ONLINE: Gardening without Gravity

Friends of Allen Centennial Garden Winter Presentation Series. Registration for FACG members is free, the fee for nonmembers is $10 per session.

press release: speaker: Simon Gilroy, professor, Botany Department, UW-Madison

Plants don’t need much to thrive: sunlight, water and some soil, but how do you garden on the International Space Station where even the air has to be shipped from the Earth and a watering can simply doesn’t work? We will discuss the challenges of growing plants in space and how this environment offers unique insight into both how plants work and how they serve to promote well-being, even when traveling at 17,500 miles per hour and 250 miles straight up.

Simon Gilroy has been a professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2007. He grew up in the United Kingdom, where “everyone is a gardener” and his research focuses on how plants sense the world around them and then how they use that information to survive and thrive. Dr. Gilroy’s research group uses time lapse imaging to follow how the whole plant responds to these kinds of events married with imaging techniques that allow us to see the action of the very molecules that make the plant work. He currently pursues these projects in settings that range from his laboratory at UW-Maison to experiments on the International Space Station.

This event is presented in partnership with Madison Area Master Gardeners Association (MAMGA).