here are a few links Katherine gave me to provide background info on the ephemeral pools she talked about during last Thursday's "Walk on the Wild Side", and the reptiles and amphibians you might find associated with these ecosystems. Enjoy! The third one down is a list of all the distinct North Carolina ecosystem types as classified by the North Carolina Natural Heritage program. You can search for the description of vernal pools, or any other type of ecosystem you're interested in in this pdf.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Hey...
A quick note about today's walk on the wild side. Katherine Wright, the Blomquist Horticulturist, will be leading a tour focusing on springtime ephemeral pools, a unique ecosystem in the southeast that appears and then disappears during the months of spring and early summer. Please join us at the Blomquist gatehouse at 11! More info about these unique environmental niches to come in a blog post in the next few days.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Hey there- a quick note about an interesting community outreach project here at the gardens.
As I write this, the soft patter of a gray, rainy day whispers outside my office window. The gentle rainfall that permeated the late fall and winter has given rise to a glorious floral display this Spring. The hundreds of new native woodland perennials in the Blomquist, added during the Fall to enhance the visitor experience along the main loop in the lower portion of the garden, have emerged with vigor. The Bloodroot, Sweet Betsy, Virginia Bluebells and their woodland neighbors, most of whom were rescued from piedmont woodlands in the path of development, have gone above and beyond this Spring, due in no small part to the amount of work put into building healthy soil with a diverse population of the microscopic miracle workers that make plants grow and thrive.
Beginning in October of last year, my colleague Annie Nashold and I embarked upon a community outreach and educational partnership that has proven truly rewarding, and has restored my faith in the amazing things that can be achieved through working with children. The “Eco Design Project” paired the team of horticulture and children’s education here at the
Design is everywhere, in everything we interact with in our human-made world. It’s also evident in all the miracles of adaptation and survival in the world beyond where the sidewalk ends. A botanic garden is where those two worlds meet, and what better place for young people to experiment with how we can design to incorporate both.
Our work with these students, which began with abstract conversations about “what does it mean to design something?”, and “what goes into the design process?” quickly evolved to discussions around “do different places have different feelings associated with them?”, “is design involved in creating those feelings”, and finally “how do we create a certain feel with design?”.
The culmination of these classes and discussions is the formation of “design teams” among the students, who have been charged with creating a design vision for a section of the
throughout the world which seem to fit this aesthetic. Their final task is to take all they’ve learned and put it into a final presentation to a group of SPDG and
This project, and its combination of demystifying design while at the same time harnessing the inherent creativity of young people has proven to be quite special. My mantra in life is this: to make a true impact in anything we do, we have to see the big picture- how all the connections, big and small, come together to create the end product of our efforts. As a gardener, having the opportunity to speak to these students about my vision of the design process, being able to work with as thoughtful and intelligent a partner on the subject as Annie, and being immersed in the high energy world of young people has given this designer great joy, and a new appreciation of what it means to design.
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