Window Garden Wednesday: Amy Litt

Posted in Window Garden Wednesday on March 2 2011, by Plant Talk

Ed. note: Here at the Garden, we are surrounded by plants and knowledgeable plant people, which means that even the average Garden employee/cubicle dweller tends to soak up a lot of information about how to best care for our plants. To many at the Garden, this immersion, combined with a nascent love of plants plus easy access information has driven us to practice what we preach in the form of tending a windowsill garden. On occasional Wednesdays, we’ll introduce you to some of the Garden’s many windowsill gardeners. We hope you enjoy this look at what our window gardeners grow.

Who are you and what do you do at the Garden?
Amy Litt, Director of Plant Genomics and Cullman Curator. I study how plant genes differ among species and how those differences in genes are responsible for differences in plant form and function. In other words I study the genetic basis of plant diversity. I also teach and mentor graduate, undergraduate, and high school students.

What kind of plants do you have in your windowsill garden?
Mostly ferns, and one tiny “living stone.” The latter is a type of desert-adapted plant that grows in the driest parts of Africa. It has almost no stem and very fleshy leaves which store water; it only has 2-4 leaves at a time, and it grows in rocky soil that covers it up to the tops of the fat leaves, to keep it cooler from the hot sun. There are some for sale in the Garden Shop.

Any good stories about where the plants come from?
Well the living stone was a free giveaway at a conference I attended a year ago. It’s sealed with a teeny bit of soil in a tiny plastic cylinder with holes in the bottom so I can give it a bit of water. I’m very proud that I’ve managed to keep it alive.

I grew one of the ferns from spores; we germinated the spores to try to grow the sexual phase of the ferns, and apparently some of them did in fact have sex and a new fern plant grew. It’s a maidenhair fern and very delicate and beautiful. Ferns have a fantastic variety of leaf shapes, some of them very un-fern-like, so I’ve collected a few with what I think are wonderful leaves.

Learned any good windowsill gardening tips while working at the Garden?
We have fantastic light in the Pfizer Lab so as long as we remember to water our plants we really can grow anything.

What’s your favorite thing about working at the Garden?
Well, really, there are two things. One is being able to see such a fantastic diversity of plants from all over the world, including beautiful, weird, rare, and fascinating species. I don’t have to have my own greenhouse, I can visit the Nolen Greenhouses, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the Rock Garden–all of which have more wonderful collections of plants than I could ever amass.

The other is the people. I love my colleagues. Not only in the Pfizer Lab, where I work with a great bunch of curators, students, post-docs, technicians, volunteers, interns, and visitors; and not only in the Science Department, but throughout the Garden. The Garden employs a wonderful group of interesting, friendly, helpful people, and it is really a pleasure to be among them.