Sunset

Starting in September, "The Diary of The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai" will have a new author.

I have had a wonderful 3.5+ years here at The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai Resort helping Joe, Ronnie, and the rest of the Kona Kai staff realize their dream of an ethnobotanic teaching garden here in the Florida Keys, where visitors can come and learn about the incredible importance of plants in their lives.

Looking back, it's amazing to see what we've accomplished. I remember some of our first projects: building a comprehensive BG-Base database for KKBG's plant collections, creating 500+ records labels and 140+ display labels for the plants, and developing the first iteration of our "Ethnobotanic Tour," which we now call our "Transforming Your Understanding of Plants Tour." The Tour has been taken by over 1,200 people from all around the world since I began leading it in March 2011. After working on establishing these foundations for the Gardens, I moved on to develop kkbg.org, the Gardens' virtual mobile-friendly botanic garden "app", with Joe while at the same time working with Ronnie on expanding our educational outreach to the local community by making The Fairchild Challenge (a very successful South Florida environmental education program developed at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens) available to Upper Keys teachers and students as "The Upper Keys Fairchild Challenge," which involved over 900 students (53% of all local elementary and middle school students) last year.  Since Day One, I have worked closely with our Grounds Manager, Veronika, when it came to learning more about the characteristics and needs of the plants here on the property, conducting tree trimming, discussing plant selection, and planting our precious new specimens. I also had plenty of interaction with the other staff here, too, even if it wasn't as frequent or intensive as my work with Joe, Ronnie, and Veronika. Tracey and Denise coordinated reservations for my tours, and I always saw Ileana, Maria, and Charlie around the Gardens taking care of the accommodations or their garden beds. We have also recently been blessed with another great addition to the team, Karen, who is helping Veronika out in the Gardens, and it seems like she will fit in wonderfully.

As you can see, even though I have been the "face" of the Gardens for the past few years, I've had incredible support from the rest of the staff here, without whom the Gardens' work would not have been, or continue to be, possible. On a personal as well as professional level, I have learned from each of them, and know I am a better person for it. One of my favorite parts of working at Kona Kai is that the staff here do not see each other exclusively as co-workers or colleagues, but friends and family, which I believe is no small contributing factor in what makes Kona Kai so magical; you feel like you're coming home from the moment you arrive on the property, especially as a returning guest.

Although I am departing, it is not because I see the mission and vision of the Gardens to be unimportant, as I hope you've been able to realize from all of my previous 75 blogs, which I have written from the heart. Indeed, I still consider it one of the most noble and urgent causes in today's world. What I have felt is a calling within the deepest parts of my spirit that I can no longer ignore, and unfortunately I cannot answer it while at the same time having a full-time job. In 2007, a strange unprompted curiosity came over me about contemplative monastic life, which I knew nothing about at the time. In order to learn more about it, I visited a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts while at Connecticut College, after which I knew I needed to return at some point for a longer visit and also explore other monastic orders, which I was planning on doing after finishing my internship at Holden Arboretum in 2011. One of my favorite quotes is "If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans," and as I was making plans for monastery visits, I came across the advertisement for my current position here at The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai Resort. I could not believe there was a position being offered at that particular moment in time that suited my ethnobotanical interests / education and my botanic gardens work experience so well, so I figured this might be where I was meant to be for the foreseeable future. I applied for the position and have been here since. Even though I see the work being done here as extremely important and I really couldn't have asked for a better job for several reasons, the pull towards monastic life has not ceased to leave me, and has become more and more intense, especially over the past year, during which I made two visits to the same monastery I visited in 2007. After my last visit in June, I've had a deep sense of peaceful conviction that it is time for me to make the necessary visits to the monasteries to discern whether or not life as a monk is my next vocation.

I have no doubt the "sunset" of my time here will quickly make way for a beautiful sunrise; I am confident the Gardens' work will continue to thrive, supported by all the staff I mentioned earlier, Kona Kai guests, the local community, and one other notable addition (to be introduced in the next posting) who will take my place as Associate Director of the Gardens at the beginning of September.

What follows is a slideshow I put together covering the Gardens' main themes and undertakings over the past three and a half years. Be sure to watch it in full screen mode (click on the button on the bottom-right-hand corner of the video) on a laptop or desktop (if you watch it on a mobile device, you won't get any of the sound that goes along with the video and you probably won't be able to read any of the text), and adjust the quality to one of the HD options by clicking on the "gear" button on the bottom-right of the screen after you've begun playing the video in full-screen mode. Here's to many more "fruitful" years to come for The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai Resort!

Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director

So Much To Do, So Little Time

I'm pretty sure everyone has made or heard this lament several times in their life, if not every day. Most of us have more things we want to do than we have the time and/or resources for, both in our personal lives and at work, and this is certainly the case at The Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai Resort.

Think of all the things we currently do and could yet do with this botanic garden. We want to answer all the e-mails we receive the same day we get them. I need to inventory our collections regularly and take notes on flowering and fruiting events, entering all this into our botanic garden database. Plant labels need to be made and maintained. I research new plants to add to our collections then need to make time to head up to Homestead to bring back the new specimens. We take photographs for our own records and also for social media - and then we need to manage all those social media accounts. We would love to acquire more plots of land to expand our collections. I would love to be able to offer ten different tours instead of two. I already have a 90-minute tour slot each day, but demand could certainly increase to requiring two per day. It would be great to put out a blog every week instead of once every two or three. We're working on a botanic art gallery and it would be very neat to feature interactive exhibits along with those works of art. It would be of great benefit to the community if we could bring our educational environmental programs for students to all the schools here in the Keys, not just elementary and middle school students in the Upper Keys. We would love it if our Grounds Director could spend all her time focused only on caring for the collections, but as it is, about half her time is needed for other work on the property. KKBG.ORG has come into its own as a virtual ethnobotanic garden, but I would love to to make it an even more comprehensive ethnobotanical resource. It would be valuable for us to attend more community events, devote more time to fundraising, and write at least a few grant proposals each month. It sure would be neat to host seminars and workshops on ethnobotany here with experts from around the U.S. and the world, as well as a range of other special events. It would be nice to eat lunch each day as well. And on and on and on...

Just a few of the things we do.

Now think of how much an organization with one full time staff member and three part time staff members could handle well without becoming overwhelmed. At least one part-time person is needed for daily horticultural maintenance and another part-time person is required for a basic level of administration, and all of a sudden we're already down to one full time and one part time person! Needless to say, we can't do all we would like to do. In reality, though, no organization does, even if they have 100 times the staff and resources. There will always be something more that could be done, and more is never enough.

Deciding what to focus our time on given our limitations and figuring out how to go about accomplishing those things has been a challenge for me in my role as Associate Director here at the Gardens, but one I quite enjoy because I feel it's a skill that is extremely important to develop for use in all aspects of life. So how exactly does one go about making these choices about what to do given constraints on time and resources? When it comes to the Gardens, Joe and I get together a couple times a year to comprehensively evaluate what we are doing and what we might want to do. Our mission and vision statements are crucial to this process because they allow us an objective framework from which to evaluate whether or not programs are relevant to what we want to achieve as a Garden and which relevant programs are most important. Choices on my own then need to be made regarding how to go about accomplishing these goals. With practice and an internalization of the priorities of the organization as well as consideration for deadlines, I begin to make these choices almost unconsciously. Beyond that, personal preference is important, as some people prefer to start the day with the most challenging tasks so they can coast downhill after that, whereas others prefer to start off with easier-to-accomplish tasks to get into a groove before going after the more time-consuming and challenging tasks.

To make things a little more complicated, each week is usually full of unanticipated interruptions and tasks. I've found that one of the most valuable skills to develop is a flexibility from hour-to-hour and day-to-day that allows me to maintain a sort of disjointed continuity: taking on unanticipated tasks as they arise while at the same time staying focused on the several projects of central importance that need to get done, so that when I'm able to get back to the last major project I was working on, I can pick up easily where I left off. I imagine the ideal of this skill metaphorically as a constant juggling act of tennis balls (representing major mission-oriented goals to accomplish) that incorporates other tennis balls (representing smaller unanticipated tasks) into the juggling routine whenever they come up. The tennis balls are then dropped out as they are "accomplished," all while maintaining flawless juggling of the others. When you get it right, this is basically what it feels like:

Certainly, people have juggled several more balls at one time than that, but not in such an incredibly artistic and powerful way. So, even if we can afford to have only a few tennis balls in the air at a time as a botanic garden given the staff and resources we have, we can still create an unforgettable experience for our visitors and local community. It's not how much you have, but what you do with what you've got.


Rick Hederstrom
Associate Director