, garden supporters and international invitees gathered Wednesday night to see the ceremonial planting of the guest of honor: a three-foot-tall sapling of the Flor de Maga, the national flower of Puerto Rico.
Christian Torres-Santana, the director of the Arboretum Doña Inés Park in San Juan, Puerto Rico, said the garden lost 35 percent of its collection of native and endangered plants when Hurricane Maria hit the island almost a year ago.
“Knowing how long it takes to get those plants out and how much work you have to put in just to find them because some of them are rare and endangered,” Torres-Santana said. “And it takes you days to go get a single species, and, you know, the whole process of growing them until, suddenly, they’re gone.”
Donna McGinnis, the president and CEO of the Naples Botanical Garden, said that it might not know it from the outside, but botanical gardens around the world have a sort of network.
When one garden is in trouble, others around the country – and, in some cases, the world – will lend a helping hand.
That was the case when Hurricane Irma hit Southwest Florida.
Eight botanical gardens offered aid by sending their own experts ranging in topics from tree trimming to heavy machinery to orchid care. For McGinnis, reaching out to the arboretum in San Juan after Hurricane Maria was a no brainer.
“So, when we heard from Christian and they had been hit by two hurricanes and it was flattened, we said, after getting so much help, that of course we would go.”
In January, the garden sent a crew of three people to the arboretum with equipment and good will.
In that process, they developed a strategy to keep plant loss at a minimum in the future: an iCloud for your garden.
“We really saw that the plants we could grow were really similar,” McGinnis said. “And so we began to talk about how could we back up each others collections so if something catastrophic ever really happened, there is some place you could go to get your plant material back.”
Carlos Olivencia-Gaya from the Board of Directors of Arboretum Doña Inés Park agrees with McGinnis that the progress in the arboretum is important, but that the partnership also offers something Puerto Rico has been in need of: hope.
“It’s got two purposes,” Olivencia-Gaya said. “It also was a moral support for us because we know that we are not alone here. Knowing that we have the help of people like the Botanical Garden helping us gives us a lot of hope that we are going to be up again very soon.”