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.
![IMG_2509[1]](https://bettyfordalpinegardens.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_25091.jpg)