Blooms and Beyond

Dave Creech says SFA Gardens spent 30 or 40 years waiting for minus four degrees. When the 2021 freeze finally brought it, only two of the garden’s 31 gardenias really survived. The champion was Whispering Pines, a big double that Jim Berry had offered Dave because it didn’t fit his nursery’s product mix. In Part 2 of Ping’s conversation with Dave, the long wait pays off in plant picks: Japanese maples that came through unaffected, two camellia species that were in bloom when the cold hit, and Parrotia subaequalis, a Chinese ironwood that turns fire engine red in an East Texas fall.

Then the talk turns to the people who grow plants. Dave names labor as the industry’s biggest challenge and runs the numbers: a kiwi costs eight cents a pound to pick, while a hand-picked blueberry runs 40, 50, 60 cents. He makes his case for golden kiwi in East Texas, a crop he admits he is stubborn about, and Ping reports that her three-year-old son asks for one every week at Costco. Dave also has a number for young professors: horticulture enrollment peaked in 1977, with 650 students at Texas A&M.

The second half travels. Near Kunming, in Yunnan, Dave went to see the Camellia of 10,000 Flowers, two varieties grafted and woven together in a monastery plaza, with a monk whose job every day was to sit by the tree and protect it. He remembers refugee camps in Pakistan going from tents to mud houses to houses with roofs, a PhD advisor who told him seven students before him had failed, and the former student who walked up at TNLA and said, “You’re still alive.” Part 2 ends at SFA Gardens today, with a lecture series every second Thursday and an environmental education program for kids that is coming back.

Listen Time: 54:23

Dr. Dave Creech, Professor Emeritus and Director, SFA Gardens, Stephen F. Austin State University. He has lived in Nacogdoches for 47 years and works half time; in his words, he is not retired. He studied under Hollis Bowen and J.B. Storey at Texas A&M and did a master’s in potato tuber physiology at Colorado State University under Milt Workman, arriving the year Old Main burned. Raised in Asia, he has been going to China for more than 30 years and worked in Pakistan’s orchards in the 1980s. He once ran a peach business, and his current projects include golden kiwi and feijoas.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture

“So we spent 30, 40 years waiting for minus four degrees. This is a torture test.”

“Do you want a fire engine red foliaged Parrotia ironwood?”

“I never worked a day in my life.”

“I really think the people or the culture that you see with the plant really played a big role in changing your view of the whole world.”

“If you love what you do, you’re, you’ll be fine.”

Drainage first for Japanese maples. SFA never plants a Japanese maple in its bottomland gardens. The tree goes on top of the ground with a berm built up around it, so it sits on a knoll. Poor drainage kills Japanese maples, but once established they are very drought resistant in East Texas. In containers they like a variable schedule: consistent daily watering in a shade house has hurt maples at SFA’s nursery.

Chilling or day length? Japanese maples grow in Houston, given drainage, and in Minnesota, and they don’t seem to have a chilling requirement. Dave’s view is that they respond more to photoperiod than to hours under 45 degrees.

Why a big maple costs so much. A Japanese maple over two inches is worth $400 or $500 wholesale. Few Texas growers produce them, so they come in on tractor trailers from Northwest nurseries, and they can’t be cinched. Cinching means netting a tree tight into a pole so trees stack like poles. Japanese maples are brittle and break, so each one has to be fitted on the truck.

What long-term evaluation catches. Of 31 gardenias at SFA, two really survived minus four; one sold as Arctic Frost “went to the ground and below.” Indian hawthorn, Rhaphiolepis indica, has died for Dave in ’83, ’89, and 2021, yet huge beds of it keep coming back into the trade a year or two after each freeze. His conclusion: native trees are mostly fine, and the shrub world needs the attention.

Parrotia subaequalis. This Chinese ironwood was discovered in Zhejiang Province and, Dave says, wasn’t really described until the 1990s. It is directly related to Parrotia persica, Persian witch hazel, grows faster, roots more easily, is drought resistant, and turns fire engine red in fall. It came through minus four without trouble. It has no real common name, and “Chinese ironwood” doesn’t sound very appealing to Dave.

Simpson’s stopper, Myrcianthes fragrans. A sand dune tree to about 12 feet, popular on the western side of Florida, and very salt tolerant. At SFA it handled the lower teens and high single digits with no problem; minus four took it to the ground, and it grew back vigorously. AgriStarts is now starting a variety called Geode. Clones are available now, including a variegated form and a Mexican form, and Dave has plants from Cuba.

The cost of picking. One person can pick 500 to 1,000 pounds of kiwis an hour, at about eight cents a pound. Blueberries run about 150 pounds a day by hand, 40 to 60 cents a pound, which is why larger blueberry plantings of 50 to 100 acres go to machine harvest, which can pick for a dime.

Where golden kiwi grows. Golden kiwi has been tried in California, where growers own the domestic market for green kiwi, but Northern California is too dry and the fruit shrivels. Its home region in China, around Changsha, has a hot, humid climate like Nacogdoches. Golden kiwis store for four months, and New Zealand packs a million trays a week, which makes golden kiwi a worldwide continuous supply.

New pests in East Texas. Dave lists brown marmorated stink bug, spotted wing drosophila, and ambrosia beetle as pests he had never seen before. Crape myrtle bark scale, the pest Dr. Mengmeng Gu made a career out of, is now turning up on callicarpa, a native plant; Ping saw it on the host range trial on callicarpa.

A camellia carrying two varieties. The Camellia of 10,000 Flowers is grafted, with two varieties growing on one tree, woven together. Dave says the tree goes back to the 1400s.

Guanxi. Dave describes guanxi as “the art of relationships, time, trust, friendship, experience.” Ping says it translates to relationship. She adds that in Eastern Asia the older you get, the higher you stand on the social ladder, at least within the family.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: October 4, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Dave Creech was registering for his second semester of agronomy at Texas A&M when J.B. Storey, a six-foot-four pecan professor, grabbed him in the old basketball coliseum, walked him past every registration table, and introduced him as the next great horticulturist. Dave switched majors. Forty-seven years at Stephen F. Austin State University later, he directs SFA Gardens, 138 acres of mostly bottom land that marks its 40th anniversary this year. In this first of two parts, Ping sits down with a horticulturist she first met as a PhD student at Texas A&M.

