When horticulturist Dennis Carter takes his morning walk at the Blank Park Zoo grounds in Des Moines, Iowa, his eye finds every weed, every frond, every stalk in the zoo. He carefully observes each shrub, tree, and vine for good health, stopping periodically to rub a leaf between thumb and forefinger before giving his stamp of approval and continuing on with the walk. On the summer mornings, heat doesn’t yet hover over the sidewalks, and Carter’s footfalls echo in the quiet. In the winter, when visitors are rare, the horticulturist’s steps are muffled by the snow. An awakening happens across the grounds as animal caretakers coax their current inhabitants out with breakfast. The zoo’s path curves in a wide loop from the main building and greeting center, stopping at the homes of lemurs, sea lions, and lions of the land before curving by Jamaa Kwa Africa, the sweeping plains where slender-horned gazelles, giraffes, and zebras graze long grasses in the summer.
Everything, from the towering palms that provide a fortress for the zoo’s indoor tropical birds, to the trees used as scratching posts by the resident tigers, is under Carter’s watch. Even the no-name shrubberies backdropping the zoo’s paths, and the pesky weeds popping up in between them, are in Carter’s care. If it’s green and it grows in the Blank Park animal kingdom, Carter is its caretaker. And while others may not understand the importance of a job of ordering plants and studying fungal plant infections, horticulturists like Carter are the ones who help a zoo maintain its sense of wild—for visitors and furry, feathered, tailed, and scaled residents alike.
Steward of the Jungle
Carter hadn’t planned on becoming the zoo’s flora keeper. He moved to Des Moines from a more rural part of Iowa for his wife’s work, and he responded to a job listing for a horticulture technician. Carter holds no horticulture degree but makes up for it with two decades of groundskeeping and maintenance experience. After three years of working with the zoo, Carter was promoted to the position of horticulturist. Now, as Blank Park’s own personal Lorax, he speaks for the trees—and the flowers, and the vines, and the bushes.
A day spent overseeing acres of diverse foliage is never typical. Carter may start his morning by clearing brush from a footpath, then move on to planting a new sago palm in the tropical bird center, and end up removing a downed tree from the rhinoceros habitat. Since Carter is responsible for anything with roots on the zoo grounds, he spends the cold months of the year planning flower beds and exhibits. As the snow melts, he cleans up winter sticks and debris, then prepares for mowing, watering, and weeding. The most important work, however, happens in the exhibits. An Aldabra tortoise has much different habitat and dietary needs than a Siberian tiger, after all, so Carter must carefully consider the unique circumstances of each species in the zoo’s care—while working to bring African and Southeast Asian ecosystems to the blustery North American Midwest. Carter works closely with the animal keepers to ensure that the plants he brings into the zoo are safe for the animals they’re placed with.
“Every animal at the zoo, every day, gets some sort of enrichment,” explained Blank Park’s chief marketing officer, Ryan Bickel. “It’s something in addition to their regular diets. It’s an activity, a treat, something to keep the animal active and mentally stimulated. Browsing is an example of that. ... Every animal is going to have a different type of enrichment. The giraffe, for example: They’ll put a big bundle of browse in what is almost like a big trash can with holes, and the giraffe has to use their tongue to rip the browse out. It’s an activity for them.”
Protecting Where the Wild Things Are
Familiarity with the creatures he’s building homes for is a must. A giraffe could easily reach past its enclosure to snack on nearby growth, while rhinos are bullies that will trample plants in their habitat. Residents of the Discovery Center, the zoo’s temperature-controlled, glass-enclosed stomping ground for tropical birds, thrive on a delicate balance of heat and humidity—a balance that can be thrown off-kilter by plant diseases or fungi.
Carter works to ensure everything is symbiotic; if he orders banana trees for the Discovery Center, for example, he makes sure there are animals that would benefit from the fruit—and as it happens, the zoo uses 40 pounds of bananas a week. But Carter’s job is not without its challenges. Sometimes, population density and control is an issue, such as with mousebirds in the Discovery Center, which have insatiable diets and reproduce exponentially. “It’s hard to keep the plants looking nice when they’re just ripping the leaves off,” explained Carter, “to eat, and to make nests.”
People like Carter comprise the thin line between public education and fear when it comes to untamed creatures. They take the environments we will never know or be comfortable with—the jungles and tundras, the arid Saharan plains, and the vibrant Amazonian tropics—and bring them to the fringes of our world so that we may become better advocates: more aware, conscious, diligent. For Carter, those efforts include leading the zoo’s upcycle program, through which volunteers cut invasive species like honeysuckle out of state and public parks and give them to the zoo for animal browse.
And it’s not just the resident animals that Carter looks out for. He also oversees the zoo’s pollinator gardens, where native pollinator plants are allowed to flourish for bees and butterflies. Thanks to his stewardship of the pollinator gardens, the zoo teems with monarch butterflies once a year as they spawn and migrate.
When thinking of the most important jobs at a zoo, zoologist and animal keeper are often the first that come to mind—or maybe whoever maintains the steel fences separating you from a 500-pound lion—but horticulturists like Carter, as Bickel put it, “keep the wild in the zoo.”
“When you’re looking at the grounds, you won’t notice them as much if they’re well-kept,” said Carter. “But you’re going to notice if the bushes are overgrown, lawns not mowed, exhibits not kept up, flower beds full of weeds. That’s why it’s important, I think, what I do.”
