Plants, People, Science

Native and Nonnative Ornamentals as Pollinator Plants - A Discussion with Dr. Sandra B. Wilson

• American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) • Season 1 • Episode 3

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In this live episode of Plants, People, Science, Sam and Lara interview Dr. Sandra B. Wilson, a Professor in the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of Florida, to discuss her research, her career, and her advice for young researchers.

The featured article is available on the ASHS HortScience electronic journal website at https://doi.org/10.21273/HORTSCI16123-21.

To learn more about Dr. Wilson and her work go to https://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/faculty-profiles/sandra-wilson/.

Learn more about the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) at https://ashs.org/.
HortTechnology, HortScience and the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science are all open-access and peer-reviewed journals, published by the American Society of Horticultural Science (ASHS). Find them at journals.ashs.org.

Consider becoming an ASHS member at https://ashs.org/page/Becomeamember!

You can also find the official webpage for Plants, People, Science at ashs.org/plantspeoplesciencepodcast, and we encourage you to send us feedback or suggestions at https://ashs.org/webinarpodcastsuggestion.

Podcast transcripts are available at https://plantspeoplescience.buzzsprout.com.

On LinkedIn find Sam Humphrey at linkedin.com/in/samson-humphrey. Curt Rom is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/curt-rom-611085134/. Lena Wilson is at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-wilson-2531a5141/.

Thank you for listening!


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Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. Can you hear me? All right, perfect, all right. So we have a very special guest here who's going to play music for us in a minute. This is Sam Humphrey and Lara Brindisi, and this is our first live interview, so it might be a little bit rough. Thank you for joining us and let's give it away to Dr. John Clark.

Dr. John Clark:

Okay, so this is a newly composed song, especially for the ASHS podcast, so I hope you like it.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Wow, thank you so much. He's running off to his next session, but that is a piece of music that he composed just for this podcast. So when you listen to future episodes, you will hear that music that has never before been heard, except for today. So love that. Hello, welcome, thank you for coming.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

My name is Sam Humphrey and I'm Lara Brindisi and we're the co-host of Plants, people, science, the ASHS American Society for Horticultural Sciences official podcast. So we're going to talk about the layout of our podcast and what our, what our episodes will feature, and then we're going to get into an interview today with Dr Sandra Wilson. Yeah, a little bit of background about this podcast. So we're going to be doing, you know, a series of episodes where we interview the leading scientists in the field, especially if they are members of ASHS, and this will show a little bit behind the scenes of what's going on in the research, but also presenting, you know, the latest research that is just going on in the industry, in the field, whoever is presenting, and normally these shows would be recorded, but we thought it would be really fun to do a live episode so that we can broadcast right here from Chicago, from this conference. All right, so let's talk a little bit about ourselves. Just brief introductions. Hi, I'm Sam. I am a master's student at North Carolina State University and I study strawberries in controlled environments. I did my undergrad at the University of Florida in plant science and I just really love many areas in horticulture. I love soil science and environmental science and how we can change environments to grow plants better, and so I really love the idea that this podcast really will bring together lots of different fields and increase visibility for important work. And I'm Lara. I study basil mainly at the genomics, chemistry, physiology of whole tolerance specifically. I also work on other crops and vertical farming systems and medicinal plants. Really glad to be part of this podcast, so looking forward to getting into the interview today.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

This podcast started. Well, the idea of the podcast started only about five months ago. The ASHS has several plant industries, groups of scientists that come together to talk about areas of their interests, so there are education ones and their communication ones, and a couple of those plants groups showed interest in having a podcast to talk about ASHS and the important work our scientists do, and so they proposed the idea our wonderful cerebellum, which is a very important topic for us to talk about ASHS and the important work our scientists do, and so they proposed the idea. Our wonderful Sarah Powell has brought this to fruition. She transferred that information and recruited us. Several students on the podcast team Us teammates joined.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

