EP 2-10 SHANE SMITH

Wendy Corr:

Well, hey there, folks, welcome to The Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on really interesting people that have had an impact in the Cowboy State. And our guest today has had a huge impact in the Cowboy State.

You might not know his name, but if you have ever been to the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, you know about Shane Smith and his work. And that is what we're going to focus on today, is Shane Smith and the work that he has done to raise the visibility, to raise the accessibility, of organic, of horticulture, of growing things in the Cowboy State.

So I'm so pleased to welcome to The Roundup, Shane Smith! Hello, Shane. How are you this fine day?

Shane Smith:

Great. Little cold, but good, yeah, it's a little cold.

Wendy Corr:

That's all right, that's all right. This episode will warm everybody up, and it will get everybody ready for the upcoming growing season, and I think that that is so fun.

Shane, I'd like to to start off by just saying thank you for all the work that you have done in raising the visibility of growing things in what is traditionally not a growing-things-type state. Tell us about, tell us about your love for gardening. How, how did you start this love for gardening?

Shane Smith:

Oh, as a child, I used to weed my mom's strawberries and decided that was almost as good as candy. And she was a great gardener. And then I, as I got older, I decided, what could be more fun than to grow stuff? So having a career in horticulture, which is what the professional name of people who do what I do, is, it's a blast. I did it because it's so much fun, and I haven't turned back.

I mean, it's that old saying, you know, if you love what you're doing, you're not going to work. And through my career, 41 years at Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, I started there when I was 23, I believe.

Wendy Corr:

Wow!

Shane Smith:

And it was east of town and I was a little, you know, naive about Cheyenne and everything else. Iwas in Fort Collins, studying at CSU, and I heard about these folks doing America's largest solar heated greenhouse. So I came up and started volunteering, and next thing I knew, I was hired.

And didn't get paid hardly anything. And over the years, had just wonderful staff, wonderful volunteers that really deserve more credit than I do, and we just made it happen.

Wendy Corr:

You had a great volunteer program there. I remember when you and I first talked, it was two or three years ago now, when we first talked, I did a story for Cowboy State Daily about the horticulture, about the Botanic Gardens. You've got a great story about the volunteer staff.

Shane Smith:

Well, it's changed as of the last five years or so. But while I was there, about 90% of the physical labor was done by volunteers. It was very diverse group of Cheyenne residents. It was, you know, all ethnicities, all incomes.

We had a program that involved kids working off court fines, kids who were exemplary, like Boy Scouts, Congressional Award winners, at least people trying to win a Congressional Award, young people and a number of handicapped folks through the goodwill and through magic city to institutions in Cheyenne then.

And as of late, it's a little more of a narrow group. One of our main missions back then was providing therapy through horticulture, and that's not quite as important there these days, but it's still a great program.

Wendy Corr:

It is. We want to come back to that idea too, here, later in the conversation, but Shane, tell me about the importance and the impact that that Cheyenne Botanic Gardens has had. Why is it, and why was it, at the time, such a novel thing to have the botanic garden there in Cheyenne?

Shane Smith:

Well, Cheyenne is, a lot of people don't believe me, that it's the toughest garden climate in the lower 48. People in Cheyenne believe me. But people in other places are like, No way. You know, northern Maine, northern Minnesota has gotta be worse.

And no, it isn't worse. They have snow coverage. Cheyenne has the least amount of winter snow cover. The front range there, there's winters where Denver has more days with snow on the ground than Cheyenne.

Which means we've got to winter water to keep our trees alive. It's number one in the nation for hail. The town averages 10 storms a year, but the whole town doesn't get hit by hail when that happens. It's very neighbor related, but it still makes it tough to garden.

Of course, it's dry because of its elevation, and it's windy, as everybody knows, it's the windiest city in Wyoming. Cheyenne beats Casper by an average of one mile per hour. Cheyenne has a daily average wind speed of 13 miles an hour. So if you have a calm day, you have to have a 26 mile an hour day to make up for it. God forbid we have two calm days.

And so there's a lot to think about when you garden there and, you know, I jokingly say you'd have to be an idiot to put a botanic garden there, and I was that happy idiot. But the town was so accepting and so appreciative to see a Petunia bloom, you know, or how do you grow tomatoes, and so that worked in our favor to have that tough climate.

And luckily, we've always had a greenhouse to work out of. We moved to Lions Park in 1986 and a very similar type of solar heated building. And then we expanded eight acres of grounds, award winning children's village.

And, you know, we grew, and I think this still is the right number, 50,000 bedding plants, and planted them all across town with volunteer help, and tried our best to beautify Cheyenne. We were kind of the extension agents. This is where people came to get their gardening information. So we did lots of classes, lots of workshops, that, of course, still goes on,

And, you know, the new conservatory opened about five years ago or so, and it amazes me to this day, because it's unheard of that a town the size of Cheyenne has a large tropical conservatory. 28,000 square foot. It was about all set of close to $20 million, voted in by the people of Cheyenne as an optional sales tax, plus we raised another $2 million and we were able to put it together.

And there's a number of big cities that would give their right arm to have something like that in their town, and it's free, and you can walk into the tropics when they're open, and sit under a palm tree, you know, and which would be a big boom right about now.

Wendy Corr:

I bet that tropic garden is real popular right now.

Shane Smith:

And we built in lots of places to sit and hang out and read a book or stroll. And another thing that I think is interesting over the course of the history of the gardens are the number of interesting firsts that the Cheyenne Botanic Garden had.

We were the first passively solar heated botanic garden in the nation. We were the first Botanic Garden to generate electricity using photovoltaics. We also have a wind generator. We were, there's a thing called LEED certification, that is green building.

And you have to get certified. You have to build in a certain way. You can't have waste water, runoff, light pollution, recycled materials, that kind of thing. And our children's garden, the Paul Smith Children's Garden was the very first LEED certified children's garden in the world. It was the highest level of LEED certification at platinum. I believe it was the first platinum in the state for LEED certification.

And then it's the first children's garden to have a theme of sustainability, the sustainability, past, present and future. So we show how farmers’ windmills work next to a solar powered pumping system from underground.

And then we are the first, I'm pretty sure the only botanic garden in the world to have a navy submarine periscope.

Wendy Corr:

I thought that was so cool. Yes, it's worth visiting just to see that, right?

Shane Smith:

Yeah, yeah. And so anyway, it's the kind of thing that probably should never have happened, but it did anyway, and it did because of the can-do attitude of the people of Cheyenne, the volunteers, staff.

And it's kind of like, I see similarities to Frontier Days. You know, Frontier Days. Why Cheyenne? You know, you'd think it would be in a big city, but it's not. Cheyenne did it and made it happen. And they did it with volunteers too. And so it's just kind of the can-do attitude that occurs in Wyoming.

Wendy Corr:

So, it really is a tribute to the people of Cheyenne, that all of these things have been able to happen - and it's a tribute to you, obviously, in so many ways. This is your life defining work.

Shane Smith:

Yeah, it was. I mean, I did other things. I have done national consulting. I've done some international work. I worked for orphanages in Venezuela before Venezuela got kind of scary. I'd love to go back, but I don't think I'd make it home again. And Mexico, I worked in high altitude villages, working with kids, with school gardens and teaching them how to do garden techniques.

The Roundup: A Conversation With Shane Smith