His favorite plant is bald cypress, a tree that can last 3,000 years. SFA holds 136 cultivars and selections of it along Lanana Creek. Dave follows one of them, ‘LaNana’, from an unexpected email out of Nanjing Botanical Garden, through USDA quarantine at Beltsville, to 2,000 trees headed for Memorial Park in Houston. Then comes ‘Cascade Falls’, a weeper Dave calls gravitationally challenged. A nursery that couldn’t sell it shipped him several tractor trailers of 12-foot trees, and he trained them over steel pipe into a tunnel where people now propose.

Ping and Dave also compare how China and the United States plant trees, from the tree-lined medians of Chinese highways to weeping willows on every lakeshore, and ask why sweet olive stays a minor crop here when Dave once counted 169 varieties at a single conference. Part 1 ends on February 16, 2021, when SFA went to minus four degrees. Dave spent four days trapped at home, and the Asian evergreen magnolias he had praised on garden tours were later finished off by a nine-degree December night. The plants that made it gave him a new rule for any landscape: 80% natives. Part 2 picks up with Ping’s questions on azaleas, camellias, and Japanese maples.

Listen Time: 53:10

Dr. Dave Creech, Professor Emeritus and Director, SFA Gardens, Stephen F. Austin State University. He taught horticulture in SFA’s Department of Agriculture from 1978 to 2007, retired, and was hired back to direct SFA Gardens. He spent his childhood in India, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and Burma (now Myanmar), where his father, an agronomist and former vo-ag teacher, took him along to field plots in Nagpur. He came back to the United States at about 16, moved from agronomy to horticulture at Texas A&M, earned a master’s at Colorado State University on a National Science Foundation fellowship, and finished a PhD in fruit physiology in 1978. His international work has taken him to Guatemala, Mexico, Pakistan, Chile, New Zealand, and, starting in 1994, 27 times to China. Bald cypress is his favorite plant.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture

“I wasn’t a horticulturist, but he made me be one.”

“In horticulture, it’s not just fruit and veggie, but also ornamental.”

“Well, in 1,000 years it’ll own your whole lot, your whole home lot.”

“It is gravitationally challenged.”

“So now my new mantra with this new wisdom is that, plant 80% of your landscape, and the backbone of it, in natives.”

Three cypresses meet in East Texas. Dave describes East Texas as the place where bald cypress and pond cypress meet, with Montezuma cypress genetics from Mexico to the west. He says Taxodium dubium goes back 90 million years, that the genus was once found around the world, and that it now grows only in North America and Mexico.

Montezuma cypress hardiness. Growers long assumed Montezuma cypress was tropical. In 1983 a young Montezuma cypress at SFA, from an area that rarely freezes, came through a hard freeze unharmed. Dave now grows it in Oklahoma. It is less hardy than some bald cypress, and much hardier than anyone expected.

Knees, or pneumatophores. The knees that rise from bald cypress roots are pneumatophores. Their purpose is still debated. Cutting them off does not slow or kill the tree, but landscapers dislike them because they come up wherever there is moisture and tear up lawn mowers. Chinese breeders were the first to cross bald cypress with Montezuma cypress to get rid of the knees.

Seedlings versus clones. In the United States, 99% of bald cypress are grown from seed, and every seedling is different. Clones, made by grafting or rooted cuttings, are identical. In China and other places, cultivars reproduced by grafting or cuttings are the norm.

Juvenility and cuttings. A cutting roots only from a young plant. Dave’s example is a thousand-year-old bald cypress: take a cutting from it and you cannot root it, because the tree has lost its juvenile ability.

Topophysis and plagiotropic growth. A cutting taken from a side branch “thinks it’s a branch” and keeps growing sideways for a while. That is topophysis, and the sideways habit is plagiotropic growth. The fix Dave learned in China: after one year in a one-gallon can, cut the plant back low, and it will send up a good leader. Those trees can grow six feet the second year.

Training a weeping tree. A weeping bald cypress sends its new growth straight down. To make an arch, Dave tied the plants to bows of steel pipe and left the bows in place for two or three years, until the new growth turned to wood and held its shape.

Two years of establishment. SFA’s standard for a new tree is two or three years of care: keep the weeds away, mulch around the plant, dig a decent planting hole, and water. After that, Dave says, a tree “better learn how to live in East Texas.”

Plant patents and sharing. When SFA Gardens began, universities traded plants freely and academia had no patented trees. Patenting took hold in the 1990s, and people grew nervous about giving away plants bound for royalties. SFA puts patented plants it receives into the garden, but keeps them out of its plant sales.

Why the magnolias died. The February 2021 freeze killed SFA’s Asian evergreen magnolias, some six to eight inches in diameter, back to the trunk, and they regrew fast. A December with no freezes and bananas on the banana plants followed, then nine degrees on December 23rd. That second freeze caught the vigorous regrowth and killed the magnolias. Live oak, native along the Gulf South but not in Dallas-Fort Worth, lost seedling trees when Northeast Texas went to minus eight, minus nine, and minus 11.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: September 27, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Donna Fare, a former ARS researcher, had Lisa Alexander smell a branch of osmanthus. The words Lisa reaches for to describe that scent became the title of this episode: apricot, honey, and sunshine. Lisa is a research geneticist at the US National Arboretum, part of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and she breeds hydrangeas, tea olives and other woody ornamentals. For Ping, the smell of Osmanthus fragrans means home. China has been cultivating the species for over 2,000 years.

So why hasn’t tea olive gone further in American markets? Lisa and Ping keep landing on the same reasons. Most Osmanthus fragrans germplasm is in another country, and imported plants sometimes turn out to be all males. Every cross gives exactly one seed, because only one ovule in the four-chambered ovary is ever fertilized, and that seed takes six months to germinate when it germinates at all. Growers mostly propagate from cuttings, and Lisa’s own team is pleased with 50% rooting. Her crosses from 2018 are only now in their third year of field evaluation. From cross to a market-ready tree, she says, is seven to ten years.

