Winter Gardens at Cornell: Beauty In the Snow [Ithaca Times 1/17/2013] – Profiles Cornell Plantations’ winter crown jewel — the Mullestein Winter Garden — and other campus gardens with particular winter interest. “The Minns Garden, located at the west end of Tower Road, is a colorful perennial garden providing four season interest with ornamental grasses, espaliered apple trees, and three botanically inspired steel entrance gates designed and built by local artist blacksmith Durand Van Doren in 2008. The west gate (24 feet wide) portrays flowering bulbs and plants that grow in the garden, while the other two gates (6 feet wide) illustrate the trunks, branches and fruit of apple trees, a tribute to one of the Finger Lakes most important crops.”

University advocates Native American farming methods [innovationtrail.org 1/18/2013] – Jane Mt. Pleasant, associate professor, Department of Horticulture, says the modern agricultural sector could learn a lot about the sustainability of natural resources from practices in Native American culture. “[The 'Three Sisters'] system has a lot of principles that we can use in thinking about sustainable agricultural systems today,” she says. “One of the primary things is actually that it was done without tillage. We recognize that tillage, even though it does lots of good things, it also is enormously destructive of our soil resource.” Mt. Pleasant was also interviewed on WSKG radio.

Energy from Willows Comes of Age [Ithaca Journal 1/2/2013] – Because of its rapid growth, willow produces eight times as much yield per acre as a typical Northeastern forest, said Larry Smart, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University. 800 acres of willow could produce one megawatt of electricity, enough for 750 homes for one year. See also Shrub Willow: Building a Better Biofuel [Cornell Daily Sun 1/23/2013].

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