Plants: A Tour of US Botanic Garden Production Facility

I was able to get a private tour to the Botanic Garden Production Facility in Fairfax recently, and I saw some pretty cool stuff. The production facility keeps plants and suppies them to the Botanic Gardens in Washington, DC. It is an incredible place and really demonstrates how extraordinary and diverse plants are.

The sign outside of the building

A view of the greenhouses

Each individual greenhouse has a fairly diverse collection of plants. These of some of the inside pictures:

The greenhouses are equiped with weather instruments and computers that calculate how to adjust the climate in each house.

Interestingly, lots of animals get into the buildings. I saw bees, and our guide said that there were colonies of cockroaches, and that if you were to spray the premises with pesticides, you would end up with hundreds of dead cockroaches on the floor. There are mice, feral cats, and even hummingbirds that show up.

Our guide showed and told us so much that it would be hard to write about it all, but here are some other cool things there.

This is a carnivorous plant that secretes a stickyish substance that traps insects unfortunate enough to land on it. You can see little beads of the substance on the leaves in the picture.

I had asked our guide if there were any plants with blue leaves, and he said that this irridescant plant had the closest to blue leaves of any plant in the plant kingdom.

These are some Hawaiian plants. Unfortunatly, Hawaii's animals are mostly endangered or extinct due to human activity, and all the pollinaters these plants once had are now dissapearing. Many plants are feeling the losses, like the cabbage-on-a-stick plant (you can see a fairly unhealthy one in the center of the image). The moth that pollinated them went extinct, and now there is only one left in the wild. If scientists hadn't hand pollinated it, the plant would be extinct.

Cacti flowers are awesome, aren't they? You might wonder what pollinates these guys, and the answer is: bats! Bats, contrary to popular belief, are freindly, harmless, and help the environment immensly.

This is a succulent plant called a "living stone". It's texture is very smooth.

Plants are essential to every environment, and need to be cherished. When plants start going away, like milkweed, then other things like monarch butterflies feel the losses. Want to help plants? Try planting native plants in your garden! Every plant helps!