Blomquist Garden of Native Plants

2011-07-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

Happy Thursday!

We had a great "Walk on the Wild Side" class in the Blomquist today. For those of you were not there, or for those of you who were but want more in-depth info about our topic, "Water in the Soil" (or something to that effect), here's a link to a PDF that I think covers much of what we talked about. It focuses on agricultural soils and how to manage them for water conservation, but the general gyst is the same for garden or wildland soils. Enjoy!

2011-06-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

June already?!

If you are planning to come to tomorrows "Walk on the Wild Side" in the Blomquist Garden, the topic will be "How plants cope with heat stress". Timely, no? See you at tomorrow at eleven at the Blomquist Gatehouse.

2011-05-11T09:29:00.001-07:00

Here's something fun. Use this link to download and listen to a recording of frog sounds made at a pond on my family farm. Then, go to www.herpsofnc.org, then to the "frogs and toads" page, and there you can choose any of the various species and, among other things, you can learn what their calls sounds like. After listening to the calls of our native frogs and toads, see how many of the frogs vocalizing in this recording you can identify. Enjoy!

2011-05-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

Almost Friday!!!!

Well, actually, it's only Wednesday, but if you squint and blur your vision, Friday doesn't look so far away. I had a great visit in the garden yesterday with the Blossom Garden club from the Trinity park area of Durham. We spent an hour talking about wildlife gardening, and I shared some funny anecdotes about the wildlife in The Blomquist Garden, and we had a great time. It turns out, as Katherine informed me today (my assistant in the Blomquist, Katherine Magowan), that we have baby red shouldered hawks in the Blomquist garden. Our resident pair have successfully hatched a clutch of eggs, and there are at least two young hawks growing up in the Blomquist. Cool stuff. I'm including a photo from the tour yesterday. Pictured are the attending members of the Blossom Garden Club.

2011-05-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday mornin',

A few things to discuss. This weekend the NC Native Plant Society Reid Chapter and the Traingle Land Conservancy are sponsoring a "Green Garden Tour". Four local gardens will host visitors during the tour, and the Blomquist Garden is one of them. For more info, visit this link.

We had a great tour last week in the Blomquist Garden. Our topic was "Wild Gingers of the Southeast", and a great crowd enjoyed a lively discussion of the interesting botanical history of these species. I mentioned that I would include some info about the walk in a post, including the 1957 article written by Dr. Blomquist concerning how taxonomically unique were the north american wild gingers. Indeed, professor Blomquist is noted as an expert on the subject of our wild gingers, and this article helped spawn widespread acceptance at the time concerning the validity of the genus Hexastylis. Included here is an excerpt from Doctor Blomquist's article. I apologize for the weird things that happened when I added the article to the post as far as line spacing, etc.

Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 255-281 BRITTONIA January 9, 1957
A REVISION OF HEXASTYLIS OF NORTH AMERICA*
H. L. BLOMQUIST
INTRODUCTION
"Heartleaves" is the common name of a group of low, perennial, aromatic,
evergreen, herbaceous plants related to wild gingers (Asarum L.) with which they
have generally been considered to be congeneric. Because of their distinctness
as a group, however, from wild gingers of North America, Bafinesque (1825) segregated
these plants from Asarum into a new genus Hexastylis. This segregation
was for a considerable time disregarded by American taxonomists, but in 1903
Small adopted Hexastylis for this group of plants in the first edition of his Flora
of the southeastern United States. This recognition of gexastylis as a genus distinct
from Asarum has not, however, been followed by some of the other taxonomists,
such as Feruald in the 8th edition of Gray's Manual of botany (1950).
Up to the present time, 10 species of this group have been described from
eastern North America, all restricted to the southeastern United States. The only
other region where similar plants occur is in the Orient, and most of these have
been placed in the genus Asarum, where they are still retained. Just how and to
what extent these Oriental plants show relationship to Hexastylis is somewhat
uncertain, since no thorough, comprehensive study of them has been made, as
well as no monographic study of the genus Asarum, beyond the extent of such
treatments as are found in de Candolle's Prodromus (Duchartre 1864) and Engler
and Prantl's Die nat~dichen PfTanzenfamilien (Schmidt 1935, Solereder 1893).
Aside from disagreement as to the generic distinctness of Hexastylis from
Asarum, there is considerable diversity in the taxonomic treatments of heartleaves
in the various floras of those areas in which they occur. Furthermore, all
these treatments are more or less inadequate or even erroneous. This unsatisfactory
taxonomic status of the group is largely due to the differences in degree of
understanding of certain taxa, differences in emphasis, and lack of appreciation
of the relative taxonomic value of certain characters.
in general, in attempting to distinguish taxa, within groups, too much emphasis
has been placed on some structures which are too variable. This is especially
true of leaf-blade form. This varies to such an extent in the population of
one taxonmand often as much on one individual plant--that some leaves may
have the identical form of those of another taxon. It seems, therefore, unfortunate
that form of leaf-blade has been used as much as it has in the naming of species,
such as H. arifolia, callifolia, and heterophylla. Actually, the last epithet applies
to most of them. Another means of distinguishing certain species has been based
too much on the relative sizes of flowers and their parts. These vary to such an
extent that size differences are often of limited diagnostic value. On the other
hand, certain structures, which seem to be more specific and constant, have
apgarently been overlooked by American taxonomists. These are: (1) the pattern
of variegation of the leaf blades, (2) the flare in the calyx-tube of several species,
(3) the extent of the division of the style-extensions above the stigmas, and
(4) the relief pattern inside the calyz-tube present in several species.
In this study, the author has made an effort to examine as many specimens as
possible in living or preserved condition since he has found that in pressed
specimens the flowers of these plants are generally so distorted that it is often
difficult if not impossible to interpret their form and structure unless they have
been seen living or preserved. Besides his own collections, some 1600 specimens
from various herbaria have been examined. Expression of deep appreciation is
due for the courtesy and cooperation of the curators of those herbaria from which
loans of specimens have been obtained.
HISTORY
The first species named of the plants included in Hexastylis was collected in
eastern Virginia by John Clayton before t730 and briefly described in a polynomial
by Gronovius in his Flora virginica (1739). This was later named Asarum
virginicum by Linnaeus in Species plantarum (1753). The next species was discovered
in South Carolina by Andr6 Michaux who named it Asarum arifolium in his
Flora boreali-americana (1803). The third was collected in the southern Appalachians
(Broad River, North Carolina) by Rugel in 1841 and distributed as Asarum
(Monotropa) macranthum, a manuscript name by Shuttleworth. This plant had undoubtedly
been seen also by Michaux, who wrote below his description of A.
virginicum (F1. Bor.-Am. 1:279), "Obs. Folia maculata. Legi varietatem flora
maximo, plus quam pollicari, caetero omnino similem." In 1893, Small and Vail
renamed this species A. grandi/lorum by elevating a varietal name applied to it by
Duchartre (1864), which he accredited to Michaux. But, soon discovering that
this combination became a homunymn, Small (1894) renamed it A. macranthum.
However, in 1897, while studying some specimens of Asarum from North Carolina
and Tennessee sent them by Ashe, Britten and Baker discovered that the name
macranthum was also a homonymn and renamed it A. shuttleworthii (1898). In
1897, Small described another species which he named A. callifolium. This plant
had been collected in Florida at least half a century earlier by Chapman, who had
identified it as A. arifolium Michx. Also in the same year, Ashe described four
new species (,4. rutttii, A. memmingeri, A. heterophyllum, A. minus), but admitted
that A. minus was Irobably the same as A. virginicum. In 1924, Roland M. Harper
discovered a remarkable species in south central Alabama, which he called
258 Brittonia [VOL. 8
Hexastylis speciosa. This seems to be an endemic since it has not been found
elsewhere. The last species to be described was discovered in southeastern
Virginia by Fernald and Lewis and named A. lewisii by Femald in 1943.
The genus Asarum, including those plants segregated as Hexastylis, has
generally been placed in the family Aristolochiaceae, although this name was
preceded by the name Asaraceae. The former name has, therefore, been proposed
for conservation over the latter. However, in 1903, Small recognized the priority
of the family name Asaraceae for the genera Hexastylis, Asarum, and Aristolochia
in his Flora of the southeastern United States. In the subdivision of the family
Aristolochiaceae, Spach (1841) seems to have been the first to divide it into
tribes, of which the tribe Asareae included Asarum. This tribal name was elevated
to the rank of subfamily (as "suborder") by Duchartre (1864). The latest
comprehensive classification is that of Sehmidt in the second edition of Engler
and Prantl (1935), who retains the tribe Asareae but places this under the subfamily
Asaroideae together with two other tribes.

Regarding the infrageneric classification, above that of species, Braun
(1816) divided Asarum into three sections, segregating the species now included
in Hexastylis, together with a few Oriental species, into section Ceratasarum. In
1842, Asa Gray, in emending the genus Heterotropa of Morren and Decaisne (1834)
so as to include A. arifolium and A. virginicum, placed these species in a new
section, Homotropa. Since the generic name Heterotropa was based upon a Japanese
plant, it has not generally been adopted for the North American species, nor
the sectional name Homotropa. Duchartre adopted the sectional names of Braun
and added another (Aschidasarum). This sectional classification was followed by
Solereder (1893) in the first edition of Engler and Prantl. In the second edition of
this work, Schmidt (1935) elevated the sectional name Ceratasarum to the rank of
subgenus and retained it also as a sectional name under this taxon.

GENERIC CONSIDERATIONS
Since disagreement exists among taxonomists on the generic distinctness of
Hexastylis from Asarum, it seems necessary to discuss this question. Like specific
concepts, generic concepts are formulated on the basis of personal experience
and judgement. There is, however, a general understanding that if related
groups of species differ in the same way in certain more or less fundamental
characters, they may be segregated as genera, provided there is no serious intergradation
in these characters between such groups. The difficulty in this matter
is, of course, the necessarily subjective evaluation of the fundamentality of
characters. This ultimately rests to a great extent upon phylogenetic considerations
which vary in lime depending upon the acquisition of new facts, and may
vary in application to different groups.

That the two groups of species in southeastern North America which have
been segregated into Hexastylis and Asarum are generically distinct is generally
agreed. The basis for disagreement is to what extent they intergrade in the Oriental
forms. Unfortunately, as is stated above, the Oriental forms are still so imperfectly
known that it is uncertain to what extent any of them are similar enough to
the North American forms to be classified into either of the above genera or both,
and how many can be so treated; and, if both are represented, to what extent and
in what characters, if any, they intergrade.

