A conversation with Deborah Lalumondier, Senior Horticulturist in the Climatron at Missouri Botanical Garden
She’s been watering, pruning, weeding, selecting plants, and dealing with pests in the Climatron for 40 years. But Deborah Lalulmondier will tell you, “I’m not the boss; I’m just bossy.” Deb retires at the end of the month. Retirement is a significant milestone in anyone’s life, but to be part of something as well-known and well-loved as the Climatron for so long, is hard to imagine.
“I started out as a history major at Mizzou.” I was a big bookworm, a daydreamer. I was all over the place trying to decide what I wanted to be. Most of the girls in my dorm at Mizzou were business majors, so I thought I would try that. Took all the intro classes to accounting, marketing, management. That was pretty horrible.” She ended up with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, with an emphasis in Horticulture.
“I had a Moon Valley Pilea, an old-fashioned houseplant you rarely see anymore, that was dying. I thought, hmm, Intro to Horticulture, let’s try that, and that was it. And I realized later that I had always been fascinated by greenhouses; they looked so cool from a distance. And they were even cooler from the inside, their own little worlds with their own inhabitants. Life under glass, that was it for me.”
Deb grew up on a farm and has early memories of the alfalfa field, her mother’s vegetable garden, and her great-grandmother’s trailer out on Highway 61, full of houseplants. “A lot of the women in my family had houseplants, and I had taken a class on plants for interiorscapes and had memorized the Latin names of 250 houseplants. Back then, the Climatron was mainly really big houseplants. I interviewed for this position a few weeks after I graduated, thinking it was just a practice interview. The man interviewing me, the superintendent of the display houses, turns out was also a Mizzou grad and had also been on the flower judging team, just like me, so we just clicked.”
The Climatron has unique challenges, unlike the outdoor parts of the Garden. “The Climatron not only looks like a jungle, it IS a jungle. Everything fights for its space in the sun, which there is never enough of, and the main part of the job is pruning. Deciding what plants should get priority–this one gets gorgeous flowers if you let it get big enough, but if it gets too big, it will shade out others that are rare and endangered, and there are only a dozen or so on the planet, and in the meantime, there are others that are pressing up against the glass because they are 80 foot tall in nature, but there is only 30 foot of space for them here.” Making the decisions on what gets pruned is one of the best parts of her job, along with the many comments from peers and visitors about just how cool her job is.
Deb wishes people would understand that houseplants are not pieces of sculpture you can use to enhance the decor. “Wrong light, wrong water, wrong humidity, it will die; I can’t fix that.” She’s also heard her share of interesting questions. “A visitor once asked me if we brought all the flowers in the Garden inside for the winter.” (Ahh…no.)
Her personal plant passions are all over. “Begonias, gesneriads, epiphytic cactus. I crossed the two Brugmansia in the Climatron, got seed, and will see what color the offspring bloom next summer. I planted tomatoes for the first time this year, freezing a lot of sauce.”
She’ll have plenty of time to grow tomatoes after retiring to her home in Saint Genevieve, while the Climatron’s care is left in the hands of the next generation of horticulturists.
Take a tour of the Climatron with Deb on YouTube;
Plant Geek QUICK FACTS
– Favorite gardening tool? My Felco 8 pruners.
-Favorite Garden you’ve visited in person, near or far? Huntington, in s. California.
-If you could have lunch with any other plant geek, dead or living, who would it be? June Hutson, one last time. She was such a mentor to so many of us, and I don’t think she really knew it.
Words and photos by Jo Batzer. Additional photos provided by Deborah Lalumondier.