We have a team behind just Lara and I and that team includes Alex Fraser, who is our podcast producer, who's interested in environmental science and many other things. There Alex is in the wonderful shirt. We also have a couple of people who are on the sort of research side of this. So Lara and I do the talking and we also will read these papers and do research on our own. But just to add to that expertise, we have other students helping us as well. So on our research team we have Lena Wilson, who is into blueberry breeding. She's a master's student right now at North Carolina State University and she's interested in biotechnology. We also have Andrew Comatz, who also does blueberry breeding but is interested in ecology and sustainability, and he's at the University of Florida. We also have, again, lots of support from our wonderful Sally Murphy and Sarah Powell again. So our team is structured as us two hosts and we'll be doing all the talking, but again we have that team in the background doing the important work that supports this podcast.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yes, we're aiming to have four to six episodes a year that's really the rough guideline and trying to capture all the different aspects of port of culture. So different fields, different perspectives, different crops. I guess fields is a little broad. It could mean literally in the field or fields of research. So I guess we'll incorporate all of it and the emphasis is to look at research that was published in the horticultural journals published by ASHS, especially for members.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So anyone out there in the audience especially that would be interested in being interviewed, feel free to contact us. If you don't have our information yet, we'll share it at the end of the podcast episodes. That way you can reach out to us and we can discuss any future interviews as well. Yeah, yeah, so that is one of the great things that we've had in ASHS. Right, we were just talking about how we've met all of these amazing people who could be on the podcast someday or just have really interesting ideas about our research. You met people like that today, right, Lara? Oh, yeah, I mean I love ASHS. I only just started coming, actually last year, due to Aaron Farr convincing me in the audience.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

I'm going to give her a shout out. But yeah, I really love ASHS. It's been my favorite conference that I've attended so far. I mean, they're just wonderful people that attend. I've been going to so many talks on. Of course, basil has been really popular this year. I don't have to go to as many basil talks as possible, but also controlled environment, agriculture, genomics talks and genetics talks, medicinal plants. It's been a riot.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yeah, I've also really enjoyed the ones that are not so field specific, like there was one really cool like workshop today on undergrad education, there was one the other day on leadership, so a lot of cool stuff going on here. What else have you enjoyed about the conference? Well, just meeting cool people, right. So especially our you know our interviewee today that I would like to introduce.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So we are thrilled to introduce our guest, Dr Sandra Wilson, who is a professor in the Department of Environmental Horticulture at the University of Florida. She has received many awards as an educator and has made outstanding contributions to horticulture, and today we will be discussing her research. So her research is comparative and non-native plants through a discussion on two of her papers that she's published earlier this year in Hort Science. The one we will be discussing today is called the evaluation of native and non-native ornamentals as pollinator plants in Florida. Number one floral abundance and fetus eye tonification.

Dr. John Clark:

