In the corner of Botanica’s parking lot, half a dozen fern species sprout from mulched garden beds.
There’s hybrid ferns, cinnamon ferns, painted ferns, lady ferns, Japanese Beech Ferns.
Some of the plantings are thriving. Others are merely surviving.
“Over here, we have cinnamon, which is struggling,” said Lynette Zimmerman, the executive director of Botanica, pointing to one fern species. “The heat really took a toll on some of these plantings.”
The cinnamon fern’s failure is exactly the purpose of this test garden, which sits far from the rest of Botanica’s lush, manicured landscapes. Here, horticulturists seek to discover which species will succeed in Kansas, with its hot, dry summers and sandy soil. Botanica moves plants into their main gardens based on the results of the test gardens.
A plant's survival in the test garden is especially pertinent this year, as Wichita enters Stage 2 of drought conditions and cracks down on outdoor water usage. Even though Botanica is exempt from watering restrictions, Zimmerman says it’s trying to reduce water consumption by 10%.
“We chose to be proactive and to launch our own water conservation initiative, so that our gardens would be – if we were forced into a phase three situation – our gardens would be already adapting to that level of watering,” she said.
In early August, Zimmerman said Botanica already met its goal. How?
Rounding a bend in the gardens, she points out a walled, grassy garden bed: the Beverly Blue Teaching Garden. But something’s different – a fountain that normally spills over the edge of a rock wall is dry.
“We have several water features on our campus … and we've actually shut off two of them that were using fresh water to, again, meet our 10% reduction goal,” Zimmerman said.
Other water features at Botanica – such as the koi pond and the iconic Margie Button Memorial Fountain in the rose garden – reuse recirculated water instead of fresh water.
The garden’s watering process has also been turned upside down. Botanica now waters at nighttime or early morning, instead of during the daytime, to avoid losing moisture to evaporation. And Zimmerman said employees are hand watering some gardens instead of using irrigation systems, saving droplets with a more targeted approach.
The test garden in the parking lot is one place that switched to hand watering. Zimmerman said the change helps Botanica look for drought-resistant plants that can successfully move into the main gardens, because the 2024 drought may not be the last.
“We are planning for the future and for a changing climate to look at more drastic swings in the temperature and the weather across each season,” Zimmerman said. “And that's informing our conversations around the sustainability of Botanica and the way that we practice horticulture and how we operate our gardens.
“That is an absolutely strong conversation for us, and we're having that now, knowing that this isn't a one-off drought situation, that we may experience drought conditions in the future.”
Brian Fuchs is a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Nebraska. Droughts are naturally occurring phenomena. But he said climate change can make droughts more likely to occur more frequently, which Wichita may experience because it’s caught between arid western Kansas and wetter Eastern Kansas.
“Especially for places in those transition zones, it becomes harder because some years could be quite wet and you have an abundance of moisture and no worries at all,” Fuchs said. “And then you could get into a pattern where several years are quite dry, and then all the problems kind of rear their head and come to the forefront.”
Wichita’s average summer temperatures increased by 1.5°F between 1970 and 2023, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit that analyzes climate data. Climate models predict Wichita will experience nearly triple the number of days above 100°F by the 2030s, compared to 1961-1990, in a high emissions scenario.
Hotter air can hold more moisture, Fuchs said.
“A warmer atmosphere has the capability of holding more water,” Fuchs said. “So, as temperatures warm, it will keep trying to – for lack of a better term – suck all that moisture out of the surface. And up to the point where there's no more to bring out.”
Back at Botanica, Zimmerman walks by the xeriscape garden – a type of low-maintenance, low-water landscaping common in desert-like regions of the country.
“Denver has in their Botanical Gardens … amazing, low maintenance-scape gardens,” Zimmerman said. “And in our changing climate, we're certainly looking at those models.”
