WELCOME TO THE KOLZ BEGONIA RESEARCH CENTER!
2008 is drawing to a close and it's been another enriching year for me. Click on the above link to read a letter sent to officers and branches of the American Begonia Society and which dear friend, Julie Vanderwilt, also put on the ABS website. I had a wonderful visit from Dr. Judith Taylor , author of Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens 1800-1950 from San Francisco to do research on begonia hybridizers. She has an article that will appear in 2 issues of Pacific Horticulture in 2009, and a book on hybridizing with a chapter on begonias that will be published in the future. I'm glad that KOLZ was able to help in her endeavor. I didn't update this site like I had hoped. I planned major additions or changes which didn't happen, so this year, I plan on making smaller changes and doing it on a regular basis. I was active in the Margaret Lee (president) and Mabel Corwin Branches of the American Begonia Society . I also made the trips up to Santa Barbara and beyond to participate in the Santa Barbara/Ziesenhenne Branch meetings. I created a website for the Margaret Lee Branch and hosted it through my personal internet provider. Thanks to the donations I received from various sources, see DONORS , that allow for this site and service, I'll now be hosting the Margaret Lee site and the new Mabel Corwin and Alfred D. Robinson Branch sites on this provider. Click on their namesakes pictures at the bottom of any page to get to these sites.These changes will be taking place over the next few weeks, so please come back and check them out.
I'm looking to 2009 to be just as full. You'll notice that I've reworked the website and changed the navigation and some of the pages. I plan on having an update every month. I hope this will bring you back visiting and checking out the site. I'm still President of the Marge Lee Branch and now am Vice President of the Mabel Corwin Branch. I'm hoping that 2009 will see the first KOLZ Begoniafest, a day of fun and study for begonia lovers. Several projects for KOLZ and its collection are progressing and the benefits will enhance and enrich it.
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'm adding my own and sharing these treasures with others. Read KOLZ: BEGINNINGS for the amazing story of how this came to pass. I've met wonderful people that I’ve had the great pleasure of being mentored by and developed 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. Watch for some of their stories in updates.
This site is evolving 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 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 found 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 some them on the my pages, Web Articles and Web Sites. Please let me know if there are others that you have found useful and would like to share with others, michael@kolzbegonia.com.
Currently you must visit KOLZ to see what it has to offer but future pages will allow you to take a 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 rolls of film negatives 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 newer bindings. Photographic prints, old catalogs, botanical prints, art, drawings and sketches are all part of the collection.