From what has been seen of the Oriental species, it is fairly obvious that at
least some of them, such as .4. variegatum Braun & Bouche, A. maximum Hemsl.,
A. macranthum Hook. f., and even A. sieboldii Miq. could very well be placed in Hexastylis. The only characters in which some of them may show some intergradation
with Asarum are mainly vegetative, such as the evergreen vs. annual
habit of leaves, one or more leaves borne on the same branch each season, and
the extent of hairiness of leaves and the outside of the calyx. On the other hand,
similarities are in characters of more fundamental importance, such as the separate
styles with the style extensions above the stigmas, and the partial inferior.
ity of the ovary. In these characters, there seems to be little, if any, serious intergradation.
It must he admitted, however, that a thorough, monographic study of
the Asarum complex may alter our present concepts, but it may safely be assumed
that any such alteration will tend to establish more genera rather than fewer.
So far as North American material is concerned, as is stated above, there
seems to be no question that Hexastylis and Asarum represent distinct genera, as
may be seen from the following comparisons:

Asarum
Styles united except at the apex, the
stigmas terminal on the spreading lobes.
Ovaries wholly inferior.
Vestiges of petals sometimes present.
Stamens with long filaments.
Anther-connective extending in a long,
pointed appendage.
Lobes of calyces more or less attenuated.
Calyces hairy on outside.
Two leaves borne each season.
Leaves pubescent.
Leaves membranous.
Leaves persisting only one season.

Hexastylis
Styles separate, extending above the
extrorse stigmas.
Ovaries superior to partly inferior.
Vestiges of petals absent.
Stamens with very short filaments or the
anthers sessile.
Anther-connective at most extending in a
short, blunt appendage.
Lobes of calyces not attenuated.
Calyces glabrous on outside.
One leaf borne each season.
Leaves essentially glabrous.
Leaves coriaceous.
Leaves persisting more than one season.

It goes on, but I can't cut and paste drawings and taxonomic keys very well into this blog.

If you want to read the whole thing, find a PDF online for the journal Brittonia, Volume 8 Number 4 from Jan 9, 1957. The article is entitled "A Revsion of the Hexastylis of North America" by H.L. Blomquist

For a simpler introduction to our native wild gingers, here's a short link with a list of the native wild gingers of the southeastern United States.

2011-05-02T09:08:00.001-07:00

Mornin',

The "Walk on the Wild Side" for May is coming up this week (Thursday, 5/5 at 11:00), and this talk will focus on our native wild gingers. We'll examine the natural history of our native Asarum and Hexastylis species, talk about their unique ecological niche, and discuss how they can be used in the native garden. Hope to see you there!

2011-04-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Howdy,

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.

http://www.vernalpool.org/vernal_1.htm

http://www.climatechange.nc.gov/pages/ClimateChange/Piedmont_Upland_Pools_and_Depressions.pdf

http://www.ncnhp.org/Images/Other%20Publications/class.pdf

http://www.herpsofnc.org/

2011-04-07T05:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-01T05:00:00.001-07:00

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 Sarah P. Duke Gardens with the Duke School for Children and their seventh grade class and instructors. Together we have worked to build an understanding for and appreciation of an often elusive term: “design”.

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 Blomquist Garden. The teams have worked on identifying a “Blomquist aesthetic”, and what it means in the design of new features within the garden. They’ve also conducted “precedent studies” to identify existing examples of landscapes and structures

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 Duke School representatives, during which they will make design recommendations for the Blomquist study site, and explain the process they went through to reach those design conclusions.

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.

2011-03-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

Is it March already????? Just a few notes about some recent and upcoming activities... The "Walk on the Wild Side" of a week or so ago focused on mosses, and in particular on the fascinating strategies for survival they have. We talked a good bit about the idea of "alternation of generations" and how that concept relates to moss reproduction. Lots of fun, a great crowd, excellent questions. Thanks to all who attended. I'm including a shot of the talk taken by one of the attendees (thanks Nancy). If you ever take pictures in the Blomquist, whether during a tour or just by yourself, and are willing to share them, I'd love to use them in this blog or on the website. Here are a few links to topics we discussed during the tour:

alternation of generations

Mosses and alternation of generations

Moss biology

Lots of spring ephemeral wildflowers popping up! Give me a day and I should have the "what's blooming" page of the website updated with some images of plants in bloom and where you can see them. See you soon.

2011-02-03T04:56:00.001-08:00

IT"S ALIVE!!!!!..... After a few months in mothballs, the Blomquist Garden blog is back in action. Let's get right down to business. Today there is a "Walk on the Wild Side" tour of the Blomquist Garden at 11:00. The topic today will be "helping animals survive the winter in your garden". An interesting link I found in my research on this topic is from a British forest preserve website. Check it out.. I'll add more links later.

Another interesting link comes from a British invertebrate preservation site- lots of interesting info about how they protect different types of invertebrate habitats. Obviously, our bugs and our their habitats in the southeastern US are different, but I thought it was a very comprehensive treatment of how to save species by conserving habitat.

Here's a link to an interesting article about winter ecology in insect species. Fascinating! It's amazing what our insect friends have to go through to make it from year to year.

2010-10-21T13:52:00.000-07:00

Hi there!

I've enjoyed communicating with you through this blog, and many thanks to those of you who have commented, both online and off, about what you like/dislike/would like to see talked about. This will be the last post for the Blomquist Blog. It's been harder for me to find time to post in recent months, and it just seems like the right time take a break. If you have any comments/questions about any and all things Blomquist and/or native plant related in the future, please feel free to e-mail me at sbloodwo@duke.edu. Thanks, and remember to spend time in the woods! Enjoy!

p.s. If you want to keep track of the topics for the monthly "Walk on the Wild Side", you can still visit the "Wild Side" page of the Blomquist Garden website. Take care.

2010-10-12T04:17:00.000-07:00

Hot again!

Today is supposed to hit 88! Summer just won't accept defeat.

I wanted to supply a short recap of last week's tour in the Blomquist Garden. We talked a good deal about drought, it's affects on plants, ecosystems and economies, and how we as gardeners can mitigate the effects of drought in our own gardens. One of the things we covered was how to build soil that helps your plants withstand drought conditions. We recently completed a complete reconstruction of an area of bed space within the Blomquist with an eye for just this topic.

First, we removed all existing plant material and heeled it in elsewhere, then we added a custom mix of soil with a high organic material content (mostly composted leaf mulch). Next we added limestone to adjust the pH value to a level that is more hospitable to plant life (we were at pH 5.5 and we are aiming for 6.5-6.7) by adding eighty pounds of lime for every one thousand square feet of soil surface area. Then we added a fungal and bacterial granular inoculant. This introduces beneficial fungi and bacteria into the soil which interact with the plant roots to effectively increase the volume of soil from which the plant can harvest water. In times of drought, having specimens that can more effectively manage their water needs means less watering and healthier plants. Finally, we added our shade to part shade shrubs and perennials, and now we wait till Spring to see our results!

We were over at the State Fairgrounds yesterday sprucing up our native plant garden for the opening of the State Fair this weekend. If you come to enjoy the rides and low-fat food along the midway, check us out. We're just down the hill from the village of yesteryear and not far from the blacksmith shop in the gardening area of the grounds. Just ask for the North Carolina Native Plant Society garden. See you there!

2010-10-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

What a great start to Fall!!! I talk to many folks who are new residents of NC, and they have been telling me "I didn't realize weather this nice existed!" Just when we were starting to think we'd be wearing shorts and tank tops in January, the heat wave broke, gave up the ghost, and left us to chop our firewood in peace. That last is a bit paradoxical, as the burning of firewood and its subsequent release of carbon dioxide fuels things like global warming and endless days over ninety degrees. LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA- can't hear you! (fingers in my ears)

I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow for our monthly Blomquist tour! We should have great weather, and apropos of the four inches of rain we received last week, I'll be talking about drought, and the different ways that drought puts stress on forest ecosystems. Please join me!

If you haven't visited the information kiosk in the Blomquist Garden lately, please do. My colleague Jeff Harward helped me construct some improved literature receptacles for a larger selection of brochures, etc. You can now pick up copies of our Duke Gardens magazine there, as well as brochures related to the Blomquist Garden, self guided botanical tours, and info about Durham.

Just bought some more great plants from our friends at Niche Gardens and the North Carolina Botanical Garden yesterday. Whenever I need native species that are hard to find, those are the two places I go. Please do the same and support these great native plant sources.

2010-09-29T03:48:00.000-07:00

Rainy Wednesday.... who would have believed it. Seems like months since we've had any rain, probably because it's BEEN months since we've had any rain. More rain today tomorrow. We've got a few hundred plants to plant that will have to wait a few days now for the soil to dry out a bit, but that's okay- I'll take the rain.

The monthly tour of the Blomquist Garden, called the "Walk on the Wild Side", will focus on drought, and what happens to forest ecosystems in times of prolonged dry weather. In honor of my talk, it will most likely rain next Thursday. See you at 11 at the Blomquist gatehouse.

I'm working this morning on a new entry for the Blomquist Plant I.D. Blog "Name That Native". I'll be posting entries for that blog through October, then I'll take the late- fall and winter off, and start back up again when Spring arrives.

If you read my last post, you may remember me mentioning a 5K race I was going to run on campus last Friday. I bring it up again to comment on aging. I ran a lot when I was in high school and college, and thought I was pretty good. I recently starting running again (could have something to do with just having turned forty in July, not sure though). At any rate, with a quarter of a mile to go in that race last week I was in the lead, only to get passed by a nineteen year old at the very end. Payback is a #$^%#. Twenty years ago, I was that kid doing my level best to put any old geezer racing against me in my rear view mirror. I even remember what it felt like to put your foot down on the accelerator and find that extra gear when it counted most. I tried that on Friday myself, but something went wrong with my transmission, and that gear was nowhere to be found. I'm taking this hunk of junk into the shop.

2010-09-23T04:14:00.000-07:00

Holy Taxonomy Batman! Time flies when you're not blogging.... Lots going on. Plant sale this weekend from 9-2 this Saturday here at the gardens. Lots of plants to choose from- both native and exotic. I'm running in the Pauly Dog's 5k run on Friday evening on East campus- I'm skipping the hot dog eating contest. Never seemed a good idea to run in ninety degree weather and then wolf down as much of something as you possibly can. I'm a vegetarian anyway, and I've never eaten a tofu dog that I'd want another of. At the sale we'll have a special collection of piedmont native perennials for sale in the Blomquist Collection area- come see us!

Some fun improvements happening in the Blomquist Garden- we're about halfway done with a garden renovation near the entry gatehouse. We've pulled out the exisiting plants and potted them, and we've improved the soil and irrigation. yesterday we began installing some of the "bones" in the form of boulders, shrubs, ferns and sedges. Soon we'll add some decaying logs, and then the flowering perennials will come last. Check it out!

Can't think of anything else to say right now, except "Will someone please throw a few three day weekends into the calendar, and pronto! I'm fried" Thanks in advance for your cooperation, whoever is in charge of the whole weekend type thing. See you!

2010-09-09T06:24:00.000-07:00

a quick note- the latest blog post in my native plant i.d. blog is up- a good many goldenrods and others who are in bloom right now- check it out, you might learn the name of that plant you've been seeing on the roadside on the way to work. Enjoy!

2010-09-07T11:31:00.001-07:00

I love three day weekends. Who was the @#$#^%$ who shortened them to two!?

