Inside the Arboretum Teaching Nursery, the new Elizabeth Mary Wolf Environmental Learning Center has been buzzing with activity since its soft opening earlier this year.

This summer, we’ve turned our efforts to upgrading outdoor areas of the Arboretum Teaching Nursery. Smooth concrete now covers the major path arteries that customers use to navigate the nursery. We’ve also enhanced the smaller paths with hexpave and gravel. All of this means cleaner shoes, great traction, easier pulling of loaded carts and...plant sales rain or shine!

Selecting climate-ready plants and appropriate plants for insect pollinators and hummingbirds is a major goal of Rachel Davis, GATEways Horticulturist for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. The ‘Pollinator Squad’, her group of 15 volunteers, meets weekly to develop and manage the Habitat Gardens, including the meadow basin; the Hummingbird Garden; an Insect Pollinator garden; and the bioswale which runs through the meadow basin.

Two of Abbey Hart’s volunteer teams took a field trip to Annie’s Annuals and Perennials Nursery in Richmond last month. The goal was to see the broad variety of plants that the nursery grows and sells — annuals, perennials, native plants, landscape plants, herbs and vegetables, etc., — and to allow the volunteers to purchase plants. Some of the Arboretum volunteers had been there before; for others it was an eye-popping first-time experience.

“It’s all about plants, everything comes back to plants.” At least that’s Karen Slinkard’s philosophy (and the Arboretum and Public Garden team tends to agree).

Karen — a two-time UC Davis alum, active Davis community member and Master Gardener — and her husband Stephen have made a generous donation to create an endowment fund supporting the Learning by Leading™ student internship program and also made a current use pledge to be used over five years, also in support of the program.