Lisa’s program works on those problems from several directions: pre-breeding with microscopy and flow cytometry, open-pollinated seed sorted to its parents with molecular markers, and a firm rule that nothing gets released unless growers can propagate it. Then she describes the plant that could turn the tide, an orange osmanthus that grows through Zone 6, and her dream of a catalog photo showing a front door at Christmas with a blooming Osmanthus fragrans in a pot on each side. The last section stays at the National Arboretum, with how researchers find plants through the National Plant Germplasm System and why USDA wants its collections shared.

Listen Time: 52:55

Dr. Lisa Alexander, Research Geneticist, US National Arboretum, USDA Agricultural Research Service (Floral and Nursery Plants Research Unit). She runs a breeding and genetics program for ornamental landscape plants. Hydrangea is her most active program, oakleaf hydrangea is one of her favorite plants, and tea olive is her other main interest. She also grows fringe tree, an osmanthus relative, and has evaluations and breeding under way for incense cedar and manzanita. Her tea olive trials are in McMinnville, Tennessee. She grew up in the Ridge and Valley of East Tennessee, earned an undergraduate degree in biology, and found plant breeding on a research program with a chestnut breeder. Her background is mainly in forestry.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture

“Apricot, honey, and sunshine. It’s like nothing else.”

“it didn’t just wipe out a tree, it wiped out an entire way of life.”

“And with anything, you know, it only takes one amazing plant to turn the tide.”

“It says the people who plant the tree, and then the next generation will come in and enjoy the shade.”

“We want to be a node of distribution and not, like, a silo of collection.”

Tea olive and its relatives. Osmanthus fragrans is native to China, where it grows as an understory tree in temperate forests. Lisa crosses it with more cold-hardy species, mainly Osmanthus armatus, Osmanthus heterophyllus and cultivars of Osmanthus × fortunei, aiming to recover three traits of fragrans: the upright tree form, the flower fragrance, and the smooth leaf. Many osmanthus cultivars have a holly-shaped leaf, which is less friendly in a garden. Fringe tree is an osmanthus relative.

The four osmanthus groups. On air, Ping describes Sijigui as the group that can bloom through the year when conditions favor it, and says the other three groups bloom only in fall. Lisa finds the four categories confusing even as an osmanthus breeder, and she points to the traits underneath them: flower color, from creamy white through light yellow to bright orange; flower form, from flowers appressed to the stem to longer, more pendulant ones; and bloom time. For the group names, Ping’s UGA Extension Circular 1363, Propagating Sweet Tea Olive (Osmanthus fragrans), written with Yulong Chen, lists Yingui (Albus) with white to pale yellow flowers in autumn, Jingui (Luteus) with yellow flowers in autumn, Dangui (Aurantiacus) with orange flowers in autumn, and Sijigui (Asiaticus) with pale yellow to yellow flowers several times from fall to spring.

Apical dominance. An understory osmanthus is content as a multi-stem shrub. In the presence of light, the leading shoot takes over and the plant shoots up toward it. Some are more shrubby than others, but Lisa says every one of them will train up to tree form or stay a shrub, depending on how you want it shaped.

Heterozygous, outcrossing crops. Osmanthus does not inbreed, so each plant carries a lot of genetic diversity. Cross two medium-sized parents and the seedlings range from a tiny dwarf to a giant tree. The same biology makes it hard to build the F2 populations a geneticist normally uses to tie a trait to a gene (37:38).

Pre-breeding. The work before the crosses that count. Lisa uses flow cytometry to make sure parents have the same genome size, and pollen tube work to learn whether a plant is self-fertile, whether flowers need to be emasculated and bagged, and whether one species’ pollen will take on another.

Parentage reconstruction. Collect open-pollinated seed, extract DNA, and let markers identify the parents. Lisa uses microsatellite markers for this. They are not the newest technology, but they are reliable and affordable enough to run in her own lab every season on each batch of seedlings.

Cold stratification. Temperate species such as Osmanthus heterophyllus need a cold period before their seed will germinate, and Osmanthus fragrans does not. Seed germination work has to be species-specific, which leaves an open question for every hybrid seed: does it need stratification or not?

Semi-hardwood cuttings and grafting. Semi-hardwood cuttings are the most popular way to propagate osmanthus cultivars, with problems in both take and survival of rooted cuttings. A few specialty operations graft, and grafting needs seedling rootstocks.

What a traditional breeder means. Lisa calls herself a traditional plant breeder because she thinks in population-level methods such as recurrent selection and backcross breeding. Most of her tea olive work is “pollen to pistil, get the seed, grow out the seed and look at it.” She is adding controlled-environment testing for cold hardiness, so that screening is not only a matter of whether a plant dies in the field.

Genome-enabled breeding. Through Breeding Insights, ARS aims to give all the crops it breeds the kind of technology-based support the big crops have. For a breeder of non-model woody crops, Lisa says, that is a change from living on the technology crumbs that come down from other species.

The National Plant Germplasm System. The first place a researcher should look for a plant. Its GRIN website shows which osmanthus species, seed especially, the system holds. After that, a researcher who reads that a scientist has trialed a set of plants can reach out, and USDA scientists share material under agreements such as a plant evaluation agreement or a material transfer research agreement.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: September 13, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

John Ruter put 1,200 hibiscus seedlings in the ground and kept seven. The other 1,193 got bush hogged. He is the Armitage Professor of Horticulture at the University of Georgia and the director of the UGA Trial Gardens, and this week he walks Ping through everything that happens between a cross and a plant you can actually buy. It takes ten to fifteen years, and in his case it started with a phone call from a mountain research station.

The superintendent at Blairsville told him to come up and look at his hibiscus. When John got there the plants were covered in hibiscus sawfly, which runs four generations a year in Georgia. His answer came from a native species with hairy leaves. Under the microscope, Hibiscus grandiflorus looked like old shag carpet, and it had zero feeding damage. Moving that hairiness into his red-leaved selections cost him an F2 and a backcross and several years, and it produced the first hardy hibiscus ever released with sawfly resistance. Five of those plants became the Head Over Heels series.

