If I were visiting the San Diego Zoo, an ideal morning would go something like this:

After entering the Zoo right at opening, go directly to the left of the flamingos to the coffee cart. They are now serving organic, shade-grown coffee that is delicious. I am a coffee-with-half-and-half guy, but they also offer the ” fufu” drinks so many people love. Now, with a hot java in hand (in a ” compostable” cup!), continue just a little way down the path which leads past Flamingo Lagoon into Monkey Trails. Between the flamingos and the coffee cart, there is a magical garden.
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A major reforestation/browse project was completed this week at the San Diego Zoo, replacing a decades-old eucalyptus-forested hillside (located south of the migratory duck pond). In its place, many new browse plants and trees will grow up and produce food and enrichment for our animals. A major reason for the successful breeding practices we’ve had here is our ability to grow and provide plants that these animals would eat and play with in their native habitats.
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Zoo InternQuest is a career exploration program for high school students. For more information see the Zoo InternQuest Journals. For more photos see the Zoo InternQuest Photo Journal.

Driving down the road to the back gate of the Wild Animal Park, we looked down below, admiring the beautiful view of the nearly 1,000 green acres of animal exhibits and gardens. After parking, we met up with Frank Escobedo, a lead gardener, and Bonnie Duff, a senior gardener, who were prepared to give us the royal tour of the grounds. Mr. Escobedo has worked at the Park since 1970, two years before it even opened to the public. Because of his passion, lifelong interest in plants, and a lot of stuff he taught himself and learned in college, he taught at community colleges and put together botanical gardens before planting himself at the Wild Animal Park. Ms. Duff attended UCSD and got her bachelor’s degree in biology. She worked for the Wild Animal Park’s Mum Festival for four years, taking care of the elaborate chrysanthemums before she branched out and became a senior gardener.
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Read the Zoo InternQuest journal that these photos accompany.

Throughout the Baja Garden there is a spectacular view of the East African enclosure. The Zoo and Wild Animal Park have more plant species than animal species.
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Being a gardener at the San Diego Zoo has many responsibilities that a gardener anywhere would have, like pruning hedges and fertilizing trees. What makes being a gardener here so much more rewarding than elsewhere is the many unusual jobs in which we get to be involved. Planting flora from all over the world to create exotic environments at the Zoo is one example. Another might be researching what kind of plants can be used in a primate exhibit. One exciting project we started recently was very unusual and struck me as a great topic for a blog. The experiment involves growing the plant that chocolate comes from, a very tropical plant in our mild, non-tropical climate.
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This time of year, mid to late winter, is an unusual time for a plant family to put on its greatest show. When most of the country is supposed to be freezing and under snow, Southern California is in the midst of one of its spectacular blooming shows! Aloes, which are mainly from southern Africa, have adapted very well to this similar-type climate and put on their flower show in a riotous act of colors. They bloom typically from late winter to late spring, while some aloes are in bloom sometime every month of the year. The oranges and reds that aloes are known for are sometimes overshadowed by blooms of white and scarlet, yellow and green, to the multiple shades of warm hues. All combined in our garden settings, they present a color spectacular. The main African collection site, across from the Veldt exhibit on the San Diego Zoo’s Horn & Hoof Mesa, has the highest concentration of blooming aloes this time of year. (A fierce aloe Aloe ferox is pictured.)
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I spent some time today doing my regular maintenance on the Bog Garden at the San Diego Zoo (see Mychael’s previous blog, Bog Blog: Flytraps and Ducks). This entails laying an old half ladder carefully across the bog, resting it on a milk crate so as to not crush the plants. I lay a small piece of plywood down on the ladder so I have something to sit on. This enables me to work out into the center of the bog, which is a little too far to reach from the edge. It’s low-tech, but it works. I cut out dead pitchers and flytraps, pull weeds, and cultivate the medium. The sand tends to sink down, so I like to stir it up to bring some of the sand back up to the surface. I also clear out the outlets along the center by plunging a piece of wire down each one. They tend to get a little clogged from the algae that build up in the sump.
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If you’ve traveled around the San Diego Zoo over the past five or so years, you may have noticed some areas that looked like they were right out of the pages of a conservation magazine discerning the woes of clear cutting in the Amazon rain forests. What’s going on?

Over the last 25 years or so, the Zoos’ grounds have lost around 75 percent of the tree cover that it had, due in part to construction of new facilities and old, unsafe trees that had to be removed. The final nail was put into the coffin on some of the eucalyptus (pictured) by the eucalyptus long-horned borer, the lerp psyllids, and drought during the years starting in 2000. Eucalyptus trees county wide were hit hard by the psyllids, and that was true here in the Zoo.
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Have you been to see the carnivorous plant Bog Garden in the Monkey Trails and Forest Tales habitat at the San Diego Zoo? If not, definitely make it a priority next time you’re here. These fascinating insect-devouring plants are as beautiful as they are remarkable. The Bog has been one of our most challenging horticultural features and also one of the most satisfying. Only about 10 feet across by 6 feet wide (3 by 1.8 meters), the Bog gets more than its fair share of attention from horticultural staff as well as the public. Venus fly traps Dionaea muscipula (pictured), sundews Drosera species, and the spectacular North American pitcher plants Sarracenia species grace this small garden just left of the golden-bellied mangabeys on lower Monkey Trails.
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As you enter the San Diego Zoo, the first exhibit you see is Flamingo Lagoon. But even before you spot the Caribbean flamingos, you may notice some hefty and flamboyant hibiscus flowers along the front of the Lagoon. These are unique plants, hybridized by a local grower, and they are in full bloom right now. In fact, it seems there’s hardly a month of the year in which these spectacular shrubs are not blooming. This poses a bit of a problem for the gardener (me), by the way, since it’s always more desirable to prune when the flowering season is over. If I let the hibiscus go too long between prunings, the flamingos would soon disappear behind the shrubbery!
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