A few notes.... we had a great "Walk on the Wild Side" last Thursday. Our topic was the early twentieth century Chicago area landscape architect Jens Jensen, and his impact on ecological landscape design. Lots of fun. As an ecology student interested in landscape design, Jens Jensen was one of my heroes, and he remains so today. I mentioned that I'd add a few links about him in a blog post- here ya go!

Jensen was a bigwig in the development of the parks and nature preserves in and around Chicago. Here's a link to an article detailing some of his legacy in that part of the country.

His book entitled Siftings is a treatise on the need for closer connection with our natural environment, among other topics. I read it twenty years ago, and still have fond memories of it.

Jensen was also enamored of working with his hands, and the peace and well-being that could be derived from a life of craftmanship. He took this love and translated it into a folk school in Door County, Wisconsin, an amazing spot to spend some time if you've never been. The Clearing is alive and well today, carrying on Jensen's love of all things handmade.

oh yes... the name of the author that I was struggling to remember during the walk who makes me think of Jens Jensen is Wendell Berry. My favorite book of his is one of his non-fiction essay collections entitled A Continuous Harmony.

one last thing... I've posted a photo gallery of the new handmade cedar railings in the Blomquist Wildlife Garden. Click here to check it out!

2010-08-31T04:27:00.001-07:00

Morning!

I thought I might add a few photos to the blogosphere here. I am in love with the Wildlife Garden at the moment (for the tens of thousands of readers for whom this is their first Blomquist Garden blog post, we have a small themed garden within the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants which is called the Blomquist Wildlife Garden). At any rate, I spend at least fifteen to twenty minutes a day in the Wildlife Garden, usually pruning and weeding, but equally as often just looking. It's a wild space, and through the heart of it runs a small stream. I have been doing a good bit of very selective pruning lately to open small windows that a visitor can use to gaze up the stream course and see into another world. A healthy population of both green and cricket frogs have made the stream their home, and if you take a moment and sit on the northernmost bridge and look upstream, chances are you will see anywhere from one to five or six frogs in varying states of seeming repose. Some have only their bulbous eyes above water, peeking from within a blanket of detritus in the stream itself. Others are perched along it's banks at differing heights among the boulders. Yesterday Katherine called me to say she had seen a large Garter snake making his or her way upstream. I was there soon after, and the frogs had, predictably, gone into hiding, save for a brave soul peeking out from beneath a soggy Spicebush leaf in the water. For me, this is the essence of gardening; the creation of places where humans can revel in their ability to give succor to their own souls through the act of emulating nature, while at the same time creating a refuge where mother nature's wheel can continue to turn and we can be witness to it all.

I'm including a few photos of my froggish friends, their habitat, as well as some images of the new cedar fencing we've installed along the path in the garden. Don't forget the tour with Katherine this Thursday at 11:00. See you there!

2010-08-24T04:04:00.000-07:00

Happy Tuesday...

I mentioned in my last post our cooperative garden project at the NC State Fairgrounds with the NC Native Plant Society. If you click on this link you can see a few photos of the garden soon after it's construction. We'll be putting the finishing touches today on phase one of the cedar fence addition to the Wildlife Garden. I have enjoyed this project a great deal, mostly because we've done the whole thing "in-house", as it were. We harvested the downed cedar from my family's property in Northern Durham county, we cut, sanded and finished all parts of the fence by hand on-site, and we installed the fencing ourselves. The fact that the existing rails on the bridges in the Wildlife Garden (expertly constructed by Justin Waller) were made of local red cedar, and the existence of a young red cedar tree in the garden itself, influenced my choice to add another architectural element using this material. One of my favorite landscape architects, Jens Jensen, was an early advocate of the use of native species in the landscape, as well as a pioneer in the use of indigenous building materials in highly designed landscapes. Around here, there is no more aesthetically pleasing and useful indigenous building material than red cedar, if you ask me.

I love it's color, shape, feel, smell, and durability. Click on Jensen's name to read an interesting article about him, his philosophy, and the early resistance to focusing on native plants as preferred plants in the designed landscape. It's an interesting read, and offers up some interesting discussion topics involving native plant landscaping as well.

Don't forget about Katherine's "Walk on the Wild Side" tour in the Blomquist Garden on September 2nd. We'll see you then!

2010-08-19T11:50:00.001-07:00

A few interesting things to mention....

Katherine and I worked at the NC State fairgrounds yesterday. The Duke Gardens has a cooperative venture there with the North Carolina Native Plant Society, in the form of a small native plant demonstration garden. This is a permanent display set among the many seasonal gardens that get built for the fair each year. We're in the process of improving and expanding our small garden, so be sure to check it out if you come to the fair this year. We look forward to seeing you there.

Also, the fifth installment of the plant ID blog from the Blomquist Garden is available now. This week's focus is on the genus Eupatorium, with five of the ten plants this week being from that group.

Finally, we've been sweating (or should I say swimming) in this ridiculous humidity this week to move ahead with the improvements to the Wildlife Garden. A new low cedar fence will edge the path and emulate the rustic design of the bridge rails in the garden. We hope to have phase one of these improvements done by the end of next week, and have the garden open for business again. See you soon!

p.s. I'm working with Google to figure out why Korean internet chat pornography folks have decided to use my blog (as well as the blogs of others) to spam info about their websites in the comment section. I keep deleting them, but each time I post a new entry, four or five new bogus comments show up. In the meantime, how about you (my two readers) add some legitimate comments to the mix ? I'd love to hear from you!

2010-08-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Hello....

Hot day.. like liliputians under a hair dryer. Anyway, what's going on.... Oh yes- we had an excellent "Walk on the Wild Side" last week in the Blomquist Garden. our topic was all things related to some current renovations/improvements in the garden. We covered everything from deciding when to renovate a garden space, design considerations, opportunities for infrastructural improvements while you're tearing things up, soil building for fungi and invertebrate diversity, etc.

A number of you mentioned some thoughts about follow up info from the walk- soil building recipes, mycorrhizal fungi innoculants, and so on.... It's been a week, so I've forgotten some of the best queries. Please comment on this post with particular questions and I'll respond. Next month's tour(9/2) will be lead by Katherine Wright, the Blomquist Horticulturist. Her topic will be "How Wetlands Work", with an emphasis on ecosystem services, water quality maintenance, how different species have adapted to thrive in wetland soils, etc. Please join us! In the meantime, look for some new construction in the Blomquist Wildlife Garden beginning next week. We'll be installing some low cedar fencing along the path. The fence materials were harvested from Durham County (all Red Cedar branches) and we've been working the last month or so to turn those raw materials into attractive, functional, durable garden art. Enjoy!

p.s.- for those of you following the plant i.d. blog that Katherine is using to enhance her native plant knowledge, there is a new installment. If you have any plants you would like to see covered, or if you have photos of native plants you need help identifying, let us know through this blog and we'll see what we can do!

2010-08-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

Hello. I've been out of the office, as it were, for the last two weeks. I know the two of you found it hard to live without my periodic pearls of wisdom, so here I am! I'll be back to posting a few times a week for a while. Today, I wanted to give you a heads up about Thurday's "walk on the Wild Side" tour in the Blomquist Garden. I'll be talking about the design and construction of some improvements to the garden that have begun and will continue through the Fall. We'll discuss everything from the initial impetus for starting to think about changes, to the conceptualization and design of said changes/improvements, finally ending with a vision of how the changes/improvements will make the visitor experience in the Blomquist Garden even better. Hope to see you there!

2010-07-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

Where is the time going? I've been a bit awol from the website and blog recently.... i do have a good excuse, though. Let me think a minute, I'll come up with something..... Okay, I've just been doing other stuff. I always get drawn into the boys swim season as it nears it's end in July. The DSSL (Durham Summer Swim League) championship meet was held last weekend in Cary, and now I'm in "swim meet withdrawal". It's time for my kids to start another sport that I can live vicariously through, and fast! The third installment of the "Name That Native" identification blog is up, for anyone that's interested. This week has a good representation of native vines, and next week will focus on piedmont savannah natives. A few engaging classes came through the Blomquist this week- I'll talk about them once I have a few photos to show as well. I'll be on vacation next week camping in Michigan with my boys, and then the following week I'll be in Cullowhee, NC at the NC Native Plants Conference. That's a fun one, if you haven't attended. Till next time!

2010-07-07T03:37:00.000-07:00

The second installment of the "Name That Native" blog is up. There are now twenty species descriptions up there for your identifying pleasure. Enjoy! (stay cool)

2010-06-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Don't forget... the "Walk on the Wild Side" this Thursday. This will be another Landscape Design focused talk, with an emphasis on forms, color, texture and combinations. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we will NOT be talking about flowers. Since the green parts of a plant are around a lot more than their flashy flowers, I thought we'd talk about them for a change. Hope to see you at the Blomquist gatehouse at 11:00 this Thursday (7/1).

2010-06-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

Tuesday..... well, it's not Monday. OK, so I wanted to fill you in on a new resource from the Blomquist Garden. Katherine Wright, my assistant in the Blomquist, is embarking on a plant ID effort to add to her native plant nomenclature knowledge. I thought it might be interesting for our readers to follow along each week and get the same plant lists to commit to memory that she does. We're doing this in the form of another blog called "Name That Native". There, you'll find a list of ten to fifteen new species each week. The entire list, no matter how long it gets, will be cataloged on this blog by week. Check it out when you get a chance.

2010-06-28T04:19:00.001-07:00

check it out...

The humongous Lilium superbum (Turks' Cap Lily) I mentioned a short while ago in another post is now in bloom! It's over eight feet tall with twelve flowers. You won't see many, if any like it of this size in this part of the state. If you go the the "What's Blooming" page of the website, find the grid map and print it. Make a mark in J5- that's where the Lily is. I've got some updating to do of that page. It's swim season for the kids, so I've been busier than usual outside of my two jobs. I'll get on it soon.

As an aside, another Lily ,Lilium pyrophilum, is about to bloom in the carnivorous plant bog (F5 on the grid map). I've linked its name to a journal article about the species. Commonly called the "Sandhills Lily", populations of this species were thought to be simply Lilium superbum who had taken a bit of a wrong turn at Albequerque and moved too far east. It's now recognized as a distinct species, although very similar in many ways to the Turk's Cap lily. Ours are getting ready to bloom as we speak, so a bit behind the Turk's Cap.

2010-06-24T04:10:00.000-07:00

One more thing...

I wanted to add a photo from the latest "Walk on the Wild Side". We discussed "weeds", what that term really means, how plants become known as weeds, etc. In the photo, we're examining what for all the world looks like a clear case of bio-mimicry, or an organism trying really hard to look like another organism. The plant in my left hand is Duchesnea indica, or Indian Strawberry. The plant in my right is Fragaria virginiana, or Virginia Strawberry. The Fragaria is a native species we would hunt for in the fields and wood edges to make wild strawberry jam. The Duchesnea is a non-native species that looks like Fragaria in almost every respect, but has a fruit you wouldn't want to eat. My guess is that part of Duchesnea's success at establishing itself in our gardens and becoming "weedy" has to do with effectively fooling animal foragers as to it's true identity and duping them into eating it and spreading Duchesnea seeds about. Very tricky, you sneaky little plant, you!

