US National Arboretum Gardens Unit Leader Scott Aker announced plans to destroy a national treasure, 10,000 Glenn Dale Azaleas on Mt. Hamilton, after the 2011 blooming season. Interim Arboretum Director Ramon Jordan confirmed the plans.
Both stated the reason was a pending loss of private funding which was exclusively for use in a different area of the Arboretum, the Asian Valley.
This doesn't make any sense at all since the Glenn Dale Azaleas on Mt. Hamilton are maintained by unpaid volunteers. In fact it would cost more to remove the Glenn Dale Azaleas then to just leave them in place and let the volunteers maintain them. This is a tragic and misguided use of federal funds.
Some view this as a ploy to get more private funding. By threatening to destroy the most popular collection in the Arboretum, they may hope to secure private donations that would actually be used in other parts of the Arboretum since the azalea collection is maintained by unpaid volunteers.
The Glenn Dale Azaleas draw thousands of visitors each spring. These are the azaleas that the USDA developed and grew in the National Arboretum to provide hardy strains of evergreen azaleas. Almost every winter-hardy hybrid evergreen azalea variety came from or descended from this group at the National Arboretum.
Horticulturist Benjamin Y. Morrison worked for over 25 years to create this superior group of winter-hardy azaleas with large, colorful flowers suitable for the Washington, DC region. In 1946-47, Morrison planted approximately 15,000 azaleas from his work at the USDA's Glenn Dale research station on the south face of Mt. Hamilton at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC.
In 1949, the Arboretum opened to the public for the first time during the azalea bloom. The Azalea Society of America calls it the country's premier reference collection. The US National Arboretum is probably the best repository of genetic diversity in evergreen azaleas anywhere in the world and I hope that it will remain so.
The importance of the Glenn Dale Azaleas to ornamental horticulture make this misuse of federal funds a tragic mistake.
The website savetheazaleas.org puts together in one place the documents pertinent to this problem. It is the sincere hope of the site's webmaster that knowledge of this problem reaches everyone who is in a position to apply pressure to stop this insanity before axes, saws, and herbicides destroy this national treasure.