Hi, Dr Wilson Hi.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So to serve your full, I'll serve the publication.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Hello everyone. Thank you, Lara and Sam, for this opportunity and also for picking this paper. You never really know the volume of the audience. I mean, you know how many times the papers download it, but you really don't know the impact of the paper. When I got the email from you that it was selected to be featured in this podcast, me and the co-authors and the graduate students certainly were very excited. So thank you very much.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So this project was? It included a collaboration with a B ecologist out of the Department of Entomology named Rachel Malinger. It had a master's degree student on it, Rachel Heather Kaliman, who has graduated and is now working on her Doctor of Plant Medicine program, and then Dr Gary Knox. He's a horticulturist here at ASHS. He couldn't be here right now, but he was an author as well and an statistician. So that was our team. How did you get together? Okay, so how did we get together? Well, the University of Florida has lots of opportunities for, and they want interdisciplinary research, and she had just the B ecologist. That was a new physician, she was just hired and she didn't really know how to grow plants. I knew how to grow plants and also we wanted it to be in more than one location, and Dr Knox is located at one of our research and education centers, and we found this wonderful graduate student, and then the project began.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Thank you so much for that. So for everyone in the audience, who the people in the audience who might not have read this paper, could you describe briefly what it's about?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Okay, so I'll backtrack a little bit. So we got this team together and before we published this paper, one of the first things we did was to survey all of the master gardeners in Florida. We sent the survey out to 4,000 participants and we wanted to get an understanding of the value of be gardening, their interest and also whether or not they, how comfortable they were in identifying the friendly plants and what type of programming they would most likely benefit from. So we did that survey, we published that in the Hort Technology Journal and then that just led to our discussions of the science. And really the question that we were talking about with each other is you know, we see all these plants in the box stores and at the nurseries and they're labeled pollinator friendly. But what does that really mean? Does that mean that that plant attracts pollinators and they're visiting but not using those floral rewards? And at what level? How do you discern if a plant is pollinator friendly or not? So we also collaborated with Jacksonville Zoo that was interested in this type of study, and that's really what got the conversation going. What type of study would we need to get the research to be able to support that question? So what did you find Okay. Well, to give you just a tiny bit of a background of the project, so what we did was we picked 10 different ornamental species and for each of the species we tried to have a native genus and a non-native genus, because that's something we wanted to compare, like did it matter to these pollinators if they were visiting a native versus a non-native? And also we included pentas, and pentas do not have a native counterpart, but they're a huge, they're in every pollinator garden retail center. And so what we did for that one was we included an old-fashioned pentas, sort of like the kind that you find at your grandmother's house, and then we compared that with one of the new F1 hybrid pentas and we arranged that in a Latin square design with plots of those 10 species.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And then we monitored the insect visitation for five second intervals and we recorded that visitation. And we did that by groups. It was too hard to be able to classify it down to the exact species, so we grouped them into native, small and medium-bodied bees, large bees, wasps, butterflies, and there was Thank you, c, thank you. These students are amazing. They, of course. They know the publication more than I do, as Sam just reminded me. The last category was honeybees, and so those were the morpho groups.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Again, this study was conducted in two locations, so that's something we were looking at as well. And then the final element that we assessed was the effect of season, like did visitation change over time throughout the study? So that's to give you a little bit of background information of how that experiment was set up and, to answer Lara's question, what we found. So we recorded 22,000 insect visitations in the collection times that we made and we found that 55% of the visitations were made by the native small to medium-bodied bees and following that was butterflies and then wasps and then honeybees.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And regarding the different species that we looked at, we found the greatest floral intensity or the floral amount was Lantana, both native and non-native. Lantana had the greatest floral density and we found that Galaria both native and non-native Galaria didn't matter which attracted most of the bees. They're very attracted to Galaria and pentas interestingly, had a large population of wasps that used pentas, which is important, and I mean we saw that that visitation decreased, as we might expect, as the season decreased and you know it reminds us that when we're planting pollinator guards we need to consider that insect visitation year-round and provide those fallflowering species and serve them in that capacity. So we did. It was a great experiment. We learned things we didn't even think we were going to learn.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So I have to ask you mentioned that you recorded 22,000 visits. What does it actually look like for the team on the ground? Are they, you know, camping out, staking out the bees and the wasps in the background? What does the research actually look like for people collecting it?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, my graduate student's not here because she couldn't be here, but she would just give you like a great big sigh and she would probably just I don't know have some anxiety, as she remembers being in the hot field all summer long, standing there waiting and really hoping for visitation. Because you know we planted and we hoped they would come, but no one's really sure and you know we always had to choose a certain time of day and full sun and things like that. So, to answer your question, it was very hard in counting those insects and being able to identify those morpho groups. But it was even harder in the follow-up publication where we had to extract the nectar and also the pollen from those plants.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

But wait, hold on. There were two whole plots. There were two locations in Florida separated by what? An hour and a half over three different seasons. Right, was it just her collecting the stator or was it a whole team?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

