Anybody who has lived through a really tough Chicago winter probably has at one time or another jokingly cursed about the place being like Siberia.
It turns out that is just about right.
Growing proof that Chicago weather has a lot in common with Siberia’s is germinating right now at the Chicago Botanic Garden in north suburban Glencoe. In research greenhouses, tender shoots from seeds of 216 plants never seen before on this continent–trees, shrubs and perennials brought back early in October from the Amur River Valley north of Vladivostok in the Russian far east–are starting to spring up.
“Some day some of these should turn out to be mighty oaks,” Galen Gates said recently at the Botanic Garden, where he is director of plant collections. He was showing off dozens of tiny, leafy sprigs of various Mongolian oak trees that are growing from some of those seeds.
“What makes the Mongolian oak so exciting for us is that they grow within such a broad ecological amplitude,” Gates said.
“That means we found them thriving on high and dry land, low and wet land, hot south-facing slopes and cool north-facing slopes,” he said. “We even found them growing in ocean spray, so they probably have a salt tolerance that would make them very good candidates as street trees around here.”
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Gates led the expedition of five plant-hunting scientists to Russia this year for the Midwest Plant Collecting Collaborative, an organization of botanists and horticulturists from five Midwest botanic gardens and arboretums. Together, they are systematically searching likely places in the world for plants able to survive and thrive in the deep-freeze winters and steambath summers of America’s Upper Midwest.
Siberia, at least its densely forested southern regions, was long suspected as a great trove of plants adaptable to Midwest conditions. Unfortunately, because of the Cold War, for most of this century it was off-limits to American plant hunters.
That changed with the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, the Midwest Collaborative has sent scientists on three Siberian plant-hunting trips.
This year’s 3 1/2-week expedition probably was the most successful scientific plant-hunting expedition, not just in Siberia, but in the long history of botanical exploration anywhere, Gates said.
That is because the scientists were aided by such technological advances as satellite positioning systems to pinpoint the exact location and conditions where each plant and seed was found within an immense, trackless wilderness. Consequently, each plant and seed came home with a wealth of precisely documented scientific information attached to it in a manner not possible even a few years ago.
But looking for plants in Siberia is not just an academic exercise for the Midwest Collaborative’s member institutions–the Botanic Garden and Morton Arboretum in Chicago, Cleveland’s Holden Arboretum, the University of Minnesota’s Landscape Arboretum, and St. Louis’ Missouri Botanical Garden. It is an adventure tinged with the promise of changing the landscaping–if not the landscape–of their home communities.
The hope is, for example, that among the Mongolian oak varieties brought back in October, some will someday be released to the public to broaden and enrich the oak species available to city and suburban yards, parks and boulevards in the Upper Midwest.
It will be many years before Gates and other scientists will know if that is possible. Though little shoots of Mongolian oak varieties are now growing in the greenhouses of the Collaborative’s member institutions, scientists won’t transplant them for a couple of years into outdoor gardens. Then it will take many years of observation to see which, if any, flourish in Upper Midwest weather.
Founded in 1992, the Midwest Collaborative is carrying on a tradition of American horticulture that stretches back at least to Ben Franklin. While Franklin served in France as envoy of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, he began sending home seeds of European plants he thought might transplant well and enrich the biota of the new nation.
That practice has never stopped. American diplomats and soldiers serving abroad once thought it part of their duty to look for plants that might be useful to Americans at home.
The Midwest Collaborative’s plant hunters also follow in the footsteps of scientists who in the late 1890s first began methodically combing the world’s temperate zones for new plants that might have economic, genetic or ornamental value in this country.
Until the last couple of decades, almost all of that exploration was done by East Coast institutions such as Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, the New York Botanic Garden and the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.
Most often they looked for and developed plants well-suited for eastern coastal climates. But such plants can suffer in the much harsher climate deep in the American continent, where seasonal temperature swings are far more dramatic and destructive to plant life.