There is a lot here beyond hibiscus. John explains why an Asian species and an American species usually will not make a fertile hybrid, using a dance-floor image that lands in one sentence. He explains why hardy hibiscus cannot be propagated offshore like almost everything else in the trade, why every cultivar he releases starts with the letters RUT, and what he does with graduate students that put three of them in first, second and third place at the same symposium. Ping brings her own hibiscus story too, from Chengdu, where Hibiscus mutabilis is the city flower.

Listen Time: 52:28

Dr. John Ruter, Armitage Professor of Horticulture, University of Georgia, and Director of the UGA Trial Gardens. He teaches three courses and runs an ornamental plant breeding program covering both herbaceous and woody plants. Past and current work includes hibiscus, Ilex, camellias, conifers, Salvia, Pycnanthemum and Lagerstroemia. His first release, the holly Emerald Colonnade, is now used as a boxwood replacement on estates.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture

“And we ended up picking seven out of 1,200 to keep.”

“it looked like old shag carpet growing on the leaves, and we noticed that they had zero damage”

“The hybrid ends up with three sets of chromosomes and somebody doesn’t have a dance partner.”

“So it’s always a number game.”

“I don’t baby them, I don’t hold their hand, I don’t call them every day and say this is what you’re doing today.”

Hibiscus sawfly. A Hymenoptera insect, so it sits in the bee family. The larvae are what chew the foliage. The adults look like a little black fly with a red orange thorax. Georgia gets four generations a year, which is why it turns into a real production problem rather than a nuisance.

Trichomes. Plant hairs. Hibiscus grandiflorus is loaded with them, and that physical barrier is what gives it complete sawfly resistance. Breeding the trait in has a visible cost: the trichomes shift the red foliage toward a matte red-gray rather than a glossy red.

Lodging. John gives the definition himself. It is an agronomic term for falling over, and it was one of the original flaws he set out to fix in the hardy hibiscus of the late 2000s, alongside late spring emergence.

Heterosis. Also called hybrid vigor. His mutabilis by taiwanensis F1 hybrids hit ten to twelve feet in a single season, which is the effect working exactly as advertised and also more plant than any nurseryman wanted.

Ploidy, and why crosses fail. The hardy hibiscus native to the eastern United States are diploids, two sets of chromosomes. The Asian species, including Hibiscus mutabilis, taiwanensis and Hibiscus syriacus, the Rose of Sharon, are generally tetraploids with four sets, and their base chromosome number is different too. Cross a diploid with a tetraploid and the offspring gets three sets. One set has nothing to pair with at meiosis, and the plant is sterile. John compares such a hybrid to a mule.

Cultivar name versus marketing name. The cultivar name is the permanent botanical identifier and it is often deliberately nonsensical, which is why UGA settled on the RUT prefix for everything out of John’s program. The trademark or marketing name is what appears on the pot, and in the last ten to fifteen years the companies have wanted to choose that themselves, along with the series name.

The one-year patent clock. In the United States, a public disclosure that reads as an offer for sale starts a twelve-month window to file a plant patent. That is why an unreleased selection photographed on a garden tour, or printed in a catalog by accident, becomes an urgent filing rather than a minor problem.

Mountain mint. John’s program holds 16 or 17 of the 19 native Pycnanthemum species and has just finished a four-year garden trial. Only two named cultivars exist. It is a strong pollinator plant, and the species are distinct enough that you can often tell them apart by the scent of the foliage.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: August 30th, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Gamma rays, seedless shrubs, and the unglamorous skill that still beats every fancy technique.

There is a cobalt source on the Oregon State campus, and Dr. Ryan Contreras uses it on plants. He describes the method with a shrug and a movie line: “The Forrest Gump, life is like a box of chocolates. We never know what we’re going to get. We’re just taking a shotgun and pointing it and blasting and then growing out populations of those looking for useful variation.” That is mutagenesis, one tool among many in a program that keeps germplasm or small projects on close to 50 genera.

Ping asked Ryan for the whole toolkit, and he gives it: sexual recombination as the workhorse, crossing elite by elite to move fire blight resistance into a plant the industry already likes, ploidy manipulation to make seedless forms the way a triploid banana is seedless, chemical and radiation mutagenesis, targeted gene editing, and the tissue culture step that woody plants keep refusing to cooperate with. He explains why ornamental breeders rarely backcross, since woody plants suffer from inbreeding depression and many will not self-pollinate at all. Then he shows where the ideas actually come from: a Kolkwitzia he taught for years because it was climbing over a seven-foot privacy fence onto the sidewalk, a Philadelphus madrensis whose fragrance reached him from a hundred feet away at the Santa Cruz Arboretum, and growers in Oregon asking him to fix cherry laurel.

Underneath the techniques runs an argument that will not go out of style, because it never went in. The technique Ryan relies on most is walking the plots and looking at plants, and he has thirteen years of lilac sequencing without a validated marker to show for the alternative. He is unusually candid about the misses too: a triploid Cotoneaster with pink flowers, good fall color, and total fire blight resistance that nobody wanted because it had no berries, and a flat admission that some of what he releases over a career will be duds. Growers, students, and anyone who has wondered how a new shrub gets to a garden center will find something to take home.

Listen Time: 52:52

Dr. Ryan Contreras, Professor, Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University. Ornamental and woody plant breeder, at OSU since December 2009. He earned his PhD with Dr. John Ruter at UGA (Tifton), his master’s with Dr. Tom Ranney at NC State, and his first taste of plant breeding as an undergraduate working with Denny Werner on Buddleja.

Dr. Ping Yu, host, UGA Department of Horticulture.

The toolkit, plainly explained. Ryan starts from the idea that breeding is not a complicated science: create variation, then choose. Everything else is method. He walks through recombination, elite by elite crossing, ploidy manipulation for seedless forms, EMS and gamma mutagenesis, transgenics, and targeted editing, and he is honest about where woody plants stall. Corn, cotton, soy, and wheat have chromosome-level genome assemblies and known gene targets. Nursery crops mostly do not, and regeneration from undifferentiated callus is the bottleneck.