All right now Sam's making me feel bad as her academic advisor. It was a robust study, but she did have a team of people that came out to help her. Part of that was her training the team so that everybody had the same knowledge base as she did. And to make her life a little bit easier, we did it every other week and then on the opposite weeks. Then she would go to the other location and do that, and the study was a six-month study, so that, you're right, it was a lot of data, yeah, so collecting a lot of data usually means a lot of challenges will pop up along the way.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Can you discuss any challenges that you might have run into in collecting this type of data?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So we all publish those papers where you know in your mind what didn't quite work and you're hoping that that's not going to detract from the reviewers accepting the publication. So this is sort of like behind the scenes Now that these papers are published. Of course, with any field study, there's going to be things that you didn't expect, and we certainly had that whether it was weather differences, differences in the way the fields were managed, with nearby weed management and things like that. And actually probably one of the hardest parts was trying to get all of that plant material from different nurseries, and even some of it we propagated ourselves to be at the same maturity, to start at the same time, and so, since you asked the question, this is good for the students to know that they're not alone when these things happen.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So my graduate student drove to the nursery to pick up the plants. We were scheduled to install the experiment the next day and everything was set up, so it needed to be done that day. And she got to the nursery and these were special plants that they had ordered for our experiment. Well, somebody didn't realize that they were for our experiment and they didn't belong at the nursery, so they were put to pasture, I'll just put it mildly.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And when we got there they had this kind of look like which plants are you here to pick up? And so that was one of the pentas, one of we had two pentas that was one of the pentas, and so they actually had to go out to the nurseries holding area where they got rid of the plants that they weren't going to use, and it had just been that morning so they were able to pull them out, but those plants hadn't recovered from that shock. So what we had to do is hold those plants and then incorporate those plants into the next study that we published as part two. And those things just happen and you just roll with it.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yeah, so to bring up the nursery involvement, what does the demand look like for these native plants in the nursery, since apparently your research plants are really a hot commodity for consumers?

Dr. John Clark:

I mean.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

I feel like Lara and Sam asked the best questions ever, because that is an excellent question. So, even though there's a surge in popularity with native plants, really it only represents a very small fraction of our industry. In Florida, that's 15.5% of ornamental sales are consists of native plants, so it is a small amount. And many of the large scale nurseries, which Riverview Farms was the they donated all the plant material for us and helped us to decide which plants we should include in the study, like which ones they observed were pollinator friendly, and but they didn't sell the natives. They sold improved hybrids that might have had some of the native germ possum, but it wasn't just the natives. So we had to go to another nursery that only produces natives and they produce those by seeds, whereas the other plants were mostly vegetatively propagated. So, to answer your, I think that answered your question.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So it sounds like a lot of people in Florida will grow these native flowering plants and it sounds like there are kind of pollinators. But are there any further benefits to the environment or to ecology aside from the pollinators?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, I just love native plants. I think that they're just special because they've been here before we were here. I mean, they've survived hardships for many, many, many years and they're accustomed to our rainfall and to our seasons of drought and all of that, and that makes them more durable. It makes them require less maintenance than some of our non natives and also they bring a great amount of diversity, biodiversity, to our gardens, and there's just lots of them. I mean, they've been used medicinally and historically for dyes and food and fiber, and they just have a really rich heritage and it makes sense to see them come back, so that natives are kind of our new norm.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So I did get to go to your talk this morning and I saw pictures that you put up of these native plants and they are quite stunning, some of them really crazy, horrible, and you're talking about non-natives and how they've been bred to look a certain way. How does this influence the number of flowers or the flower structures, and how does that compare to native, to non-native plants and how does that influence pollinating efforts?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So that was really the big question. You know, the goal of the study is to understand that question and we only had 10 species in the study. But what we found is that, statistically, if you were to compare natives and non-natives just with these plants that we studied, they didn't. Statistically the non-native plants didn't attract pollinators less than the native plants. But you have to remember we chose non-native pollinator plants that the industry picked for us, that they saw attracted natives. So in a little bit we kind of skewed the scale regarding that. And what else did you ask?