As an aside, look at the name after the italicized Latin at the top of each of the linked pages for the plants. Duchesne is the person credited with first describing the Virginia Strawberry, and as a result you'll notice his/her last name after Fragaria virginiana. The individual who first described Duchesnea indica, a Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Focke, obviously paid homage to Duchesne, the person who named the plant the Duchesnea tries so hard to resemble, by naming the plant after them.

2010-06-24T03:44:00.000-07:00

Mornin',

If you're a fan of the good old U S of A, and you enjoy soccer, yesterday was a great day. I had to put that in there. The plant world obviously has a very special place in my heart, but the first thing I really enjoyed doing as a child was chasing a little round ball up and down a field. I still love it. Here's a link to a short video about the US win over Algeria in the World Cup yesterday.

The "Walk on the Wild Side" next week (7/1) will focus on design. We'll discuss texture and shape and how to combine a diverse group of native plants to create a garden where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I'm purposefully going to eschew flowers in this talk. Too often, folks cease to see and appreciate plants when they aren't in bloom. Plants are far more than their reproductive parts. In this talk, we'll try to get beyond this blatant sexual objectification and view the plants for all their other great, and often overlooked qualities. See you there!

2010-06-10T04:22:00.000-07:00

Schools out, schools out, teacher let the mules out! Today is the last day of the school year for Ethan and Samuel. Once they stop crying and moaning about not having to get up early, bathe regularly, and go to bed, I'm sure they'll find something to do with their time. We'll see. Lot's blooming in the Church Endangered Species Garden these days. The photo included is a Dissected Beardtongue, or Penstemon dissectus. It's one of a number of species showing off as we speak. Check them out if you have time. If I don't sit down to type again before the weekend, have a good one, and try not to toss your children out the window after they've only been out of school for a day or so. September will be here before you know it!

2010-06-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

wow- time flies! It's almost time for another "walk on the wild side" (tomorrow at 11:00) and I still haven't decided what to talk about. Since I'm doing a lot of weeding these days, perhaps we'll discuss what makes a plant a "weed", my general philosophy about weeds, and some of the "usual suspects" in the Blomquist Garden. Hope to see you there!

2010-05-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

some notes from the wilderness...

Our Red Shouldered Hawks have babies! You can hear them calling when one of their parents bring them some grub. In a post from a week or so I ago I describe how to locate the nest in the garden. I'd like nothing more than to scale a nearby loblolly pine and get a glimpse of them, but the idea of falling eighty feet while being lacerated by an angry hawk does not appeal to me. The garden is bursting with birds right now. The goldfinches are feasting on the Columbine seeds near the Endangered Garden, and the waterfall in the Wildlife Garden is a perennially popular spot. Lots of fledglings about, chasing their parents and asking for regurgitated bugs, car keys, etc. The feeding stations are full as well with moms and dads trying to get some calories to fuel their never ending hunt for bugs to feed the babes. The Oakleaf Hydrangeas near the Blomquist pavilion and pond are quite striking (and fragrant) right now as well. You can see our information kiosk map with text online by visiting the Blomquist Website and pulling up the "Sneak Peek" page. There you'll see some images, one entitled "Blomquist Entrance Map". You can use that to locate all the special structures and exhibits within the garden. Print it and keep it to help find your way around. Enjoy!

2010-05-26T03:47:00.000-07:00

Mornin'

I wanted to go back a few posts and give you a link to an album of photos from my recent trip to DC. There are a few photos from a ramble my wife and I took through the invasive jungle of Rock Creek Park, a picture of a tiny Fiat in Georgetown, resting near the Lincoln Monument in my dorky hat, and a view of the Museum of the American Indian from the grounds of the US Botanic Garden. The majority of the photos are drawings by a group of elementary and middle school children from New Jersey and California. They were part of the United Nations Environment Programme School Art and Essay Competition for World Environment Day 2009. The images were on display in the education facilities at the US Botanic Garden, and I found them compelling and beautiful. As I mentioned, the theme for the sketches was the idea of humans finding ways, through conservation, stewardship and technology, to save the planet. Some of these kids were nine or ten years old when the drawings were done, with the oldest being seventeen. I think you'll agree that they put their considerable talents to good use here. Included with the text here is an image of Abby Hird and Andrea Kramer of BGCI (Andrea is on the left). I interviewed the two of them during my trip about the work their organization is doing to, you guessed it, save the planet.

2010-05-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

hey!

just updated the "What's Blooming" page of the website. It's been a few weeks since the last update- sorry about that. The computer I use for the web design is at home, so I do this in my spare time. Have a great weekend!

2010-05-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

Almost Friday!

It's going to be a fun weekend- the boys want to go see Russell Crowe v/s King John in "Robin Hood", so hopefully we'll get to eat some popcorn and enjoy one of the world's greatest inventions: the movie theatre. Sunday we're having some friends over for brunch, so house and yard cleaning are in the near future no doubt. Time to mow the weeds, I mean grass. I'm also looking forward to Saturday, when we have our annual Duke Gardens staff barbecue in Bahama at my family property. The summer interns are starting next week, so we'll get to meet them for the first time at the party. Fishing, barbecue, volleyball, botanizing... always a good time.

A plant to watch for in the coming weeks in the Blomquist is on the rise, literally. There is a Lilium superbum (Turks Cap Lily) that currently stands at seven feet tall as of this morning. Last year it produced eight stunning orange explosions with black freckles. This year it seems to have taken it to a new level, and I fully expect ten to twelve blossoms and an ultimate height of over eight feet. I'm including a photo of one of last years flowers to get you interested. To keep tabs on it, you can find it near the waterfall amongst the Rhododendron maximum in the wildlife garden. To see exactly where that is, print the grid map from the "What's Blooming" page of the Blomquist Website and make a mark in J5. It will probably be another two weeks before it's in bloom, so take advantage of the intervening time to watch the flowers emerge. Whenever you see a plants name in a different color on the blog, click on it and it will take you to a page on the USDA website for that species. This is the site from which I verify all my nomenclature, provenance (where a plant originates from), etc. for all my record keeping. Scroll down to view a range map for the species, and then click on individual states to see in what counties that species is found in the wild.

2010-05-17T04:15:00.000-07:00

Hey there!

My wife and I spent some time last week in D.C., one of my favorite cities. I needed to conduct a couple of video interviews for use in a short documentary I'm making about the conservation movement in the botanic garden world, and we needed some time away to enjoy each other's company. Our fifteenth anniversary is coming up at the end of the month, so a hotel in Dupont Circle was our getaway spot. Thursday was spent driving, and after arrival, filming. I met with Andrea Kramer and Abby Hird, both employees of the global organization Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). Andrea is the director of BGCI operations here in the U.S., and Abby is a BGCI representative who works at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. The two of them spoke during the interviews about the work being done all over the world, and especially domestically by BGCI to realize the conservation potential of botanic gardens and arboreta. We met to do the filming at the United States Botanic Garden, and while I was there, I took a few photos from an artists wall of sketches by young people. I was particularly moved by a group of drawings from a group of elementary and middle school students from New Jersey who, it appeared, had been tasked with imagining how we might save the planet through collective action. I'll post photos of those sketches, as well as an image of Andrea and Abby in my next post. Friday, Erika and I walked from Adams Morgan to the Jefferson Memorial taking in all that is D.C. on a beautiful Spring day. Darlin, if you're reading this, I had a great time in D.C., and the past fifteen plus years have been the best of my life!

2010-05-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

Mornin'....

I wanted to add a post in honor of our Board members, and anyone else reading this for that matter, as a means to fill everyone in on some of the highlights inside and outside of the Blomquist garden during the last six months. Okay, now let me think....

Right, to begin lets talk about garden infrastructure. We now have proposals in place for us to consider from contractors interested in building our newest feature proposed in the garden, a covered footbridge. I'm very excited about this project, and the design process of this structure has been helped along by my colleagues here at the garden, most notably Paul Jones, Mike Owens, and Harry Jenkins. Here's an artist's rendition of what the bridge might look like:

It's been a great year for wildlife in the garden, and I don't mean Duke students. It's been three years since we embarked on a campaign to attract more wildlife diversity to the Blomquist, beginning with the addition of feeding stations for migratory and nesting songbirds, and continuing with a design focus on plant additions that attract a large variety of insect and bird pollinators, and culminating last year with the completion of the Blomquist Wildlife garden. Success in an effort like this can be hard to measure, but I'm happy to say that for the second year in a row, we have a nesting pair of Red Shouldered Hawks in the Blomquist, and we're pretty sure they have babies in the nest as I write this. These raptors typically will not nest in an area unless they have adequate prey available, so to have a pair of apex predators who feed on snakes, frogs and birds (hey, I 'm building a feeding station for ALL birds) and are happy and healthy and raising young on site says a lot about the ecological health of the area they've chosen to nest in. It's outcomes like this that I garden for. I've added a photo of a green friend from the Wildlife garden stream (she's got one eye out for bugs, and another out for hawks).

Conservation education and outreach has become an integral part of what we do in the Blomquist garden, and we've been fortunate enough to have formed some special partnerships recently. The most developed of these involves our work with Durham Public Schools and Easley Elementary School. Together with the Eno River Association, we put together a design for the construction of a native plant education garden at Easley, and after a fall and winter of periodic building it was formally dedicated on Earth Day this year. As our children spend most of their days at school, it seems imperative that we make those schools places where they will learn about and become champions for our embattled wild spaces. I hope to be involved with the growth and development of this garden for years to come. Click this link to learn more about this space that we've named the Easley Discovery Garden.

Photographs are portals into another place and time, and they can be valuable educational tools as well. During the last few months, a Blomquist photography project has come to full fruit that was begun four years ago. In conjunction with the Ladybird Johnson Wildlfower Center, we've made available the Blomquist photo catalog to any non-profit to use for educational purposes. That means anyone who works for an organization dedicated to the use, interpretation and conservation of our native flora can receive free digital copies of our images for use in their publications, websites, etc. In the past four months, I've noticed a huge increase in the use of the Blomquist Catalog by all sorts of folks who want to spread the word about the floral denizens of our fields and forests. You can view the catalog here. Images are being added 2-3 times per year, so check back periodically.

Finally, I wanted to mention the Blomquist Website as a tool for those who want to dive deep into what the Blomquist garden is all about. A significant amount of improvements have been made during the last few months, not the least of which is an improved "What's Blooming" page where you can, in real time, see photos of what's in bloom in the garden as well learn where those species are located in the garden and finally print a map from the same page where you can create your own self-guided floral tours. In the next few weeks I'll be adding an "Outreach" page

to highlight some of the community projects we're involved in, some of which include partnerships with the North Carolina Native Plant Society, The Southeastern Center for the Contemporary Arts (SECCA), St Phillips Episcopal Church in Durham, The Triangle Land Conservancy, and the list goes on.