Ideas arrive by accident as often as by plan. The Philadelphus breeding program at OSU exists because a fragrance carried a hundred feet across the Santa Cruz Arboretum and Ryan went to find its source. The Kolkwitzia project exists because the only teaching specimen he could reach was hanging over a fence, bulletproof and far too big.

A grower said no, and the program changed. Ryan brought polyploid arborvitae that would not brown in winter to A&R Spada Farms and heard “I don’t care about that.” Customers call about winter browning, the nursery tells them to wait two months, the plants green up, and the calls stop. What the grower wanted instead was spruce spider mite resistance, which costs real money every season.

Who the plants are for. His triploid Cotoneaster survived 4 degrees Fahrenheit unprotected in a container, resists fire blight, roots well, and has pink flowers and good fall color. It has no berries, so the market passed. He kept a few plants and took the lesson.

Advice for students. Learn how the plants are grown before anything else. In his program nobody leaves without doing flow cytometry, looking at pollen under a microscope, sticking cuttings, and processing seed. His closing plug is for IPPS, where students meet growers and see operations.

“You go to the field, and you go to the field some more, and when the wheat plants start to talk to you, you’ve made it.”

“I would say, I think of it like at a lot of nurseries, the lowest paid person is the most important person, it’s the watering.”

“I’m not breeding plants for what I think I want. I’m breeding plants for what people who are in the industry, what they need and what they want.”

“There’s no shortage of nearly unattainable goals. We want a plant to get three feet in one year and then not grow anymore, require no fertilizer and flower 52 weeks a year.”

“So everything is gonna come back around and it takes me 17 years to release a cultivar.”

Creating variation, then choosing. Ryan’s working definition of plant breeding: observe variation and select something better for the trait you care about. Sexual recombination, through a deliberate cross or collected seed, remains the most common and easiest way to get that variation.

Elite by elite. Crossing two good parents does not mean two perfect parents. In Cotoneaster, Ryan takes a plant that grows well in production and has the shape the industry wants but lacks fire blight resistance, and crosses it with a resistant plant to bring the two together.

Ploidy manipulation. Doubling or changing the number of chromosome sets. In Ryan’s program the most common reason is seedlessness: bananas are triploid, and triploidy renders them seedless. The same trick applied to nursery crops removes unwanted fruit and volunteer seedlings.

Mutagenesis, targeted and not. Non-targeted mutagenesis uses chemicals such as ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) or physical mutagens such as x-rays and gamma rays. OSU’s radiation center has fast neutrons and a cobalt source that gives off gamma radiation. Targeted editing is the newer path and depends on knowing which gene to aim at.

The regeneration bottleneck. Gene editing and transgenics usually require regenerating a whole plant from undifferentiated callus tissue. Most woody ornamentals will not do it. New work on introducing CRISPR through non-tissue-culture-based methods would remove that step, which Ryan calls another huge leap forward.

Backcrossing and inbreeding depression. A backcross means crossing a hybrid offspring back to one of its parents, as Ping defines it in the episode. Woody ornamentals are highly heterozygous and tend to suffer from inbreeding depression, and many will not self-pollinate. Hibiscus syriacus cultivars mostly self at very low rates, and the few seeds you get are weaker. Ryan’s workaround is what he calls a pseudo-backcross: existing Hibiscus syriacus by Hibiscus paramutabilis hybrids crossed back to H. syriacus for cold hardiness, improving on Tosca, Lohengrin, and Resi.

Remontancy and reblooming. Repeat flowering reset customer expectations for whole genera: Encore azaleas, Endless Summer hydrangeas, Knock Out roses. Environment can fake it. ‘Palibin’ lilac has no reblooming genes, but shear it in early spring and it will flower in July, which Ryan saw in full bloom at Van Essen Nursery in late July. Telling a gene from a management effect is why field observations get validated with markers.

Markers and QTLs, in perspective. Marker-assisted breeding has clear wins: nematode resistance in peanut, and the hazelnut program next door to Ryan that broke eastern filbert blight. His lilac work has been running since 2013 without a validated, effective marker, which is why he keeps asking whether a technique is getting him closer to a cultivar.

Pest and disease terms from the episode. Shot hole disease and seediness in cherry laurel (Laurocerasus), western cherry fruit fly and the shipping restrictions it creates for Oregon growers, fire blight in Cotoneaster, spruce spider mite in arborvitae, and rhodoxanthin, the pigment behind that brown or purple cast on ‘Smaragd’ arborvitae in winter.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: August 16, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Growers spent years assuming the red-headed flea beetle flew in from the field edge. Dr. Shimat Joseph went looking for it out there and found almost nothing. When his lab sampled the landscapes around Georgia container nurseries, the beetle simply was not present, and nobody was reporting it as a landscape problem either. The pest was already home. The well-drained pine bark container that growers built for their plants turns out to be the exact combination of drainage and moisture retention the larvae need, which means the nursery is not being invaded so much as hosting a permanent resident.

Dr. Ping Yu walks Dr. Joseph through the whole animal in this episode. Why the name has three separate parts to it, red for the tinge on the forehead, flea for the powerful hind leg that lets it jump, beetle for the chewing mouthparts. What the damage actually looks like as adults rasp the tissue between the veins until the leaf shot-holes, skeletonizes, and drops. Why a plant that would be perfectly healthy in a garden is worthless in a nursery, because ornamental stock sells on looks. And how the whole cycle, egg to adult, can turn over in about a month at 80 to 85 degrees.

What makes the conversation unusual is how often the answer is “we don’t know yet.” Sex ratio, eggs per female, how long adults live, how many times they mate: Dr. Joseph declines to guess on all of it, and explains why guessing would be worse than admitting the gap. There is still plenty here for growers to act on, including which products his trials screened as effective, why an April drench or granule application can protect a block for months, and why protecting one block just pushes the beetles onto the next one over.

