The Business Meeting will take place at 1:00–1:50pm; Program Presentation at 2–3pm; and Show Table, Auction, and Raffle at 3–3:30pm.

Program

We will be exploring the topic of Orchid viruses. Our presenter will be Dr. John Hammond, a Research Plant Pathologist with the Floral and Nursery Plants Unit of the U.S. National Arboretum, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Research Service, in Beltsville, MD. Starting from a BSc in Agricultural Botany (University of Reading) and a PhD in Plant Virology (John Innes Institute and the University of East Anglia) in the United Kingdom. He then moved to the USA and completed two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University prior to moving to the USDA-ARS in Beltsville in 1982, where he has worked since then on viruses affecting a wide variety of ornamental plants. These include bulb crops, herbaceous annuals and perennials, and more recently also viruses affecting ornamental trees and shrubs. He has a current focus on rose rosette virus and similar viruses transmitted by eriophyid mites affecting other ornamentals. He has collaborated with multiple scientists in the USA and internationally, and also with multiple commercial nurseries and diagnostic laboratories to identify and characterize emerging viruses affecting ornamental plants. He was one of the editors for the ‘Encyclopedia of Plant Viruses and Viroids’, and lead editor of the American Phytopathological Society’s ‘Compendium of Rose Diseases and Pests, 3rd edition’.