Last but not least, ye old blog here is full o' information about what we do in the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants. Become a follower, share a link to the blog with your friends, and help us get the word out about the good work going on in the woods!

2010-05-05T03:26:00.001-07:00

birds, birds, birds...

a few very nice bird sightings in the Blomquist Wildlife Garden yesterday. There must be a good number of migrants coming through right now, as all three of these species haven't been seen in the Blomquist Garden so far this year. Come to think of it, I haven't EVER seen any of these in the garden. The fact that I saw all of them bathing in the stream in the WILDLIFE garden tells me all that advertising I did in those popular bird magazines, the banner ads I placed on those popular avian websites, and those focus groups I conducted with our local feathered friends has really gotten the word out to the migrants on the wing. It seems our B&B for the wilder set, complete with all of it's creature comforts, has become quite popular...

anyway, all puns aside, the birds I saw yesterday were the Summer Tananger, the American Redstart, and the Black Breasted Blue Warbler. There were a pair of the Warblers- here's a photo of the female. Click the species names for images of these striking birds. The sound and sight of the moving water in the stream seems to draw birds to the Wildlife Garden like a magnet, so if you have some species you're looking for, and you think the time is right for them to be in town, check out the rest stop we've made for them in the Blomquist Garden. If you want to learn more about the Wildlife Garden in particular, visit the page named for it on the Blomquist Website. Enjoy!

A reminder- join us tomorrow at 11:00 for the "Walk on the Wild Side" tour in the Blomquist Garden. We'll be discussing native ferns, their history, and their landscape uses and functions. As always, you can learn about the tour topics on the website as well by visiting the "Wild Side" page. I'd like to invite any members of our Board of Advisors who are in town for our Board Meeting tomorrow to join me and my regulars for the tour. See you then!

2010-05-03T04:44:00.001-07:00

A week or so ago, a couple of us took a trip down to Pickens, SC to visit my friend Tom Goforth at his nursery Crow Dog Ferns. Tom is a green-industry leader in the propagation of our southeastern native fern species from spores, and his nursery is a testament to his dedication to the appreciation and conservation of these ancient plants. Click here for a short slide gallery from the trip, including photos of his laboratory where it all begins. The "Walk on the Wild Side" tour this week will focus on native ferns, and I'll probably add another post before Thursday on the topic. Enjoy!

2010-04-30T03:53:00.001-07:00

Happy Friday!

Lots blooming in the garden- of special interest is the spectacular Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentuckea) blooming near the entrance to the garden (see the "what's blooming" page of the website for the exact location). It's a great ornamental tree, with nice from, a huge stature, beautiful bark, and spectacular pea-family flower clusters reminiscent of wisteria. Check it out before it's done! Also, I want to let you know that the "Walk on the Wild Side" for May (5/6) will focus on the Ferns of the Blomquist Garden. You can always find the topics for the previous and upcoming tours on the "Wild Side" page on the website as well. Have a great weekend!

2010-04-28T03:41:00.000-07:00

I had a great time with the Woodcroft Women's Club on Monday night. I presented a talk on "Sustainable Landscape Design" with an emphasis on building landscapes that last and have a positive impact on the environment. There were a number of questions after the talk that I promised I would address in a blog post. First, we talked about what I feel is the best mulch to use- leaf compost. It's what mother nature puts down in our forests once a year, so it should be good enough for us. A source for leaf compost in the Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Southeast Durham is Area Mulch and Soils. They only deliver to a few places in Durham, so not a total solution. The Carrboro Public Works department also has leaf compost periodically that you can pick up yourself. Visit their site to learn more. I couldn't find any mention of it there, but the contact info is there to learn more about what they offer. Also, I gave a lousy definition of Greensand, a common ingredient in a number of organic fertilizers. Here's a better on e. We talked alot about soil building, and how important it was to healthy plants. Here's an article that gives a good overview of the topic, albeit it's on a website trying to sell you stuff. Ignore the product placements, and you'll get some good info. We also talked alot about fungi and how important a good fungal colony in the soil was to healthy plants. Here's a short piece of information about how that works. Here's where you can get fungal innoculants for your soil through the web. I have used the Mychorrizal Landscape Innoculant on that page and have had great results. If there are any other questions I didn't answer from the talk, please comment on this post with a question and I'll respond. If you weren't at the talk and have a related question on the topic, feel free to add a comment as well.

2010-04-19T19:00:00.001-07:00

Do me a favor.... give me some feedback about the Blomquist Website "What's Blooming" page improvements in the past few months. It takes a good deal of work to keep things updated online in a timely manner, and I want to find out if it's being used. Let me know if you like it, hate it, or think it could be tweaked a bit to make it better. Thanks!

2010-04-19T04:54:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday! I wanted to update our readers (all three of you!) about an interesting event. For the past eight years, Duke Gardens has partnered with the North carolina Native Plant Society to conduct periodic "Plant Rescues" on natural sites slated for development. We bring a group of volunteers and staff to the area, where we proceed to remove native species that would otherwise be destroyed and take them back to the gardens. There we pot them up or heel them in and eventually they go into the gardens as part of our collections. Here are a few photos from a recent rescue showing the digging, the potting, and the finished product ready for fall planting. On this trip we rescued over a thousand individual specimens representing eight different species of native woodland plants.

2010-04-18T17:59:00.000-07:00

A lot to talk about... This past Friday I went to Winston Salem with Jason Holmes, Katherine Wright and Tamara Kilbane (all fellow Duke Gardens staffers) to visit the Emily Allen Wildflower Preserve. This large backyard, situated on five acres beneath an impressive hillside canopy of Tulip Poplars, is quite a special site. Open to visitors by appointment, the garden is the work of decades of attention and dedication to our native woodland flora on the part of a special lady. Use this link to view a slideshow of images from our trip, complete with pictures of Emily herself (our tour guide), as well as a multitude of Trilliums, the star attractions in the garden this time of year.

On Saturday morning, Easley Elementary held their Earth Day celebration. A part of the party was the dedication of the Easley Discovery Garden, a joint venture between Easley Elementary school, The Eno River Association, and The Sarah P. Duke Gardens. Click here for a link to a slideshow of images from the celebration. Enjoy!

2010-04-15T04:10:00.001-07:00

This weekend there will be a dedication for the Easley Discovery Garden at Easley Elementary. If you've been reading the blog during the past year, you may remember this project as a joint venture between the Duke Gardens, The Eno River Association, and Easley Elementary School in Durham. We've done a lot of work on the garden in the past year, and we hope to have most if not all aspects of our design completed by the beginning of the '10-'11 school year. The garden features native trees, shrubs and perennials, and will be used as a natural outdoor classroom for Easley instructors to teach students about soil, plant and insect life cycles, native ecosystems and the connection between our natural and cultural histories here in NC. We hope to partner with the North Carolina Botanical Garden through the Earth Partnerships for Schools satellite program they administer there. Easley teachers could attend seminars in effective natural history education and outdoor learning, which would help bridge the growing gap between schoolchildren and nature.

2010-04-13T15:11:00.001-07:00

Trying hard to keep pace with the blooming plants..... new photos on the "whats blooming" page of the website. If you are in the garden and see something blooming that's not on the website, let me know. Also, be my eyes and ears in the garden. The visitation is very heavy right now, and the chances for the plantings to be damaged are correspondingly high. If you see anyone off the path and in the planting areas (anywhere that is not a path or a structure), please kindly and politely inform them that setting foot off the path damages both the plants and the soil. Thanks for your help in keeping the Blomquist beautiful!

2010-04-04T10:34:00.001-07:00

Lots of new photos of plants in bloom on the "What's Blooming" page at the Blomquist Website. If you plan on taking pictures of your own, please respect the garden by staying on the path at all times. Thanks, and enjoy!

2010-04-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

Mornin'....

a few of us (Katherine Wright and myself) spent part of the afternoon yesterday at St. Phillips Episcopal Church in downtown Durham helping them with a community garden project. St. Phillips has a large community vegetable garden on-site that they use to donate fresh vegetables to local organizations. We were there to help set-up and install a drip irrigation system to water the crops this year. Here are a few photos from the event. Enjoy!

2010-03-29T06:57:00.000-07:00

A note....

The best way to use the printable grid map from the "What's Blooming" page of the Blomquist website is to download it and then print it. In the upper right hand corner of the screen with the plant photos is the word "download". Click on the map, and when it pops up as a larger image click the download button and then print the file from your computer. Enjoy!

2010-03-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

I had a great tour with Obamikel Alston and his "Sustainable Landscape Design" class from Durham Tech this week. The class was offered in conjunction with the "Green Jobs" initiative created by the federal government. Obamikel, I'm sorry about taking the photo with your eyes shut!

2010-03-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

It's Friday!!! The printable map of the Blomquist Garden I mentioned in my last post is ready to roll. Here's a peek at what it will look like. I'm adding it to the "What's Blooming" page of the website tonight. Print it, then make notations of what grids the species are blooming in, then take your own self-guided tour of the Blomquist-in-bloom! Enjoy!

2010-03-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

What a weekend!

It doesn't get much better than a day like today. Seventy, breezy and sunny with birds galore a singin' to beat the band. Lots of plants coming into bloom this week! I'm adding new photos every day to the Blomquist Website "What's Blooming"page. In the next week, I'll also add a Blomquist Garden map with a grid that can be printed. I'll add grid locations to each photo so that visitors, with the aid of the map, can locate the area of the Blomquist Garden where each plant in bloom is located. Look for this map in the coming week on the "What's Blooming" page. Enjoy!

2010-03-17T04:52:00.000-07:00

oops- I forgot to mention that the Blomquist Garden is just a fixin' to blow up with blooms. Tonight I'll be adding photos of the plants in bloom or about to pop on the "What's Blooming" page of the Blomquist Website. From now until the end of May is the peak bloom time for the garden, so make time for a visit!

2010-03-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is halfway to Friday!

Hi there! For those of you who attended my "Native Plant Design" talk at Fearrington yesterday, I wanted to add a link to where you can view the slide show online. Clicking on this link, you can go to a gallery of mine where you can see the show. I'm having an issue with the program lately that causes the slides to be loaded last to first. They are labeled in order, so to start at the start go to slide one and count up from there. I'll add this show to the "Media Center" page on the Blomquist Website in the next few days. Thanks to the Fearrington Garden Club for their hospitality!

2010-03-10T04:25:00.000-08:00

a note...