Listen Time: 42:17

Dr. Shimat Joseph, Associate Professor, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia (Griffin campus). Dr. Joseph works on insect problems in turf and ornamental systems, in nurseries and landscapes. He joined UGA in 2017, and red-headed flea beetle is the main focus of his nursery work. His lab publishes applied research and a blog for the turf and ornamental industries.

The industry assumption was backwards. The long-held view was that beetles flew in from surrounding landscape, fed on weeds along the field edges, and worked their way in. Dr. Joseph’s sampling found none in the landscapes at all, and no reports of the beetle as a landscape pest. His conclusion is that the major driver is the nursery itself.

The container is a purpose-built habitat. Larvae need moisture but not standing water. Pine bark in a nursery container drains fast and still retains moisture, which is precisely the balance the beetle needs. Growers optimized their substrate for plant roots and accidentally optimized it for this pest too.

Only one life stage costs money. Larvae feed on roots in the container, but Dr. Joseph’s team has found no evidence of economic root damage. Adults are the destructive stage, because ornamental crops are sold on appearance and shot-holed foliage does not sell.

Timing cannot be modeled the usual way. Generations three and four overlap so heavily that they cannot be told apart, and different host plants speed up or slow down development. That rules out the growing degree day approach that works for many other pests.

Protecting one block moves the problem. Spray a block of hydrangea and that block is protected, but the beetles get pushed onto neighboring plants they would not normally choose. Understanding that movement is an active research question in the lab right now.

“And I think the containers in the nurseries are providing exactly that, and they just love it and they just stay there and continue their population.”

“We can guess it, but I think the guessing may not be right here. So that’s why I’m not giving a number to it.”

“But eventually what happens is that they’re, they’re– we are pushing them to other plants and, uh, where they normally won’t go.”

“It is good enough that different growers can strategize that according to their marketing window.”

“There’s a lot of going on behind the scene where the plant is growing, and they have all those interactions with the pest, and they have to combat the whole challenges to be able to come to your door.”

Systena frontalis is the scientific name for the red-headed flea beetle. It is not spoken in the episode, and is included here so listeners searching for the research have the right term.

Chrysomelidae is the beetle family Dr. Joseph names in the episode, the leaf beetles. It is a large and varied group, and Japanese beetle belongs to it as well. Red-headed flea beetle is a leaf feeder within that family, and while it can feed on flowers, no flower damage has been observed in Dr. Joseph’s work.

Three parts to one name. Red for the reddish tinge on the forehead. Flea for the enlarged hind leg that powers the jump. Beetle for the hardened forewings and the biting, chewing mouthparts.

Chewing versus piercing mouthparts. Beetles crush and ingest leaf tissue with mandibles. Contrast that with a mosquito, whose mouthparts form a straw containing six needles, called stylets, used to inject saliva and digest tissue before drawing it up. That difference in mouthparts is what separates the damage signatures growers see in the field.

Shot hole describes the small perforations left after adults feed repeatedly on the same leaf area. Tissue is rasped away, the fed area sinks, disintegrates, and opens.

Skeletonization is the end state. Adults feed on the tissue between the veins, and with enough feeding only the vein network remains before the leaf drops.

Instar means a stage between molts. Insects grow inside a rigid exoskeleton and cannot expand gradually the way we do, so they shed and rebuild. Dr. Joseph’s team believes red-headed flea beetle passes through about three larval instars, though the number is not confirmed.

Molting is that shedding process. Dr. Joseph corrects himself on air from “eclosion” to “molting,” a useful distinction: eclosion refers to emergence, typically from the egg or the pupa.

Holometabolous describes complete metamorphosis, where the larva looks nothing like the adult and reorganizes entirely during a pupal resting stage. Monarch butterfly is the familiar example Dr. Joseph reaches for.

Phenology is the study of the timing of biological events across a season, which is what Dr. Joseph’s graduate student is mapping for this pest.

The numbers stated in the episode: eggs laid from the surface down to about 10 centimeters deep, roughly three weeks as larvae, a couple of weeks as pupae, about six days for a new adult to feed and mate, and about one month for the full egg-to-adult cycle at 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Cooler weather stretches all of it out.

Endosymbionts are microorganisms living inside an insect, such as specific gut bacteria, that can skew the sex ratio of a population. Dr. Joseph raises them as a possible explanation for sex ratio questions his lab has not yet studied in this beetle.

Foliar spray treats the leaf surface and targets adults. Drench applies product to the growing medium, and granules release it into the container over time. Drench and granule applications made early, around April, can leave residues that stop adults feeding for multiple months.

Multi-pronged is Dr. Joseph’s own framing. A single foliar spray on a single crop will not solve this, because adults simply move to another block and complete a generation there.

Dr. Joseph names four chemistries. What follows is current label and registration context, verified after recording, so growers can act on it correctly. This is background, not a recommendation. The label is the law, and product registration, rates, sites, and restrictions must be confirmed for your state before any application.

| Named on air | Active ingredient | Notes verified after recording |

Resistance management. The IRAC group numbers above matter for rotation. Alternating products that share a group does not slow resistance, and this pest gets hit repeatedly across four overlapping generations in a season.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: August 2, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

In 1951, nurseries still grew plants in tin cans, and information on rooting hormones was hard to come by. The society that formed to close that gap, the International Plant Propagators Society, is now the International Plant Production Society, and its Southern Region leads every IPPS region in the world for membership. Dr. Ping Yu sits down with Brie Arthur, “Brie the Plant Lady,” International Delegate and Communications Director for IPPS Southern Region, to explain how a 75-year-old organization keeps drawing in the next generation.

Brie has been part of IPPS for more than a decade, and she traces nearly every mentor in her career back to it: Fred Davies, David Creech, Tom Saunders, Tom Yeager. She walks through the region’s scholarships, including the Coach Vince Dooley Student Scholarship and the Margie Jenkins First-Time Conference Attendee Scholarship, and tells the story of the 2014 Early Career Exchange that sent her to Denmark. Ping adds her own memory of meeting Tom Yeager at the 2019 student competition and feeling, in her words, like she had met a celebrity.

