Georgeson Botanical Garden

The Georgeson Botanical Garden is a botanical garden located at 117 West Tanana Drive on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus in Fairbanks, Alaska, USA. The garden is used for both research and demonstration, and is open to the public during daylight hours, May through September, for a fee. It is part of the Alaska Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station. The garden was named after Charles Christian Georgeson, USDA Special Agent in Charge of Alaska Investigations as of 1899.

In the garden's role as a research facility, its staff test more than 1,000 trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials for hardiness each year, including Alaska native plants and those collected from trips to China, Russia, and Iceland. Georgeson also serves as an official trial garden for the National Hardy Fern Foundation. The garden serves as a location for variety trials of annual flowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruits, and researchers there conduct experiments on new crops for Alaska's conditions, such as peony.

The garden's flowering plant collections include Altai violets, begonias, columbines, dahlias, delphinium, fern leaf peony, fernleaf tansy, fuchsias, impatiens, lilies, hardy shrub rose, sunflowers, and sweet peas. Other plants include ferns, herbs, and trial vegetables including corn and tomatoes.

Due to its northern location, portions of the garden have permafrost (permanently frozen soil). In the forested areas, permafrost is 6-36 inches (15-91 centimeters) below the surface. In cleared fields the permafrost has receded to 25 feet (7.5 meters) or more.

See also

* Alaska Botanical Garden
* List of botanical gardens in the United States

External links

* [http://www.uaf.edu/snras/gbg/index.html Georgeson Botanical Garden website]
* [http://gbgsociety.org/ Georgeson Botanical Garden Society] (nonprofit support and fundraising organization)
* [http://gbgsociety.org/ Alaska Peony Growers blog]