In light of my last post, I'd like to add some more info. As you may remember, Toby Hemenway was here a month ago to talk about Permaculture. In his book, Gaia's Garden, there is a chapter that deals with soil fertility and overall garden ecology that relates very well to our last "Walk on the Wild Side". The chapter entitled "A Gardener's Ecology" speaks to many of the same topics we discussed last week, and the book as a whole is a great resource whether you're an aspiring vegetable gardener or just want to create a healthy ecology in whatever garden you cultivate. By the way, no, I don't get a cut of any sales of the books I recommend- I just like them. I link them through the Regulator Bookshop website because I think it's important to support local businesses. Sure, I've shopped at the big book stores, but if I can get something at The Regulator, or at Barnes Supply, or The Playhouse Toystore, I try to do that. Keeping money in our community supports local jobs that pay local wages that buy local goods and pay local taxes which support local infrastructure...... Let's keep it local, shall we.

2010-03-08T04:30:00.000-08:00

Mornin'

I enjoyed the "Walk on the Wild Side" last Thursday. We talked a lot about soil fertility, building healthy soil, and fertilizers. Here's a link to an article that basically sums up my position on how to create healthy soil, as well as why I choose organic fertilizers over synthetics. In case you didn't know, whenever I say "here's a link", I mean for you to click on the word "link", which is a different color than the rest of the text. See you soon!

2010-02-22T04:25:00.001-08:00

Happy Monday!

I had a great time at the "Your Natural Garden" Symposium this past Saturday. Thanks to all who came out to hear the presentations. My talk about "Natural Community Gardening" is now available on the web by clicking on this link. For some reason, when I uploaded the presentation it put the last slide first- just scroll to the bottom and go up to see the presentation in order. If you have any questions about the presentation, or anything I might have mentioned during my talk or during the workshop conducted by myself and Doug Tallamy, please feel free to post comments on this blog or send an e-mail to sbloodwo@duke.edu.

2010-02-15T13:54:00.000-08:00

A word about this past weekend...

We had a great lecture/seminar series this past weekend with Toby Hemenway from Portland, Oregon. As you will have read if you've been following the blog lately, Toby is a permaculture designer/teacher/writer who travels a good bit spreading the gospel of this great discipline of sustainable agriculture. I mentioned his book Gaia's Garden in the earlier post, and wanted to take the opportunity to name a few other volumes of interest on Permaculture:

Edible Forest Gardens by David Jacke

Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison et. al.

more rain today... I think I have moss growing on me.

2010-02-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

Hey!

I forgot to mention a book that I like in my next-to-last post. Botany for Gardeners by Brian Capon is an intersting read for those who never took botany, or if you did, you've since forgotten alot of what you knew. I don't know anyone like that, no way....

Anyway..., it has a great chapter relating to our last "Walk on the Wild Side" on seeds and germination that then leads right into a discussion of how plant tissues grow into mature plants and so on and so forth.... Check it out!

2010-02-05T04:24:00.000-08:00

It's snowing again! It's 7:00 a.m. as I write this, and I can imagine my boys at home looking out the window and praying to the gods of school closings while repeating the mantra "let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...."

A note about the blog..

In the coming weeks you may notice a change. I'd like to go beyond simply reporting the news, as it were, and create an ongoing narrative of my opinions and observations about the experience of working so closely with these miracles we call native plants. Things I will avoid are

1) Observations that are overtly partisan in relation to things like politics/religion/Duke vs. UNC, 2) critical comments directed at other human beings, and 3)whining/complaining/moaning/groaning of any sort (unless I haven't had my coffee yet, in which case all bets are off).

I really enjoy writing, and I hope if you enjoy something you read here (or do not) you'll let me know. I can't thank you, my two readers, enough for your support to this point. Keep reading! I promise I'll say something interesting one of these days!

2010-02-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

Holy frozen precipitation Batman! When will it melt?!

We had a great walk in the Blomquist Garden today. Twelve or so intrepid attendees braved the cold and the paths of half-frozen slush to listen to a discussion about what it is that brings plants out of their winter dormancy and makes them push up through the cold soil to reach the sun. If you attended and want to recap, or if you are simply interested, here are a number of links to articles covering topics similar to those we discussed today. Enjoy!

Seed Germination

Seed Dormancy

Seed Germination

2010-01-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

What a gift...

I'm sitting in my living room by the fire watching the snow fall. It seems like it's been ten years since we've had a storm like this, and I love it! So far we have eight inches in Bahama and it's not even lunchtime! The birds are out in force at the feeders in the wood's edge. To this point we've seen 3 species of sparrow, blue jays, goldfinches, cardinals, towhees, titmice, chickadees, flickers, juncos, mourning doves, and white-breasted nuthatches. They're about to eat through our last bag of sunflower seed. I think I saw some suet here somewhere.... If you're within walking distance of the gardens, visit the two feeding stations in the Blomquist Garden today. Chances are are you'll see birds there you haven't seen in a while, as the shortage of available food drives them to desperate measures (i.e. being seen with Homo sapiens).

If you'd like to learn more about attracting and sustaining a diverse cross-section of wildlife species near your abode without the help of a blizzard, consider attending an upcoming workshop at the gardens. Click here to learn more about "Your Natural Garden", a multiple-day symposium featuring yours truly along with other speakers including Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, an informative work focusing on the importance of insect diversity to the overall health and well-being of ecosystems and urban landscapes. Please join us!

2010-01-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

What's new?

A few things here. A great symposium is coming up here at the gardens. Toby Hemenway is a sustainable gardening guru of sorts, and has written an excellent book in Gaia's Garden, a study of garden design for all types of spaces that includes edible plants, natural aesthetics and ecological sensitivity with an eye for long term sustainability. Toby will be here at the Duke Gardens from February 12th to the 14th lecturing and leading classes in this elegant landscape design method. To learn more about the symposium, visit this link. I hope to see you there!

Seeing things beginning to poke out of the ground? Our next "Walk on the Wild Side" will focus on what it takes for plants to wake from their winter slumber, what influences the timing of that re-emergence, and how human activity often influences that timing. Join me February 4th at 11:00 at the Blomquist Garden gatehouse. For directions to the gatehouse, visit the information desk at the Doris Duke visitor's center when you arrive at the Gardens. See you then!

2010-01-21T04:18:00.000-08:00

Hey there,

A few interesting things to talk about. . . A colleague of mine, Paul Jones, sent me an interesting e-mail this morning. It seems the School of the Environment at Duke is hosting an environmental video contest with some decent ($$$) prize money up for grabs. If you like dabbling in the art of amateur film- making, and if you have something you'd like to say about protecting our environment, check out this link, and good luck! I'll be creating an entry, and I look forward to seeing yours!

If you like to read, and you like to eat as well, I have a book to recommend. The End of Food, by Paul Roberts is an interesting look at how our global food economy has evolved, who the power brokers are in this trillion dollar industry, and how the way we eat affects global poverty, the environment, and the sustainability of life on planet earth. As with all the books I mention on this blog, simply click on the title to see a summary of the book on the Regulator Bookshop page. Buy local!

Till next time!

2010-01-06T13:44:00.001-08:00

It's cold!!

The plants are looking less than happy about this weather, and I don't blame them.

Just wanted to make mention of a youtube video I recently uploaded. Johnny Randall from the North Carolina Botanical Garden was gracious enough to step in front of my camera and speak to the problem of invasive plants in our wild landscapes. Take a look by clicking this link. Enjoy!

2010-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

I spent a good bit of my holiday in northern Michigan surrounded by two feet of snow. Word to the wise: Honda Civics do not great snow vehicles make. Lots of time spent by the fire, and a good bit of time spent careening downhill while trying to keep up with my sons and nephew and niece on their snowboards. A reminder- Thursday's "Walk on the Wild Side"(1/7) for January will focus on winter interest planting and design for the native plant garden. Good to be back!

2009-12-10T04:25:00.000-08:00

A note about a new Blomquist staff member...

Katherine Wright will be my new assistant and the new Horticulturist in the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants starting January 4th. Katherine comes to us from the Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC) where she has been an Easement Steward, working with property owners to develop plans to help them conserve the land they own and the plant and animal species that call their property home.

TLC and the Blomquist Garden have developed a close relationship over the last year, and having Katherine as a Duke Gardens employee in the Blomquist Garden will only strengthen that tie with an organization that we believe is very important to all of us, as their mission of conservation helps create a tapestry of intact wild landscapes throughout the Triangle. To learn more about TLC, who they are and what they do, use this link, and please join me in welcoming Katherine next month.

2009-12-07T11:35:00.001-08:00

Good afternoon...

I wanted to fill you in on a recent conference I attended. The NC-EPPC annual meeting (North Carolina Exotic Pest plant Council) was held last week in Chapel Hill at the new visitor center for the North Carolina Botanic Garden. These meetings bring together botanical professionals from across the region to discuss strategies and methods of curbing the spread of invasive plants in our wild landscapes. If you would like to learn more about the council, it's mission, or this year's conference, visit this link. If you'd like to become a council member, you can download a membership form from that same link. Enjoy!

2009-12-04T04:32:00.000-08:00

We had a great tour yesterday in the Blomquist. The "Walk on the Wild Side" focused on cold weather adaptations that allow plants, native or otherwise, to survive the winter months. Thanks to the folks who came out for their great questions. The January class/tour will focus on winter interest in the native plant garden. See you January 7th at the Blomquist gatehouse at 11:00.

Now, for something completely different...

I'll be giving a presentation at the 2010 Cullowhee Native Plants Conference. The topic will focus on conservation education at botanic gardens with an emphasis on what we've done in the Blomquist Garden as well as our community outreach work to connect the public with native plants and habitats. I feel honored to be given the chance to speak to this topic, as it's one that is near and dear to my heart. If you've never been to the conference, and have an interest in native plant horticulture and conservation, consider attending. You can learn more at this link. See you soon.

2009-12-02T05:06:00.000-08:00

update..

the walk on the wild side tomorrow will focus on winter adaptations. This will be a follow up to our discussion last month about fall color. Tomorrow we'll discuss how native plants survive the cold winter months, and what goes on below the soil during this time of year that we can't see.

See you there!

2009-11-18T04:16:00.001-08:00

Hey! Book recommendation...

The Myth of Progress, by ecologist Tom Wessels is a powerful, compact read. At 130 pages, it's an easy book to finish in a quiet afternoon, and it's one that will stay with you long after you've put it down. Wessels uses elegant prose to weave ecology, economics and politics in an amazing web designed to build an image of exactly how it's come to this: a world full of entire ecosystems and human populations fated to be seen as throwaways should they a) fail turn a profit, b) stand in the way of progress, or c) fall short of wallstreet expectations. Wessels questions our assumptions about global competition and capitalism through comparisons between economic systems and natural environments, in the end making the argument that our current global market focus and fixation on ever expanding economies is a house of cards destined to collapse as we ignore it's very foundation and poison our air, water and soil. If you care about the state of our planet, and feel compelled to understand the "big picture" of how human activity effects the global environment, please read this book.

2009-11-04T13:52:00.001-08:00

P.S. as per the last post..

I'm adding a page to the Blomquist website tonight called "The Wild Side". You'll be able to go there each month to see what the topic will be for that month's walk along with a brief description of what we'll cover.

2009-11-04T11:59:00.000-08:00

A quick reminder about tomorrow's "Walk on the Wild Side".