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yeah, I mean I think that addresses the question. I guess when I hear non-native plants, sometimes I think of these doubly peddled flowers that no longer have their reproductive structures and aren't then attracting any bees. But if you are selecting the ones that are pollinator friendly in the industry, then yeah, that probably helps that problem right.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Yeah, so exactly, that's exactly right. So sometimes the analogy that I like to use is have you ever been to the store and bought a rose and been so disappointed because the rose didn't have that nice fragrance that you were hoping for? Well, sometimes that happens in our breeding efforts I mean, we're breeding better plants that have novel flowers and better forms and things like that but sometimes the consequence could be whether or not that's changing pollinator visitation patterns or the floral resource of nectar or pollen, and that's really what we were looking at. And one of the really interesting things of this study is that we compared a native Lantana with a Lantana that's called Blumify Rose.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

That's a University of Florida release of a sterile form of invasive plant. So in order to get that Lantana approved for release, they had to show that it was female, sterile and had a very low ability to pollinate the native plants through pollen, and so we were very interested to answer. That exact question is was this breeding that we did? Did we somehow inadvertently compromise the plant? And in this case we did not, which was reassuring.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Just the way you talk about this work and reading your findings, it's clear how important this is and it's really exciting for me, like from someone on the outside who doesn't do anything related to this. I really love seeing what you've done so far and I'm curious what are the next steps to research or your research program?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, every graduate student who's watching this knows that when they finish a project, there's probably at least a dozen other projects. You know of questions that need to be answered by the next student, and that's really the sign of a successful project. So where this has gone is Rachel Malinger, the bee ecologist. She wrote a separate grant and expanded this to 30 species and that includes shrub species. And what's unique about that grant? Not only is it looking at more species, but it's looking it's during the course of two years, so we only had a master's student, so we could only take six months for the data.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

This has a PhD student on it, so she'll be monitoring those plants and also they're studying the effects of floral traits and also the effects of drop stress on pollinator visitation and floral availability. So it's a pretty big extension to this project. Another fun project that we're working on, that we have a graduate student working on, is the effect of pesticide toxicity in the pollen and in the nectar of plants and whether or not we can come up with some best management practices of spray routines that isn't going to adversely affect our bee pollinators. Okay, thank you.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

So now we're going to segue a little bit into advice to students and young researchers out there and we were wondering if you could describe your career trajectory from being a young student to how you became such an important professor, especially in this industry.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Do you want me to tell them my story? It all started way back when I was an undergraduate student. I always loved horticulture. I always worked outside. I found a tremendous positive effect when I was outside with plants but honestly, I never knew you could make a career of that. I had no idea you could major in that. I loved animals so I majored in animal science. I wanted to be a veterinarian and so I wanted to diversify my portfolio.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

I applied for an animal science position on the university farm and they didn't have any availability fortunately for me, because I'm a vegetarian and I'm not sure how that would have really gone. But I was willing to do what it took to get that experience. And the greenhouse manager called me and he said we have a position in the greenhouse. And I said all right, I'll take that position. And then I start working there and the college professors who were teaching the plant classes would come into the greenhouse and they would say Sandy, why aren't you taking my class? And you should try this class.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And I started taking those classes, fell in love with horticulture and that's when I really knew that was my purpose in life and that was my passion. But I was near graduating. So I just ended up with my undergraduate degree in animal science and figured that that was just going to be it. And then I was working at this veterinary center and the professor one of my professors from plant science was picking up dog food. And I said, dr Frey, I'm thinking about going back to school to get to finish my double major in plant science. And he said you don't need to get a double major, you should get your masters and I'll be your advisor. So that was the start of my horticultural career.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

I guess you could say Sounds like mentorship really played a really big part in those first few years. So, moving forward, you realize you want to do plants. You have gotten to this place where you have this offer yes, come back to school, do plants, do plant research as a master's student. So what did you start working on and how did that lead into your next steps?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So I had a project that was we transformed tobacco to over-synthesize cytokine in and we're trying to measure that in plants, and but while I was working on that research project, the university it was University of Delaware they had one teaching assistantship available and that was given to me. So while I was doing my research I was also teaching all of the botany labs and so I got this wonderful. At the time I thought that it was unfair that I had to be teaching and do my research when everyone else only had to do their research. But now, looking back, that teaching experience actually is what helped me know that I wanted to be a teacher in my profession and so I got experience with that.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And as I was teaching, there were all kinds of opportunities for different teaching webinars and seminars and things like that. And I mean that was the days when everything was in person. You know you couldn't. It wasn't really a webinar, it was an in person seminar and I started going to those and I was just very interested in learning more about teaching pedagogy and I just wanted to be a good TA for these botany labs and little did I know that that was the start of my career path in teaching.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

