UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State President Eric Barron will be joined by two experts from The Arboretum at Penn State to talk about the Pollinator and Bird Garden and upcoming events and expansion plans in the next episode of WPSU’s “Digging Deeper” on Sunday, April 24.
Barron will be joined by Shari Edelson, director of operations at the Arboretum, and Harland Patch, assistant professor of entomology and director of pollinator research at the Arboretum, to discuss the three-acre garden, which opened in June 2021.
“Digging Deeper” will air at 10:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. on WPSU-TV and can be streamed on live.wpsu.org. WPSU is a Penn State Outreach service. Previous episodes are stored at wpsu.org/diggingdeeper.
More than 600 volunteers — students, community members, researchers, bird enthusiasts and master gardeners from around the state — helped to create the new gardens, planting more than 100,000 individual plants, Edelson said.
The garden itself is built “from science up,” Patch said. “I don't know of any other bird and pollinator garden in the world that is built from so much science.”
The plants in the garden were chosen to attract insects and birds that live in central Pennsylvania, he said. “We did our homework, we figured out what plants support them for their nutrition, things like nectar and pollen, and we put those in the garden,” said Patch. “The reason there are so many plants is because we wanted to support a great variety of biodiversity.”
An automated insect monitoring system called InsectEye being used at the Arboretum was developed at Penn State and uses artificial intelligence to identify insects.
Edelson said one of the goals of the gardens is to broaden people's perspectives and help change landscape management practices.
“When we visit designed landscape spaces like gardens, often we think about those spaces from the perspective of our own aesthetic preferences,” she said. “But choices like leaving a dead tree or leaving perennials up over the winter can make a contribution to species conservation.”
“What we're trying to do is encourage people to think about design landscapes in terms of the value that they can provide for wildlife, and the value that even features like dead trees or standing brush can provide to support organisms at different points in their life cycles,” she said.
Visit the WPSU website for more information on central Pennsylvania’s public media station.