The topic will be "Fall". We'll discuss why leaves turn colors, why the trees and shrubs that once (earlier that year) depended upon them give them the boot, and how plants evolved to have this type of hot and cold relationship with their photosynthetic workhorses. See you there! (11:oo a.m. at the Blomquist Gatehouse)

2009-10-26T04:35:00.000-07:00

Every day, multiple times per day, in fact, I try to figure out how to save the planet. What I mean is, I search my brain for ways to interpret the state of the world. Yes, I hear the same news that you do every morning. Banks failing, bombs exploding, and people living in quiet desperation, praying for their next meal. What I don't hear much about is the ticking bomb we're sitting on; the one we've worked a few centuries to create, the planet we're slowly but surely wrecking. At parties, I can be a downer. I try not to be, really. Eventually the topic will turn somehow to what I do, and then eventually to what matters to me, and then eventually to that ticking bomb. The thing is, I'm a very happy, optimistic person by nature. I love to smile, and laughing is something I do without thinking. I'm also quite distressed about the health of planet earth fifty years from now, when I hope to be tottering after my great-grandchildren. What type of earth will they take for granted, and will it bear any resemblance to the one I was born into? So I search, daily, for a way to communicate to those folks at parties, who don't understand but could find it in them to care, why we have to make responsible earth stewardship a part of all of our lives.

I recently received a letter from someone I met through my work here at the Duke Gardens. This person, who has aided my conservation work here in the Blomquist Garden, and who shares my concern and distress about the state of our global environment, sent along with her letter a copy of a recent speech on this topic. Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur, writer and environmental activist with an eloquent pen. In May, he was charged with delivering the commencement address at the University of Portland. His topic: why we should have hope for the planet in the face of such distressing trends. His prose is far more powerful than mine, so I'm including it here for you to ponder. I believe, as he does, that the time is short in which to act, but that there is hope for our beautiful spaceship.

Paul Hawken's commencement address to the University of Portland, May 3, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was "direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful." No pressure there.

Let's begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn't bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn't afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here's the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver's description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown -- Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of
people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn't stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

2009-10-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

More Blomquist happenings in the news... here's a link to a short video by Duke Productions about the "Walk on the Wild Side" tours in the Blomquist Garden. Check it out.

2009-10-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

A rainy, cool Thursday...

I love this weather. It gives me an excuse to sit by the fire, drink something hot, and wax nostalgic about my younger days playing football in the broomstraw fields of my youth. . .

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... a garden grows and new things happen every day. I'm a big fan of creative architecture in the garden, and we have something exciting planned as far as Blomquist construction projects go. A covered bridge is in the planning process at the moment. This new structure will replace an existing bridge that has served admirably, but whose sunset is approaching, as they say. I'm including an artists rendition of this new structure in this post so you can begin to wrap your brain around the idea. I'm very excited about it, and I can't wait to see the first visitor round the corner to see the finished product. More news to come.........

2009-10-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

A quick note..

The "Walk on the Wild Side" for November (11/5) will focus on Fall. We'll discuss why trees shed their leaves, what's behind those brilliant fall colors, as well as some of my favorite native species for fall color.

2009-10-14T04:38:00.000-07:00

Happy Wednesday!

If you've been reading my blog lately, you've no doubt noticed my involvement with the construction of a native plant garden at Easley Elementary School. I thought I'd take a few minutes to describe why the Duke Gardens is involved with this project.

I think that most of us would agree that our nation has collectively moved away from an intimate understanding of mother nature and how she works. We don't know where our food comes from (before it gets to Food Lion), where our water comes from (before it gets into our pipes) or how a forest is more than a green backdrop for a golf course. This disconnect has created an alarming level of apathy on the part of the average citizen. We watch impassively as the woods and streams of our childhood disappear, to be replaced by concrete, asphalt and two-by-four monocultures.

Have we truly forgotten the lessons we learned watching leaves turn to rich soil as we grew, or was nature just an abstract backdrop to us even in our early years? Whatever is at the root of our disaffection with mother nature is, it's up to us to prune it and start anew.

Anyone who has children will tell you that having kids around you opens your eyes. They see everything, and their sense of wonder and curiosity is infectious. If we want to re-connect our societies with the natural world, I believe we must start young, before those open eyes begin to close. For that reason, the Duke Gardens has embraced the idea of bringing nature back into the schoolyard. If we can create spaces where children can experience the beautiful diversity of their local wild environments right outside their classrooms, and if we can design those spaces to meet the needs of teachers, I think that we will have a great start toward fostering a much more profound understanding and appreciation among young people of the beauty and wonder of our remaining wild spaces. To learn more about what's happening with our current project at Easley Elementary, please visit the project website. Until next time, "Enjoy the Wild"!

2009-10-12T04:13:00.000-07:00

Buenos dias!

We had a great garden volunteer workday on Saturday at Easley Elementary. Thanks to all those who gave of their time to help with this special project. I've included a photo of a group shot we took at the end of the day. If you would like to be involved in the ongoing construction of the Discovery Garden, please e-mail me at sbloodwo@duke.edu for info about future volunteer opportunities. To see all the photos from the Discovery garden construction process thus far, visit the website and look in the "Easley Gallery" photo album on the "Easley Albums" page. Enjoy!

2009-10-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

Good afternoon,

If you are thinking about volunteering tomorrow (10/10) at Easley Elementary to help with the construction of their Discovery Garden, here is a link for directions to the school. See you there!

2009-10-08T03:43:00.001-07:00

Mornin,

I had a great visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden last week. They are really doing their part to teach visitors about the need for responsible stewardship of the earth. If every botanic garden would focus some part of their horticultural and educational energy towards turning back the rising tide of environmental degradation and disinterest, our descendants might still have a healthy planet to call home. The time has passed for half measures on this topic. We are riding "shotgun down the avalanche" right now, going about our daily routines as if our planet was not facing the prospect of the largest public health, ecological, and food crisis humans have ever experienced. The next 40 years will determine the future of our planet, and it's time for us all to act.

On a lighter note, we had a good group of folks attend the latest "Walk on the Wild Side" in the Blomquist Garden. I've included a photo of our group. We had a good discussion about the pervasive problem of invasive plant species in the environment, how they do what they do, and why they MUST be removed from our wild landscapes.

Finally, please consider volunteering this Saturday (10/10) at Easley Elementary in Durham to help with phase one of their Discovery Garden construction. We'll be out there from about 10-2, with some folks coming in a bit earlier and staying a bit later. I'll post a photo album of the workday next week on this blog.

2009-09-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

Hey!

Anybody out there? If you are, heres a link to a short video interview I conducted with Tom Harville, the president of the North Carolina Native Plant Society. I have a good bit more footage, so we'll probably see Tom again soon. Look for more of these video interviews in the near future with folks involved in the protection and celebration of our native flora!

2009-09-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

Hey!

Here's a link to a photo gallery from the plant sale this past Saturday. Enjoy!

2009-09-28T06:54:00.001-07:00

Hey there!

A few notes. . . We had a great plant sale this past Saturday. It was cloudy and cool, and the rain held off until the very end. I'll post a link for a photo album from the sale in the next day or so. The "Walk on the Wild Side" this Thursday is about invasive plant species and why they are such a problem in the garden and in wild landscapes.

Please consider making a small donation of your time or a modest monetary contribution to aid the construction of the Easley Discovery Garden that I've mentioned here before. You can learn more about the garden at www.easleydiscoverygarden.com. If you'd like to donate your time, we'll be having a workday on Oct 10th to begin the formal construction for the garden. Monetary donations should be sent to Easley Elementary with a note that they are for the Discovery Garden attached. Thank you in advance for your support of this special project.

I'll be going to the Chicago Botanic garden this Thursday to present a poster about the design and construction of the Church Endangered Species garden found within the Blomquist Garden.. The conference is focused on global plant conservation efforts, and is timed to coincide with the opening of the new Plant Conservation Science Center at the botanic garden.

Go Bears!

2009-09-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Lovely, cool rainy day... Fall is on the way. You've heard me mention the collaboration between the Duke Gardens, the Eno River Association and Easley Elementary in Durham. We're working together to design and build a native plant educational garden on the Easley campus. If you're interested in learning about the project, you can now follow what we're doing at
www.easleydiscoverygarden.com. The site is brand new and obviously will grow as the project grows. I'm going to upload a photo album tonight of sketches from Easley students- these are drawings of what the children imagine the garden might be, and, as is the case with everything kids create, the pictures are amazing and imaginative. Check it out!

2009-09-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

Happy Thursday! Don't you just love four day weeks! I'd like to thank all the attendees at the most recent "walk on the wild side". We had over twenty people on the tour, most of them with red hats on. Yes, the ladies of the Cary Red hat Society joined us, and we had a blast. We talked about plants with interesting stories, touching on Cherokee plant legends, anecdotes about plant explorers, and plants with interesting wildlife connections, to name a few. The next walk, on October 1st, will focus on invasive plant species in the garden. I look forward to seeing you all! The goldenrods and asters are starting to get going in the garden, and a plant is getting ready to bloom in the wildlife garden that I'd be willing to bet you haven't seen before. Solidago faucibus, or Gorge Goldenrod is a native of small regions in the mountains of South Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky, and it's quite a looker, if you ask me. Check it out!

2009-08-31T03:56:00.001-07:00

Howdy! A few notes on recent events and ones soon to come..

This past weekend I participated in a small plant rescue in the research triangle park. The site will soon be a large toll road that cuts through EPA property. The plants we were there to rescue are part of a relic piedmont prairie, a once-widespread ecosystem in this part of the state. I've been there a few times, each visit focusing on rescuing a different group of plants. Saturday I went for diversity rather than quantity, and came back with twelve different species of flowering perennials from the site. I've been working jointly with the North Carolina Botanic garden, the NC Native Plant Society, and the EPA to work out a rescue plan that will help ensure we can save a diverse representation of this ecosystem. If you'd like to learn more about the site, what species can be found there, or the piedmont prairie ecosystem, e-mail me at sbloodwo@duke.edu.

The "walk on the Wild Side" this Thursday will focus on plants with unique stories. I'll pick eight to ten species of native plants with interesting natural/cultural histories and spend time speaking about each of them. As always, meet at the Blomquist gatehouse at 11:00.

A week or so ago, I took a trip up to Martinsville, Va to look at an interesting native plant project. Employees and volunteers at both the Piedmont Art museum and the Virginia Museum of Natural History had heard of my work in the Blomquist Garden, and a group of them had come to visit me a few weeks ago here at Duke. They are part of a team charged with designing a native plant garden adjacent to both museums. We toured the Blomquist Garden here, and then a week later I visited Martinsville and chaired a design meeting to discuss their needs going forward in the design of this new garden. It's an exciting project, integrating the cultural history of the Martinsville area with the natural history of the Virginia piedmont into a cohesive garden setting with an emphasis on education. Following the meeting, I recommended they contact a landscape architect colleague of mine who will help them put the ideas we fleshed out onto paper.

