Author: Nick

When I look back at my Betty Ford Alpine Gardens Internship I can’t help but think of all the amazing opportunities I was given as an intern both inside and outside of the gardens. While in the gardens, I was subject to learning and working with plants every day in all different areas of the gardens. This included daily interactions with staff, volunteers and guests alike, which in turn allowed me as an intern to further my interpersonal communication, botanical and horticultural skills. While working every day at Betty Ford Alpine Gardens I was provided with an amazing space to exercise my college learning and acquired colligate botanical and horticultural skills within the work space and gardens. Opportunities that were grated to me outside of the gardens by the gardens were equally educational and provided me with a summer to stand among the best summers in my live. Opportunities outside the garden included hiking and seed collecting with Nick and Nicola in the surrounding areas of Vail, CO and the Eagle country area. Seed collecting provided me with in field knowledge and skills to ID plants, properly collect and label seed and get involved in the Seeds of Success Program as well as collected seeds for the BLM to help created a seed bank to restore the habitat of the Greater Sage Grouse. I was also subject to collecting live specimens of plants and soil samples on these hikes which gave me an opportunity to put my collegiate knowledge and skills into action in the field. While the gardens provided an opportunity for me to grow as a student and a horticulturist I am very happy to say my summer also included a social opportunity for me to grow aswell by living with two other interns for summer, exploring Vail and surrounding areas on solo adventures and with Nick, who knows almost everyone in the Vail Valley. Through this met many people throughout the summer and got to have a lot of fun with them. Out of work opportunities that will stand out in my mind include attending the GoPro games with Nick, hiking water falls within Vail, enjoying the Vail downtown scene, free concerts at the gardens and the neighboring amphitheater, farmers markets and music and sporting festivals. When I look back on my summer in Vail, I keep realizing the amazing amount of opportunities presented to me by Vail and the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens and am so glad I accepted the internship at BFAG and decided to step out of my comfort zone and routine life and take part in a summer that will influence the rest of my life in a positive fashion. I miss Vail all the time and luckily living in Colorado I can go back at some point, but if given this opportunity to come to Vail and BFAG I say seize it and make the most out of it and give it your all, for it is truly the opportunity of a life time.

For anyone interested in plant records, working at BFAG for a summer is a great experience! If you’ve had previous experience with BG-Base, you will get the chance to test your skills and brainstorm ways of improving the garden’s collection management. If you’ve never used BG-Base before, it is still a great place to learn the basics of the database and get familiar with some really cool plants. The garden is beautiful and if you don’t know anything about alpines (or even if you do), it’s one of the best places to learn about them. What’s also nice about a small garden is that often it’s all hands on deck so you get to do more than just plant records and no day is ever quite the same as another.

This was the first year BFAG had an internship for plant records and it was a really exciting time to be a part of the garden with so many projects in the works and the 2014 APGA conference. There’s a lot to be done in the next few years with maintaining BG-Base and eventually getting the garden mapped. My main focus this summer was inventorying the entire garden, updating the accession records, and ordering new display labels. The garden hadn’t been fully inventoried for several years so it was definitely a challenge figuring out what was still alive and what was certainly gone. But I think some of the fun of plant records is plant ID and doing inventory is one of the best ways of learning to recognize new plants.

– Jessica Wong, Curatorial Intern 2014

My summer internship has allowed me to grow, learn about the plant world, and better explore my surroundings. As the education intern I showed and talked with children about many things, from how a seed develops to how they liked to mix watercolors to what herbs grow in the garden (and were their favorite to taste!). Interacting with visitors of all ages in the gardens reminded me how powerful an individual’s sense of curiosity can be and that there is always something fascinating to learn about plants. The alpine gardens is quite the appropriate place to cultivate and entertain these two aspects. I was also able to suggest and successfully implement some of my own ideas for educational initiatives. The independence of this position helped me better develop my own sense of what is important when showing and teaching individuals about new ideas.

But since Betty Ford is a small botanic garden and there is an endless amount of things to take care of, the educational programming was just about half of what my internship entailed. When I wasn’t in the Children’s Garden, I gained an immense amount of knowledge and experience from helping Nick and the horticulture intern, Montana, carry out daily tasks. Yet I could never expect one day to be like the last, as I did everything from harvesting kohlrabi to drilling and then planting in rock to unpacking dozens of plants to creating flower arrangements to collecting seed pods at 12,000 feet in Leadville.

Yet my summer wasn’t all about the gardens, and simply being in the mountains, in Vail, was fantastic and very refreshing. Every morning I would wake up to look out my window and see the sun rising above the Gore Range, a view that can almost be seen from anywhere in town. At first the town can be a bit intimidating, but once you spend half of your weekend hiking in awe of how grand rocks can be and eat enough local ice cream scoops it’s too easy to fall in love. The abundance of laughter, relentlessly breathtaking views, and infinite ability to adventure outside makes up for what at first may feel like a sense of solitude, but soon feels just right.

– Madra Choromanska, Education Intern 2014

If you’re looking for a way to really immerse yourself in the field of public horticulture and live in one of the most beautiful places on earth, this internship is for you! During my time in Vail I was able to expand and define my skillset in general garden maintenance (planting, watering, pruning etc.), volunteer management, visitor services, seed collection, and plant records- working alongside our plant records intern to record species inventory and phenology data.  Though technically I was considered the “Horticulture Intern” the other interns playfully referred to me as the bosses “Right Hand Man,” a title I was honored to have.

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens is unique not only in its location and plant collection but also in its size. It is a very small garden, approximately 4 acres of cultivated space, but still requires a great deal of attention. As such our Senior Horticulturist, Nick Courtens, really relied on my fellow interns and I to go beyond our assigned responsibilities in order to make the entire operation run smoothly and provide guests with an unforgettable experience.  If you’re looking for a chance to see what it takes to run a public garden for the summer and form important bonds with peers you’ll have for a lifetime I highly suggest the BFAG Horticulture Summer Internship!

-Montana Williams (Horticulture Intern 2014)