I mean, from what I'm hearing, it sounds like these opportunities were being presented to you in the background and you were really opportunistic for lack of better words but in taking that up and really following the different routes as they came your way, are there any other? Types of advice that you would use as students. You maybe don't know how to speak out those opportunities yet or how to do it, so, thank you, I'm going to find them and go the other way.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, I have to say I mean look at our role models right here with Lara and Sam, because I mean this is leadership as undergraduate students and that's what we all, that's what employers all want to see, with smiling faces and good ideas and willing to do something a little bit different. And so so, congratulations to you on doing a great job with that. So I guess I'll start that by saying that ASHS has been pivotal to every career decision in my life, like when I found out when I finished my master's the reason why I got a PhD was because I met graduate students at Clemson and teachers at Clemson, and that's when I got my PhD. And same for my postdoc. I found that position at ASHS and an opportunity to go to Japan to study. That was found at ASHS. And I mean ASHS is so part of my life that my husband and I I don't even tell you guys this story, but we went to an ASHS meeting, presented our research, we report graduate students, flew to San Francisco, got married and came back all in the timeframe of the conference. And so that is dedication. I mean we fit, we fit ASHS's conference around our elope eloption I don't know if that's a word or not, but to answer your question, my advice to students, then.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So my advice for students, for young professionals, number one is to get experience and diversify yourself so that, because you might not know what your passion is like, you might not yet know what your purpose is, and the only way you're gonna figure it out is by being exposed to different things. So that could be research or teaching or extension, or that could mean getting international exposure or getting industry exposure there's. Sometimes we're just we do what we're used to doing and we don't really have time to do anything else. But just look for those little opportunities.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Identify with people in your classes, maybe as a teacher, that you really like and feel that you are in line with their way of thinking, and volunteer to help them. It doesn't even have to be a whole semester, just volunteer to. If it's someone that has an extension program, volunteer to help them with their program, one of their extension programs. We all need help and it's very, very rare that an undergraduate student comes into our office and asks to be part of something. So that's my advice for that get experience and get connected, because all of the opportunities that happened in my life were through ASHS and networking and you, just you won't have that unless you get connected. And also to just remember to also, once you're at that point, to serve and you guys are serving the society right now and finally to give back.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

That's really wonderful and over the years, throughout your experiences in ASHS and outside of ASHS, you've been a really big advocate for mentorship and mentor-mentee relationships. Do you think you could talk a little bit about the importance of that in your life these?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