A handful of Midwestern scientists in the last few decades traveled abroad on a piecemeal basis looking for solutions to specific local environmental problems.
When Dutch elm disease devastated the American elms that graced most Midwestern streets, for example, the Morton Arboretum sent its research director, George Ware, throughout Asia to look for elms that are immune to the disease.
Now organized as the Midwest Collaborative, scientists plan to visit a number of places in the world with Midwestern-like weather, including areas of the Caucasus and the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Europe, Central Asia, northern China, Korea, Japan and parts of Chile.
“It’s a tricky process finding the right places,” said Ware, now retired but still active in research. “Much of our plant exploration is for plants that can survive winter temperatures 20 to 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Sometimes you go to places that are as cold as Chicago in the winter and find the plants you bring back don’t like our 90-degree summers.”
Siberia, covering 5 million square miles, so far is the only place Midwest Collaborative expeditions have gone.
Though Siberia’s northern regions are too arctic to grow much, the marshy woodlands that stretch across its vast southern regions come as close as anywhere in the world to replicating the climate, soils and plant types found in the Upper Midwest.
The 42nd parallel runs through the heart of the Chicago area, making it sort of the geographic center of the Collaborative, other member cities lying a few degrees farther north or south.
On other continents, however, climates at those latitudes are seldom like the American Midwest’s. In Western Europe, those latitudes generally are Mediterranean, in Asia too arid. In the southern hemisphere, the 42nd parallel runs only through narrow slices of New Zealand, Tasmania, Argentina and Chile. Those places have few useful plants that would thrive in America’s heartland.
“If you go to a place where snow is on the ground all winter, you probably won’t find a lot of plants that will do well in Chicago,” Gates said. “Snow insulates plants, so many things will survive a winter if they are under snow for most of the season, but if they are exposed a lot to the cold, as they would be in Chicago, they would perish.”
The plant hunters go to places where seasons generally match the length of Chicago’s seasons.
“There was a variety of scotch pines that had become widely used around here in yard landscaping for 25 or 30 years,” Gates said. “In 1992, during an unseasonal October freeze, they died off in great numbers.
“They obviously came from seed from a warmer area that simply made them unsuitable for Chicago, but nobody knows where they came from.”
Along with surviving annual cold and heat extremes, Midwestern plants also have to thrive in soil that is more alkaline than acidic and that drains poorly because of high clay content.
“If you plant red maples from the East Coast in Chicago, they don’t perform so well,” Gates said.
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Adding up all the variables, southern Siberia turned out to match Chicago surprisingly closely.
The Collaborative’s 1993 Siberian expedition, which Gates accompanied, brought back seeds of 155 kinds of flowers, shrubs and trees from the Altai Mountain region. A much more limited trip the next year to the Lake Baikal region brought seeds of a couple of dozen plants.
Evaluating the various strains of different species takes many years. None, even from the 1993 and 1994 expeditions, is ready to be released to the public, though some are thriving outdoors now both at the Botanic Garden and the Morton Arboretum.
“We have a yellow-flowered phlomis that stands three to four feet tall that has shown great promise through three years of evaluation,” Gates said. “We have a tall delphinium standing six to seven feet that has a flower with a rich blue color that we think will have superior hardiness.
“We’re looking at a number of birch trees that may prove to be extremely attractive for landscaping but have superior resistance to diseases that plague other birches in our area.”
The most successful plants eventually will enter the commercial trade locally through Chicagoland Grows, a consortium created by the Botanic Garden, Morton Arboretum and the Ornamental Growers Association of Northern Illinois. They take a trademark out on the new plants and receive small commissions on each plant sold by local commercial greenhouses and nurseries. The proceeds finance future research.
“Everything we bring back, including things that don’t grow well here, is of scientific value,” Gates said.
“We’re becoming a Noah’s Ark of genetic material, and all this plant material enters our storehouse of germ plasm,” he said. “That germ plasm can be used to improve plant strains in the future, whether it is of immediate value or not.”