Upon his retirement this summer, Werner will simply move his base of operations from the Sandhills Research Station to the JC Raulston Arboretum (JCRA) in Raleigh, which also operates under the aegis of NC State University. “It would be nice to have a place I can call home,” says Werner. “One of the reasons I initially began working with redbuds is because of the great collection the arboretum had when J.C. Raulston was director.” Raulston, an influential and beloved NCSU professor and horticulturalist, founded the arboretum as the N.C. State University Arboretum in 1976, and Werner arrived in 1979. After Raulston’s 1996 death, the arboretum’s name was changed in his honor. “I didn’t get to see the arboretum get born, but I saw it in diapers,” Werner says. “I remember walking through the arboretum with J.C. and talking about redbuds, and it got me to breeding things. Full circle, I’d like to get redbud breeding back into the arboretum umbrella.” Werner was even JCRA director for three years, and during this tenure he hired Mark Weathington as assistant director. Today, Weathington is arboretum director, and he’s thrilled to have Werner back. “We really hope this will be the start of a longterm formal breeding program at the arboretum,” Weathington says, sitting in his airy office at the Raleigh arboretum. “We’re surrounded by so many plants. We have this great repository of germplasm, of different genetics from plants. That gives us a lot of opportunity to do exciting things.” JCRA has not traditionally had an active breeding program, Weathington explains. Sure, the arboretum has introduced a number of plants, but mostly these were varieties it evaluated rather than developed. Sometimes, too, something unusual grew from seeds sown on JCRA grounds, so the arboretum named and distributed it, but none of this constitutes the kind of diligent, formal breeding program Werner oversees.
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OutreachNC.com | JUNE 2018