guys are so great because they're helping me remember things that it's like they read my mind. And yes, I totally forgot to mention that. We have the ASHS has a mentor-mentee program. That's free, that it's just a one or two page sign-up. Sarah back there handles it, and what a fabulous way to get connected with somebody from another university that you identify with. And also, we have the resume program and somebody from another university comes and looks at your resume and you might think my resume is already good. I don't need help with my resume. Well, what you might need help and not know it is that networking. That person might know somebody who has a job position that you're gonna apply for later on in life. So it's all about building those relationships and taking advantage of all the opportunities that we have here at these conferences.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yeah, I also have to emphasize the importance of the ASHS mentorship program, because I did it and had a phenomenal mentor of Leslie Halleick, who is just an incredible leader in the horticulture industry, so I definitely think that that was really critical to helping me personally understand myself better and the direction that I wanna move forward in. Yeah, so just wanna emphasize that for sure. Yeah, I've had the same experience. Actually, my mentor was Dr Thierry Cuboda and same very insightful. We went in the direction of what I needed the most and so I ended up asking her a lot of career questions on the field and it was incredible. So I'm curious, from the mentor's point of view, we have a very strong mentee perspective, but from the mentor's point of view, what is it like doing this? I mean, you were a student once and now you're from the other side. What's your perspective on mentoring and how you seek out these relationships and what they bring to your life?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, from my perspective, I had these strong mentors throughout my whole career and they're part of where I am today and know I am today, and they invested time into me. I didn't know how to give a talk at ASHS they taught me how to do that. I didn't know how to teach they taught me how to do that. I didn't know anything, I was just a regular person that liked working with plants in my backyard, and they helped mold me into the person that I am today, and so my personal mentoring philosophy is to give back, and I feel like they invested their time into me, and now it's my turn to invest that time into students and, honestly, when I am at one of those booths working with students on their resume, or I'm in the mentor mentee program and the student gets a job that we've been working on for a while, it's so rewarding and you get way more back than you ever thought you would putting in, so it's just a 360 degree circle.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Okay, so now we're wrapping up towards the end of this. Please stick around as we finish the interview, because we will have a Q&A session and then also any feedback. But, as we are concluding this, is there anything that we didn't mention that you would like to mention, or any other thoughts or takeaways that you would like the audience to have?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Well, I guess I just would like to say that to offer a sense of if you sometimes it can be overwhelming to be at an ASHS conference with all of these people and all of these talks and you can feel like I'm not at that level and to feel just small in a very big society, and so I would discourage that line of thinking. That's how I felt early on. And also just to encourage you to think about, like what impact do you wanna make in life and what footprint do you wanna leave? What can you do? Even if it's just one thing a year, set your goals and even if it's just one thing a year that you can work towards. Try to work towards that and before you know it, you're gonna have this portfolio. That is just dynamite and it just takes a little bit of work and some patience and some really good mentors along the way.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you, Dr Wilson. So, in conclusion of this interview, if people want to follow your work or if they want to reach out to you, where can they do so?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Okay, I have a website that I update pretty regularly all my publications, courses, research, and if you just Google Sandra Wilson University of Florida, that will come up.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Thanks, and we'll be sure to include that in the show notes. So if anyone doesn't know where to find that, definitely follow up with the episode. Okay, so now we can open this up to a Q&A session. Does anyone in the audience have any questions?

Dr. John Clark:

I have a question about the the Zegiro study associated with the FedFIRST. Are you going to collaborate with them with the need of our FedFIRST project going on? I don't know if you went to that talk earlier, Because it sounds almost exactly like that, Roger. Would they do it?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Yeah, that's what this is all about, and a lot of different people are working on this issue of pollinator plants because pollinators are declining at an alarming rate and it's something of urgency and there's actually a lot of funding for it right now. So this is a separate project from that, but certainly, certainly. I went to one of those talks and we're in. We know of each other.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Great. Any other questions Come on up. Thank you very much, sandra. That was really interesting. I know you only like really talked about the first of the two papers about how you know if there was difference in oral visitation, but I know you mentioned that you also looked at if they were also taking pollin and nectar at the same rates. So I'm just curious what did you find for that paper?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Thank you and also, I'll just mention you know, sometimes as graduate students you have this really big study that took a lot of time and you collected a lot of data and you feel like, wow, I only got one paper from all of that work. And what we did in this study because it was so robust is we submitted the papers back to back, so it was the same title then. The first one focused on visitation and the second one focused on the floral rewards. So, to answer your question, we found different species had more pollen and more nectar than others. So pentas was a huge species for both nectar and pollen, and we also found that same trend that the visitation among not being significant among natives and non-natives. That was the same for pollen and nectar. So both all of the 10 species were able to produce sufficient amounts of pollen and nectar.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

