Botanist William Dress dies at age 93 [Cornell Chronicle, 1/5/2012] – William J. Dress, Ph.D. ’53, professor emeritus of botany at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium at Cornell, author of 10 plant books and for whom two plants have been named, died Dec. 15 at his home at Kendal at Ithaca. He was the editor of the hortorium’s two journals and for many years served as the editor of the authoritative reference work “Hortus Third: A Concise Dictionary of Plants Cultivated in the United States and Canada.”
Seeds of Change [Essentials blog, 1/5/2012] – Lindsay Myron ’11 is taking lessons learned in her Cornell coursework on garden-based learning to rural Tanzanian farmers.
Weird winter has growers wary [Albany Times-Union, 1/4/2012] – Ian Merwin says it’s too early to tell whether the mild, snowless start to winter will damage the state fruit harvest. “He said an oscillation between unusually warm and normally cold temperatures poses the greatest risk, and that such a pattern is predicted in climatic models used to forecast the direction of man-made climate change. ‘It is not just how cold it gets; it is whether it was unusually warm before that,’ Merwin said.”
School 2 students get extra tunnel to learning [Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 1/1/2012] – School 2 in Rochester is one of six statewide selected participate in high tunnel project funded by the USDA. “Our intent was to observe how the schools use the structure and whether it would enhance their school gardening program,” said Chris Wien, professor in the Department of Horticulture, Cornell University.