Greenhouse employee Jennifer Dunn stretches to water the plants. (Photo taken by Collin Binder.)

David Banta, the scientific instructional technician for the Biology Department, is planning to change the plants growing in the greenhouse located behind Arntzen Hall to primarily tropical plants. He said he is doing this with the help of two students provided by Western’s work-study program.

“My idea is if we got a greenhouse, let’s make it tropical,” Banta said. “I want to show plants that you would not see in the Northwest.”

He said the first goal of the greenhouse is to provide a place for biology students to do experiments, including plant growth experiments with varying light and/or nutrient levels. The second goal, he said, is to create a diversity of plants available to classrooms. He said the biology department has mostly requested native plants in the past. However, he said he can go out and collect native plants at any time from the local landscape and would prefer to use the greenhouse to provide students with a variety of tropical plants.

“We’re in a transitional state,” Banta said, pointing out the mixture of ferns, liverworts, carnivorous Venus flytraps, and orchids.

Banta said Jennifer Dunn, a biology major with an emphasis in botany, handles all the plant care and maintenance, while Brandon Braunschweigh, an engineering major, deals with cleaning, temperature control, and sprinkler systems. Banta said he is excited to work with Dunn especially because of her extensive knowledge of plants.

Dunn is a junior who first came to Western last fall. She said she first became interested in botany when her dad brought an orchid home.

“The plant died,” Dunn said. “I wanted to know why so badly I decided to spend the rest of my life learning how to take care of them and keeping them happy and alive.”

She currently has over 50 orchids at her home. She said she experiments with the orchids in the greenhouse by crossing various characteristics. One of her hybrid orchids has a few blooms that hide their pollen beneath their skin, while the other blooms on the same plant wear their pollen on the outside of the flower.

Dunn said she and Braunschweigh have started keeping the greenhouse between 75 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit this winter to accommodate the tropical plants. Banta said sunlight is a significant issue when it comes to climate control in the greenhouse. He said he and the students have to move plants around a lot since sunlight hits different angles at varying intensities throughout the year. Banta said Dunn and Braunschweigh take climate control measurements to ensure environmental quality within the greenhouse. Dunn said they sometimes put screens up over the house to prevent intense light from scorching the plants.

Dunn said pests are sometimes a problem in the greenhouse. Her main philosophy on handling pests is to stay away from spraying chemicals as much as possible, since they can be harmful to sensitive organisms within the greenhouse such as fish, frogs, and certain plants. She said one of the first things she learned in biology is to avoid the wholesale killing of insects since minimal population levels encourage the insects to breed hugely.

Dunn said she hand-kills small populations of mites or other bugs. She said companion plants, a name she said she uses to describe plants that have beneficial characteristics for another plant, often work very well to control pests. For example, she said she has marigolds in the greenhouse because they attract insects and are also toxic to them. She said the Venus flytraps in the greenhouse help to keep pests down since they capture bugs to use as a nutrient source, but the flytrapsare susceptible to aphids. She said spraying is only used as a last resort.

“There are always going to be pests in the greenhouse,” Dunn said. “You want to keep them at a tolerable level, not doing much damage to the plants and not growing in great amounts.”

She said she intends to get her masters degree in biology and wants to work in the greenhouse for her graduate studies. She said she loves working in the greenhouse, since her entire reason for going back to school was to learn more about orchids and other plants.

“This is my dream job,” Dunn said. “I’m surprised that there is so little interest in the greenhouse in general and the plants. I didn’t realize that until I started working here.”