All right, and for anyone who wants to read that paper, there is that part two and it is part of the same issue in Fort Science January 2022 issue and again that's entitled Evaluation of Native and Non-Native Ornamentals as Pollinator Plants in Florida Part Two Floral Resource Value. Do we have any further questions for Dr Wilson?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Dr Wilson, considering how relationships at ASHS have been just so integral in your professional life what is your advice? For making these friendships, relationships and not just doing what some of us get in the habit of. It's just hanging out with colleagues from our own institution.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

I remember my first ASHS conference and that's all I did was hang out with my friends because I didn't know anything else to do. I mean, I just sort of followed my advisor around everywhere, but he was busy doing a lot of the things he needed to do. So so, to answer your question, I think my advice is to do your best to get noticed, because that's when people I mean I go to talks and when I hear fantastic presentations made by students I approach those students and try to, either if I have a position available or if I think they should compete in a competition at a maybe it's a different meeting. But you know, do what you can to get noticed and you do that by serving. So a lot of times students don't realize we want you are our future, we want to invest in you.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

And moderating a session, cheryl will tell you we need moderators for sessions. So sometimes the students don't think, oh, I'm just a graduate student or an undergraduate student, yeah, I don't have experience doing that. But that's how you get experience and also that's how you get noticed and connected and you're introducing the speakers and it's in a different field. Maybe then you're even familiar with it. Doesn't matter which session you moderate, and so that's a really good way. Every time you get involved in a leadership role, you meet people and that's how you. It's just a natural thing that happens with the networking. But I understand your question because it's not intuitive of how you get connected and move out of just your kind of social group To widen that exposure. But that's how you do it.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Yeah, personally, I think I just have to always try to remind myself people are way friendlier than I expect them to be, and every time I just go up to someone new and introduce myself I don't know, especially here at ASHS I've just been graded so warmly, so I think that helps me out personally, and it's easy to learn so much to like if you approach someone that you don't even recognize that isn't even in your field. Just striking up a conversation, I agree, is easier than I ever would have expected. We only have a little bit more time, but anyone wants to ask us questions. I guess now we'll open that floor up, sure or advice. I don't know if I'm ready to give advice.

Dr. John Clark:

I'm not quite beyond my ears enough yet, but my question is with this podcast, do you have any plans on doing any surveys? And research focused around the podcast, so doing the past surveys and seeing if you're getting the impact of the podcast on your evolution, because I do a lot of agricultural marketing and that stuff and like it needs to be done Sounds like we'll talk later.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

To be honest, we haven't really thought about that part. We've kind of just been doing what we can to get off the ball and rolling. And now that you mentioned it, I feel a little bit stupid, especially because I'm actually currently taking a monitoring and evaluation course and the first part is always to do a baseline survey. So, yeah, we're definitely interested in that and it would be great to work together and figure something out. And yeah, if there's anyone in the audience that has feedback for us personally, we'll also take that now. So, questions feedback. Did anyone have anything else?

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

So I've had a horticulture podcast for four years for routine episodes, and you guys are way better. I want to do more early produced like this first episode with the three different parts, and just great job as interviewers, so just tremendous good. I really ask.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Well, thank you so much. Before you sit down, you're not going to give a shameless plug for your podcast.

Dr. Sandra B. Wilson:

Very California specific but growing the valley. It's about horticulture in California from extension property extension.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Sounds good. Yeah, what wonderful feedback. Thank you so much. Well, thank you everyone for attending today. This was spectacular. This is spectacular.

Dr. John Clark:

I need to drink some water.

Sam Humphrey/Lara Brindisi:

Don't mind me. And if you are into marketing, as one of our audience members is or if you are into specialty crops, we do have a first episode that some of you might have heard, where we interview Dr Benjamin Campbell, who talks about this stuff froma marketing and from an economist's economists perspective. So you can find our podcast anywhere podcasts are found Apple podcasts, spotify, that sort of thing and we do actually have a feedback form. We also have stickers. So I on the ASHS website you can find a page that is for this podcast and on that page you can find the feedback form link. You can also access the feedback form link at the folder that I will have up here like 10 seconds from now, and you can get a free sticker for the podcast logo. So thanks, so much everyone. Thank you.