The conversation keeps returning to one idea: plants bring people together, but the people are the reason anyone gathers. Ping and Brie make the case for showing up in person, for the talk on the bus and the conversation at dinner that no webinar reproduces. Whether you grow plants for a living, teach horticulture, or picked it up in retirement, there is a seat for you. The next meeting is in Houston, October 2026.

Listen Time: 48:07

Brie Arthur (“Brie the Plant Lady”), International Delegate and Communications Director, IPPS Southern Region. A Purdue-trained horticulturist who was introduced to IPPS as an undergraduate, Brie now focuses on consumer horticulture and food gardening, translating technical nursery research for master gardeners and home growers.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu, UGA Department of Horticulture, and a member of the IPPS Southern Region board.

Brie Arthur: “The mission of IPPS is to seek and share plant knowledge globally, and it is a global network of plant production professionals.”

Brie Arthur: “Plants are what unite us, but it’s the time we spend together that is what truly matters.”

Brie Arthur: “I was the recipient of the exchange program in 2014, and I went to Denmark, and it completely changed my life.”

Dr. Ping Yu: “This organization has lifted me up, and now it’s time for me to pay it forward.”

Brie Arthur: “The future is green.”

From Propagators to Production. IPPS kept its acronym but changed its name from the International Plant Propagators Society to the International Plant Production Society. The reason is structural: a modern nursery might specialize only in young plants, or only in growing those plants on to finish. “Production” covers the whole cycle rather than one step of it.

Why 1951 mattered. When IPPS started, auxins and other natural plant hormones were just being discovered, and there was no easy way to share rooting techniques without a society and its published proceedings. The original purpose was to let academics get propagation information to a young, growing nursery profession.

Propagation, plainly. A nursery produces plants from seed, cutting, or graft. Improved, well-bred genetics are often patented, which is part of why young-plant nurseries exist: they can manage the royalties before the plant moves down the production line.

Substrates and particle size. Brie points listeners to the soilless substrate research of Dr. Jeb Fields (formerly LSU, now University of Florida) and Dr. Brian Jackson. Particle size governs how long a mix holds water and fertilizer. Stratified substrates layer different particle sizes for better performance, but they need multiple potting machines, so commercial adoption is slow. Home container gardeners can use the same idea without the machinery.

Hot pots and sun scald. Dr. Jeremy Pickens gave a talk this year on how dark containers heat the root zone as summers get hotter. White containers keep roots cooler, which is why Brie tells home growers to use ornamental white pots for container tomatoes to reduce sun scald.

Southern native trees and shrubs. Margie Jenkins built one of Louisiana’s most important nurseries specializing in southern natives, a category Brie says still needs more development.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: July 19, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Most of us start the day with a cup of coffee and never think about the plant it came from. Dr. Leo Lombardini has thought about it for years. Head of the Horticulture Department at the University of Georgia and former director of the Borlaug Center for World Coffee at Texas A&M, Leo walks Ping through the whole journey: from a tiny white flower on a tropical shrub to the seed inside a coffee cherry to the roasted bean in your grinder.

Along the way you will learn why only about three of the 133 species in the Coffea genus end up in your cup, what “shade-grown, mountain-grown” actually does to flavor, and how three different processing methods (natural, honey, and washed) change a coffee before it ever reaches a roaster. Leo also explains a fact that surprises most drinkers: caffeine content barely moves during roasting, so a dark roast is not a stronger jolt.

By the end, Leo leaves every coffee drinker with a simple habit for the next trip to the store, and a reminder that behind every bag is a farmer who spent long days in the field. This one is for anyone who loves their morning ritual and wants to taste it a little differently tomorrow.

Listen Time: 55:23

Dr. Leo Lombardini has been Head of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Georgia since 2019. A native of Florence, Italy, Leo earned his PhD at Michigan State and spent years at Texas A&M, where he directed the Borlaug Center for World Coffee and studied pecan for roughly 15 years. His research spans coffee and pecan, and he co-led a USAID-funded project helping nine Central American countries fight coffee leaf rust.

“So most of the coffee we drink, certainly specialty coffee, comes from the Coffea arabica species, which is one of 133 species in the Coffea genus.”

“According to statistics, there are over two million jobs in the United States that revolve around coffee.”

“When you look at a coffee bean, one side is flat and one side is curved, because the two flat sides face each other.”

“If the coffee is good, you literally don’t have to add any sugar or any creamer or milk or whatever. You just drink it straight, and that’s really how you can evaluate the quality of coffee.”

“There’s so much work behind a cup of coffee, and so much sweat, and time spent in the field, just like for all horticulture crops. Never forget that behind anything we eat, there’s a farmer.”

The Coffea genus. There are 133 species of coffee, most of them native to Africa, and Madagascar alone holds 67 of them. Only about three are cultivated: Coffea arabica (roughly 65% of world consumption), Coffea canephora, known as Robusta (about 35%), and Coffea liberica (under 1%, mostly consumed locally). Arabica is prized because it is the mildest.

Arabica vs. Robusta. Arabica came from the western highlands of Ethiopia, a cool, cloudy, high-altitude cloud forest, and it evolved as a shade plant under larger trees. That is why shade-grown, mountain-grown Arabica reaches the highest quality, with ideal temperatures around 70 to 80 degrees. Robusta comes from lowland equatorial Africa across a much larger range, so it tolerates heat and resists pests and diseases better thanks to a broader genetic pool. Many modern Arabica varieties carry a little Robusta ancestry from hybridization that added disease resistance.

Coffee leaf rust. A fungal disease and the worst threat to the coffee crop. The 2012–2013 Central American outbreak combined climate, new fungal strains, and economic pressure into what Leo calls a “perfect storm.”

The coffee cherry. The fruit resembles a cherry, but unlike a cherry it holds two seeds surrounded by a sugary, watery pulp. Because that pulp ferments and rots fast once the fruit is bruised at harvest, processing has to start immediately.

