You are assigned a new course to teach and you need to prepare the course syllabus. Regardless of the institution where you work, the syllabus speaks about you as a teacher and mentor. The syllabus also can set the tone for the semester and can get students excited or turned off to your course. Where do you start? Some universities and colleges will have strict guidelines; others provide none. Even when using common sense while preparing the syllabus, many items are overlooked. This feature article provides examples on the various components from the foundational, such as presenting basic course and instructor information, to the more difficult statements, such as appreciation of diversity and student conduct.

Greenhouse- and field-produced plants of Asclepias tuberosa L., butterfly flower, were forced in the greenhouse under various daylengths to produce flowering plants for the florist industry. Examined were post-production cold storage temperature (4.5 and 10C) and period (12, 14, and 16 weeks), forcing daylength (9, 13, 15, or 17 hours), plant-production scheme (greenhouse- vs. field-produced), and planting depth (exposed crowns or crowns planted 1.3 cm below the medium surface). When forced under a 9-hour daylength, blind shoots and aborted flower buds were prevalent. When daylengths exceeded 13 hours, using night interruption, the time to produce a marketable plant was reduced from 71 days to 61 days for 18-month-old greenhouse-produced plants. Daylength of 17 hours delayed flowering of field-produced liners by 15 days in comparison to those forced under 13-hour daylength. Greenhouse-produced plants stored at 10C did not sprout when brought into the forcing greenhouse held at 17/25C (night/day). Field-produced plants, when greenhouse-forced, had fewer flowers per inflorescence (88 to 94 flowers) than greenhouse-produced plants (79 to 87 flowers).

More universities are developing on-campus horticultural, landscape, or botanical gardens. Campus gardens often evolved from the life's work of one or a few dedicated faculty members during the second half of the 20th century. Today's faculty face different demands on their time, with pressure to conduct research funded through grants and contracts and resulting in peer-reviewed journal articles. The role of faculty as university garden directors does not blend well with the scholarship associated with fundamental research. The work of a university garden director does blend well within the context of Boyer's model of scholarship that has been modified by others not only to accept the scholarship of research, but also the scholarship of integration, teaching, and engagement as equally valued forms of scholarship.

The ASHS Strategic Plan consists of four key result areas. Key Result Area One: Enhance Internal Services, identifies various aspects of communication with and enhancing services for the membership. Strategy Three calls for the development of an information highway through advanced communication technologies. Strategy Four seeks to enhance services for international members and Strategy Five and Six addresses increasing the involvement of graduate and undergraduate students and increasing the value of membership to diverse members. There are various other aspects of the Strategic Plan dealing with promoting horticulture and horticulture information dissemination that are affected by HortBase. How the development and implementation of HortBase will help ASHS reach these objectives is discussed.

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