WELCOME TO THE KOLZ BEGONIA RESEARCH CENTER!
This is a dream I, Michael Ludwig, never foresaw when I started joining plant societies in 1976. A world full of research materials, past and present, of Begonias and other plants that I love and grow, is at my finger tips. I've inherited lifetimes of work from some of the greatest minds to study begonias and I look forward to adding my own as well and sharing these tresearures with others. Read KOLZ: BEGINNINGS for the amazing story of how this came to pass. I plan on writing biographies of the wonderful people that I've had the great pleasure of being mentored by and developing friendships with along this path. They've contributed to making my life rich and truly blessed. Not all have contributed to KOLZ but all have contributed to making me.
This site will change as I continue to update and inventory the amazing treasures that I now house. I'm scanning and digitizing old material, creating databases to manage this wealth of information and working to merge the information from all these sources into a single and easily searchable system. It's a great learning experience as I go through this wealth of knowledge. I will be inventorying books, a drawer, or files and I'll start reading it and suddenly I'm exploring a new plant or land and hours have passed and I've only got a tiny portion of what I wanted to get done finished, but I'm so much richer. I continue to add new material I find on the internet and other sources as well as donations from others that wish to preserve or share their work and collections. The internet is full of fascination articles and web sites and I've included links to them on the following pages, Web Articles and Web Sites.
Currently you must visit KOLZ to see what it has to offer but future pages will allow you to take a tour pictorial tour of the treasures that are housed in KOLZ. See the herbarium specimens that Rudy, Carrie and Thelma made and preserved for their studies. Read horticultural literature that Carrie and Rudy tracked down and copied. Look at the thousands of index cards that they and Thelma used to keep track of data before the dawn of computers. Books that they used for information and the dictionaries they used to translate them from Latin or the authors' original languages. View slides that Carrie and I used; or the film rolls that Rudy used to photograph literature, print the pages and then put them in notebooks. Most of these were falling apart they were so old but they have been transferred to new bindings. Old catalogs, botanical prints, drawings and sketches are also in the collection.