Three ways to process. Natural: whole fruits dry in the sun on patios or raised beds for two to three weeks, and the pulp dries onto the seed, common where water is scarce, such as Yemen. Honey: a depulper removes the pulp, and the seeds dry with their sticky mucilage (a pectin, the same kind used for jams) still on. Washed: the pulp is removed and the seeds soak in water tanks for 24 to 48 hours, where natural yeasts ferment and break down the mucilage. After any method, seeds are dried to 10 to 12% moisture so they will not germinate or spoil.

Green coffee. Beans are shipped unroasted in 60-kilogram bags. Green beans are hard, taste grassy, and smell nothing like coffee. Only roasting develops the familiar aroma and flavor.

Roasting: time and temperature. Drum roasters work like a clothes dryer at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, with each cycle running roughly 18 to 22 minutes. Roasters trade time against temperature to hit a target roast level. Caffeine (about 1 to 1.5% of the dry bean) is stable and does not change during roasting. Acidity, counterintuitively a marker of high quality in coffee, decreases the longer beans roast, so light-to-medium roasts let you taste a coffee’s best traits.

Why caffeine is there at all. Caffeine is an alkaloid the plant produces as a natural deterrent against pests and diseases, packed most heavily into the seeds to protect the next generation.

Reading the label. “100% Arabica” tells you something about quality. A bag that says only “100% coffee” means some Robusta is blended in.

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: July 5, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

A tag you never have to look at. That’s the promise behind the RFID work Dr. Jim Robbins and Dr. Joe Maja have been chasing for the better part of two decades — a way to walk past a block of containers, or fly over it, and know exactly what’s there without picking up a single pot. In Part 2 of this special two-parter, Ping picks the conversation back up where it left off, this time digging into the applied research: how passive UHF tags work, what a drone-mounted reader can do that a barcode scanner can’t, and why the real payoff isn’t counting plants — it’s tracing them from propagation all the way to the checkout line.

Joe walks through the practical side a grower actually cares about: traditional tags versus RFID, where to start (small, with a single block or a high-value crop), how to pick a vendor who understands that moisture and container materials change everything, and the honest math on cost. Jim fills in the origin story and the “lower step” version of the system for nurseries that aren’t ready to tag every plant. Along the way the two of them land on the lessons that only show up after twenty years in the field — that simple beats sophisticated, that reliability matters more than precision, and that the projects that actually work are the ones where engineers, horticulturists, and growers are all in the room.

Then they look down the road: integrated systems where drones, RFID, robots, and AI finally talk to each other, a realistic adoption forecast, and a warm closing on why collaboration — the kind that built this whole project — is the thing worth betting on. Recorded with Joe joining live from Japan.

Listen Time: 29:18

“The advantage is that it doesn’t require line of, line of sight. And if we could attach the plant… And then just fly over the top and simply count these things, we thought this was brilliant.” — Jim Robbins (02:11)

“Instead of scanning one plant at a time, you can scan hundreds or even thousands of plants in a matter of seconds.” — Joe Maja (09:15)

“It’s not just about inventory, it’s about connecting the entire life cycle.” — Joe Maja (12:12)

“We’ve also seen that reliability is often more important than precision. A system that works consistently, even if it’s not perfect, is more valuable than one that’s highly precise but unreliable.” — Joe Maja (13:48)

“The interest has clearly shifted from ‘What is this?’ to ‘How do I use this?’ And that’s usually a strong sign that the technology is moving toward mainstream adoption.” — Joe Maja (16:16)

“You guys set a great example of how collaboration works and how collaboration matters.” — Ping Yu (27:39)

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: June 28, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱

Sometimes the most interesting plant science doesn’t come from a plant person at all. In this special two-part episode, Ping sits down with two collaborators who’ve spent fifteen years figuring out how drones can work in nursery and greenhouse production — Dr. Jim Robbins, a retired University of Arkansas extension specialist who’s loved plants since he was fifteen, and Dr. Joe Maja, an engineer who freely admits he wasn’t a plant person before the two of them met. Their accidental partnership, sparked by a 2009 question about counting plants in a field nursery, is the thread that runs through the whole conversation.

Part 1 is the grower’s field guide. What actually counts as a “drone,” and why does 55 pounds matter so much? Which license do you need — Part 107, Part 137, or both — and who regulates what? What are the five things a nursery can realistically do with a drone right now, from five-hundred-dollar marketing cameras to RFID inventory readers Joe is shrinking small enough to fly? And the question Ping keeps circling back to: does any of this actually pencil out, or should you just hire someone to fly for you?

Whether you’re a commercial grower weighing your first purchase, a student curious about precision ag, or a plant lover who likes a good origin story, this one rewards a full listen. Part 2 takes the conversation deeper into the RFID inventory work itself.

Listen Time: 66:20

Follow Along with the Transcript

“The choice shouldn’t be driven by the platform itself. It should be driven by the application. Whether it’s imaging, monitoring, or spraying, the key question is: what problems are you trying to solve?” — Dr. Joe Maja

“Think of your driver’s license — just a regular driver’s license. But if you wanted to be a certified CDL, it’s a much more expensive and involved process. And the same is true once we jump above 55 pounds.” — Dr. Jim Robbins

“The outdoor environment is very rough on engineered solutions.” — Dr. Jim Robbins

“I wasn’t a plant person before working with James, and my training was purely in engineering, so I approached everything from a systems and problem-solving perspective.” — Dr. Joe Maja

“I think the future solution is less about different hardware and more about smarter software.” — Dr. Joe Maja

Blooms and Beyond explores plant history, culture, and management through the lens of science. Whether you’re a commercial grower seeking practical solutions, a student exploring careers in horticulture, or simply someone who loves plants and their stories, there’s something here for you. Hosted by Dr. Ping Yu of the University of Georgia, each episode features interviews with experts who share enchanting stories, cutting-edge research, and practical wisdom from the world of horticulture.

Your benefit: After each episode, commercial growers will have at least one useful tip for their operation, and plant enthusiasts will have an interesting fact to share. That’s how we spread plant power to more people and make our environment a little better.

Host: Dr. Ping Yu

Episode Release Date: June 21, 2026

“Till next time, stay healthy and go plants!” 🌱