50-year-old ban no longer in the way!
There's nothing quite like the sweet, exotic scent of a creamy-white
gardenia. Its been said that the rich fragrance of a single blossom
can perfume an entire room. Perhaps best known as a corsage flower for
a prom, wedding, or other special occasion, a gardenia also makes a
great gift as a potted plant. With plentiful buds and dark, glossy leaves,
the potted plant is an attractive addition to a deck, patio, or garden
in any climate where it can thriveincluding much of the southern
United States.
If you live on the U.S. mainland, you may soon be able to buy a potted
gardenia or gardenia corsage shipped fresh from lush, tropical plant
nurseries of the Hawaiian Islands. Several years ago, federal and state
agencies lifted a 50-year-old ban, newly allowing Hawaii's nurseries
to ship potted gardenias or cut blooms to the U.S. mainland. Nurseries
can do that if agricultural inspectors determine that their plants are
free of a tiny pest called the coffee green scale.
This soft-bodied, six-legged critter, Coccus viridis, feeds
on gardenia, citrus, and a host of other plantsincluding its namesake,
coffee. Adult scales are greenish-yellow ovals, about one-tenth-inch
in size.
The change in regulations resulted in part from studies by Robert G.
Hollingsworth of the ARS U.S.
Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center at Hilo, Hawaii, and by Arnold
H. Hara of the University of Hawaii.
For several years, Hollingsworth scrutinized coffee green scale populations
in a commercial, 2-acre gardenia plot on Hawaii Island. Biologist Hollingsworth
was particularly interested in determining whether very young scales,
called crawlers, were being blown into the gardenia field by winds coming
off the Pacific Ocean.
"This was a popular but unproven notion about how plants were
getting infested," he says.
Hollingsworth showed that windborne crawlers weren't the main problem.
"Scale outbreaks always occurred on the same plants. This indicated
that scale problems resulted from incomplete control using pesticides,
not from new infestations."
If windborne crawlers had been the cause, the infestations would likely
have been more random.
Growers already know that careful use of chemicals to control another
insectthe antis actually the key to long-term control of
scales. Ants of various species are scales' foremost friends. They guard
scales by warding off their natural enemiesparasites and predatorsand
by carrying scales to uninfested plants. Ants benefit, too, because
they feed on the sugary honeydew that scales secrete.
But once their plantings are free of ants and scales, Hawaii's growers
can try out this new opportunity to market their tropical gardenias
to stateside customers. For the thousands of people who've vacationed
happily in Hawaii, the fragrance of lush gardenias from island nurseries
might bring back blissful memories of those days in paradise.By
Marcia Wood,
Agricultural Research Service Information Staff.
This research is part of Crop Protection and Quarantine, an ARS
National Program (#304) described on the World Wide Web at www.nps.ars.usda.gov.
Robert W. Hollingsworth
is with the USDA-ARS Pacific Basin
Agricultural Research Center, 920 Stainback Hwy., Hilo, HI 96720;
phone (808) 959-4349, fax (808) 959-5470.
"Glorious GardeniasMarket Opens for Hawaii's Growers"
was published in the September
2004 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.
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