ENZENBACHER, T. 2021. ANUNUSUAL AUTUMN AT THE DANA GREENHOUSES. ARNOLDIA, 78(3): 7-9 
An Unusual Autumn at the Dana Greenhouses 
Tiffany Enzenbacher 
ctober was quiet. The headhouse at the 
Dana Greenhouses was still, except 
for the dim hum of the radio, a neces- 
sity for an almost empty building. In previ- 
ous years, the same location would have been 
marked with a cacophony of sounds, the door 
thrown ajar as Arnold Arboretum plant collec- 
tors eagerly arrived to unpack their hard-earned 
seeds and plants. Sieves and colanders would 
have rattled against the center worktable as 
plant production staff removed fruit pulp from 
each seed, and everyone would be talking about 
new and exciting acquisitions. Seed cataloging 
and cleaning is a departmental undertaking, 
sometimes lasting the entirety of fall and into 
early winter. 
A AN 
fF b Wek peme 4s: 
This annual activity has occurred at an 
invigorated level since 2015, when the Arbo- 
retum launched the Campaign for the Living 
Collections, a strategic ten-year initiative to 
increase the biodiversity and conservation hold- 
ings of our living collections by adding nearly 
four hundred wild-collected taxa that were not 
already growing in our landscape. As part of 
the campaign, staff organized and executed as 
many as five expeditions annually, traveling to 
locations in northern Idaho, central China, the 
country of Georgia, and elsewhere. 
I have participated in two of those expedi- 
tions myself: one to the Ozarks and another to 
northern Illinois and Wisconsin. It was reward- 
ing to engage in the full process, from planning 
TIFFANY ENZENBACHER 
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The pandemic changed fall and winter routines at the Dana Greenhouses, providing an unplanned reprieve from processing new, 
wild-collected plant material. Chris Copeland (above) prepares grafts of a plum (Prunus alleghaniensis), one of hundreds of clonal 
propagations that are completed annually. 
