Please note that the Garden will be closed on February 3 & 4. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Get to know the Garden’s new flagship Texas plants and the interns researching them

Get to know the Garden’s new flagship Texas plants and the interns researching them

Every year, the research team adopts a few special plants as a focus for study and conservation, especially for the student interns who join the Garden every summer. This year, interns and their mentors are paying special attention to two plants, a wildflower native to Texas and a rare and remarkable native orchid, Meanwhile a third intern is investigating fungi growing in the Garden itself.

Spring 2024 Goats In The Garden Interns

Spring 2024 Goats In The Garden Interns

In the Spring of 2024, Taryn Mitchell and Sydney Lowenthal were selected for undergraduate student internships as part of the Goats In The Garden Project, supported and made possible by a grant from the North Texas Community Foundation. Intern mentors for Taryn Mitchell included Dr. Brooke Best (Director of Texas Plant Conservation), Sebastian Alarcon (Senior…

2023 Conservation & Collections Intern Experiences

2023 Conservation & Collections Intern Experiences

In the Summer of 2023, Jade Affleck, Kate Morton, Gabrielle Perez, and Gabriela Wolfe took part in a 10-week Conservation & Collections Summer Internship program, led by co-mentors Tiana Rehman (Director of the Philecology Herbarium) and Dr. Brooke Best (Director of Texas Plant Conservation). At the end of the summer, we asked them to select…

2022 Research & Conservation Intern Experiences

2022 Research & Conservation Intern Experiences

Ulysses Oles I am about to start my first semester of grad school. My experience going into the internship was very limited with regards to herbaria. I expected most of my activities to be similar to the skeletal transcriptions I had encountered through citizen science programs online. I learned through this TORCH program that herbarium…

Texas Star Mushroom now State Mushroom of Texas

Texas Star Mushroom now State Mushroom of Texas

The rare and rather unique, star-shaped fungus with the Latin name Chorioactis geaster received official designation this week by the Texas Legislature passing the House and Senate as the State Mushroom of Texas. Only two other states (Minnesota and Oregon) have officially declared a state mushroom. The mushroom is highly selective about where it grows, mostly attaching…

National DNA Day

National DNA Day

A Peek Inside Sumner Lab on National DNA Day Lab Volunteer, Jerrod Stone, shares his experience and the latest projects April 26th is National DNA Day!  Researchers have been busily prepping the Sumner Lab since its opening in January 2019. As key instruments and materials began to fall into place, everyone was eager to get…