{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025272161741835147, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004665629860031105, 'mean_word_length': 5.126190476190477, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
NEBC Meeting News

October 2016. On October 7, the New England Botanical Club met in the Haller Lecture Hall at Harvard University for its 1112 meeting. Bryan Connolly called the meeting to order and Brett Trowbridge introduced the speaker, Meghan Blumstein, a PhD student in the Andrew Richardson lab at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Meghan spoke about her Horan Prize Fellowship experience working with the National Trust in the United Kingdom (U.K.) on pest control in English gardens in a talk titled ‘‘Preserving plants in the face of pests: Lessons learned in Cornwall and Devon.’’ Throughout the talk Meghan regaled us with wonderful photos of the English gardens she had visited. The National Trust is a historical preservation land trust in the U.K., owning much of the coastline in England and Wales, and many formal gardens. During her fellowship with the National Trust, Meghan was based in Penzance, a port city in Cornwall located at the southwest tip of England. Because Penzance is situated directly on the Gulf Stream, it has a very stable, warm, wet climate year-round, allowing a wide variety of plants to thrive. Penzance’s status as a port city has led to many species introductions, both intentional and unintentional. Cornwall is known for its wonderful gardens, particularly ‘‘valley gardens,’’ which utilize microclimate variation to grow a wider variety of plant species: temperate and xeric species at higher elevations, and subtropical vegetation in the valleys. However, species introductions, lack of freezing temperatures, and high humidity are also optimal for pests and pathogens, particularly insects and fungi; thus, southwestern England has become ground zero for the arrival of novel plant pathogens. Meghan’s role was to determine the extent of U.K. gardeners’ knowledge about plant pathogens, what steps they were taking to prevent them in their gardens, how they were controlling those that were already present, and what their concerns were. Meghan focused on an insidious fungal pathogen named Phytophthora ramorum or Sudden Oak Death, which destroys more than 100 woody plant species, particularly Rhododendrons and Camellias. It has quickly spread throughout southern England via a domino effect along hedgerows of Rhododendron ponticum, and is now present in several of the National Trust properties. Thought to have spread into the gardens via a variety of means, including nursery trade plants and the boots of outside contractors, those gardeners with infected gardens lamented