Fun stuff!

Also... I'm helping design a native plant garden for Easley Elementary off Guess rd. in Durham. We're having a volunteer workday there on Saturday, September 12th to rip out the old stuff on the site. Anyone interested in helping should contact me for more info.

Finally, I'm helping St. Phillips church in downtown Durham design and install a drip irrigation system for their community garden on the church grounds. Anyone who might be interested in volunteering to help with the installation sometime this fall, let me know and I'll put you on my community project volunteer list. This is a GREAT community garden that provides food for a variety of organizations/residents in the downtown durham community. You would be proud to help with this effort.

See you soon,

Stefan

2009-08-17T04:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday! (okay, okay,... put down the rotten fruit and take a deep breath everyone..) I wanted to post a follow up to our last "Walk on the Wild Side" with Lauri Lawson from Niche Gardens. It was fun, informative, and really well attended! Thanks all! Lauri sent me a short bibliography of medicinal plant tomes she uses as references, and some of you expressed an interest in learning more about the plants we talked about. Here's the list:

"People had asked to post books on the BlomBlog: The books that I'd
recommend specifically for Eastern native medicinal plants are:"

Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants, by Steven Foster and James A. Duke,
Peterson Field Guides

Medicinal Plants of the Southern Appalachians, by Patricia Kyritsi
Howell, Botanologos Books

Planting the Future; Saving Our Medicinal Herbs, by Rosemary Gladstar
and Pamela Hirsch, Healing Arts Press

The Cherokee Herbal: Native Plant Medicine from Four Directions, by J.
T. Garrett, Bear and Company

There you have it! Lauri also gave me some suggestions for speakers to interview for my blog native plant video series starting in September. Do you have any? These will be 3-5 minute videos on a single topic. Each person (Horticulturist, Ecologist, Teacher, Conservationist) will be asked one question about a native plant topic with a "big picture" focus, and they'll have as much time as they want to respond. I'll edit the answers down to the aforementioned time and go from there! Comment on this blog or send your suggestions to sbloodwo@duke.edu

See you soon,

Stefan

p.s. for those of you who visit the Blomquist Garden official website maintained by yours truly, no- Columbines are not still blooming in the garden. I have been lax on updating the "What's Blooming" page on the site. I'm going to remedy that tonight and get a new photo album of currently blooming species onto the web page. Sorry for the confusion.

2009-08-06T04:31:00.000-07:00

In the coming months look for a new feature in this blog. Once a month, starting in September, expect to see a youtube link for a video interview feature. I'm going to make the rounds of my colleagues and friends in the native plant community and ask them big questions like "What's so special about native plant species?" or "why should the average person on the street care if a plant or animal species becomes extinct?". I could rattle off my own diatribe about these topics, but I think it would be much more interesting (trust me) if I was able to get opinions from other folks who deal with these topics on a day to day basis, and who have a few more gray hairs, and by association a bit more experience in the areas we'll focus on. These will be short (3-5 minute) videos with usually one response to one question or topic. If you have any native ecology topic you would like to see covered or someone (maybe you) who ought to be interviewed, please comment on this post and let me know. I'm really looking forward to playing Geraldo Rivera, so give me some good questions to ask!

2009-07-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

G'day mate!

A few things to talk about...

Next Thursday (8/6) the "walk on the wild side" in the Blomquist will focus on native medicinal plants and their natural and cultural histories. Our guest speaker will be Lauri Lawson from Niche Gardens. Lauri is an very knowledgeable herbalist as well as horticulturist, and we look forward to hearing what she has to say. As always, we meet at the gatehouse entrance to the Blomquist garden at 11:00 a.m..

Jan Watson (a fellow Duke Gardens employee) and I took a trip to the SECCA offices in Winston salem yesterday. SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art) is housed in a historic estate that one belonged to the Hanes family. Fredric Hanes, once a Duke chemistry professor, is credited with the initial idea of building a public garden where the Duke Gardens is now located. He approached Sarah Duke in the 1930s with this idea, and together they began the process of creating the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. This historic connection led us to conduct a volunteer invasive removal of Chinese Wisteria on the SECCA grounds yesterday. In the weeks to come, look for a link for a photo album from our trip on this blog. The art center at the estate is undergoing renovations at the moment, but it will reopen in January of 2010. Located nearby is Reyniolda House (which housea a historical american art collection), Reynolda Village ( a series of shops and restaurants) and Reynolda gardens (a gorgeous ornamental stroll and vegetable garden). Plan a visit to SECCA sometime next year, and add the Reynolda complex onto your itinerary as well. You won't be disappointed! For more info on both sites, visit www.secca.org, www.reynoldahouse.org, www.reynoldavillage.org, and www.reynoldagardens.org . Enjoy!

2009-07-28T05:38:00.000-07:00

Hi all! It's been a few weeks, I know. I can explain. It's the weeds. They captured me and took me to their leader, and she said I couldn't go back to work or write any new blog posts until I signed a contract, in blood, stating that I would never again associate myself with any product designed to bring about herbicide. Evidentally they found out that I had recently been involved in herbicide on a massive scale at the Sylvan Heights waterfowl center in Scotland Neck, and they wanted to make me pay. I tried to explain that those had been invasive exotic weeds, and that I had simply rid that site of wanted plant thugs, but they were unimpressed. Queen privet called that ethnic discrimination, and threatened to bury me neck deep in Kudzu, so I crossed my fingers and pledged to never harm another weedy plant, invasive or otherwise. Whew!

Anyway, the summer is slowing down a bit now, and i have a chance to breath a bit. The invasive removal trip the Duke Gardens staff took to Sylvan heights was alot of fun. We got rid of a good bit of chinese privet, along with some other wanted plants, and then got a tour of the facilities from Brad, the curator. We'll be going back this fall at some point to work again- check this blog in the coming months for more info.

Three of us just returned from the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=27540747836> -see this link for a conference facebook page. It's a great chance to learn more about what's happening in the native plant landscaping and conservation community. Check it out.

Finally, someone put me in front of a video camera the other day for a very short film about interesting plants in the Blomquist Garden. You can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fB7jU2A-kA. Enjoy!

2009-07-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

Afternoon all! Just wanted to let you know that last weeks "Walk on the Wild Side" tour in the Blomquist garden was well attended and informative. We spent an hour with Jeff Pippen from the Duke School of the Environment looking at dragonfly, amphibian, reptile and bird species within the garden. It was a real treat to have a guest speaker who knows his stuff as well as Jeff does. I hope to bring him back to focus on the natural history and identification of native bird species later in the year. Stay tuned! As I mentioned in my last post, we have another guest speaker in August (8/6). Laurie Lawson from Niche gardens will be teaching us about medicinal plants from our region. Please join us. Anyone who is interested in volunteering for a community invasive plant removal trip this month, let me know. On July 16th we'll be heading to Scotland Neck to visit the Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park to help them with a chinese privet problem. If you've never been to SHWP, this would be a chance for you to see some amazing birds from across the globe and help a special institution through volunteering. Send me an email at sbloodwo@duke.edu to sign up for or ask questions about the Sylvan Heights invasive removal trip. Finally, the web album I mentioned posting of the many stages of the recently completed Wildlife Garden will be available Friday. I'll post a link to the album on this blog.

2009-07-01T05:14:00.001-07:00

Hey there! I just wanted to give you a heads up about two upcoming tours in the Blomquist garden. Tomorrow (7/2) Jeff pippen from the Duke School of the Environment will be our guide for a peek into the world of native wildlife in our local ecosystems. We'll use the Blomquist garden as a showcase for some of these fascinating birds and insects. On August 6th, Lauri Lawson from Niche Gardens in Chapel Hill will be leading a tour focusing on native medicinal plants of our region. I hope to see you there! A last note: the Wildlife garden is now finished and open to the public. Look for a photo album featuring this garden in all it's stages of construction on the Wildlife Garden page of the Blomquist website next week. See you soon!

2009-06-22T04:07:00.001-07:00

Good morning! I feel like an old piece of beef jerky after this past weekend! (I'll elaborate) I spent Saturday at the Triangle Land Conservancy's Green Jamboree in Chapel Hill. It was HOT and WINDY (thus the beef jerky reference), but it was also a LOT of fun. I facilitated a wildlife gardening seminar at the jamboree that culminated in the actual planting of a wildlife garden adjacent to a historic house on the property. I had about 30 people attend the seminar, and a good number of them stayed after my talk to brave the hair dryer heat and help put plants in the ground. The event would not have been possible without the generous donations of a number of organizations. Plants for the event were donated by the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Niche Gardens, Mellow Marsh Farm, Cure Nursery and Hoffman Nursery. Other help for the event came from the North Carolina Native Plant Society. Thanks to all of you who helped! As the garden matures over the next few years, we will make plans to use it as an educational tool in the effort to educate the public about the importance of gardening for wildlife. You can also visit www.blomquistgarden.com and choose the link for the Wildlife Garden to see what we've been doing to encourage the use of native plants for wildlife attraction here at Duke Gardens. I'll post photos of the TLC Green Jamboree on this blog as soon as they are available. See you soon!

2009-06-03T03:45:00.000-07:00

What was that?! Oh, never mind. It was just the last three weeks of my life passing by in the blink of an eye. Lots going on these days. My trusty sidekick has been out with a bad back for three weeks now, and I promise I'll never take him for granted again. (not that I ever did, really). At any rate, the weeds stop growing for no man, and the show must go on, etc, etc. For those of you coming to the "Walk on the Wild Side" tour tomorrow in the Blomquist Garden, we'll be discussing the natural history and landscape uses of native ferns. Want to get out of the house? Come to the Triangle Land Conservancy's "Green Jamboree" on June 20th at the Irvin Farm property in Chapel Hill. I'll be conducting a hand's on (that means you will be getting dirty) wildlife gardening workshop there in the afternoon. You can learn more at www.triangleland.org. If there is anyone out there who wants to learn more about invasive plant removal, the Duke Gardens will be involved in two community invasive removals this summer. Send an email to me at sbloodwo@duke.edu for more info. K- the weeds are growing. Be back later..

2009-05-20T05:59:00.000-07:00

I love this weather! The past three days have felt like summer in the mountains, with low humidity, a constant breeze, and temperatures in the 60-70 degree range. Too bad it can't last. It won't be long before the dog days are here, when you do your yearly gut check and ask yourself yet again why you chose a profession that requires you to spend NC summers with a shovel in your hand. In my case, it was what I learned to do in prison. Ooops, strike that comment. I forgot to mention that in my interview. But seriously folks, you gotta love this weather! Okay... what's new? Well, for starters, soccer season is over, so no more long drives at rush hour to Chapel Hill. That's really what I've become when I'm not working at Duke or for myself: a chauffeur who transports young athletes to (pick a sport) practice. I'm sure you didn't log on to read about my children's athletic exploits, though. If you did, just ask me about them the next time you see me and I'll fill you in. One thing of note to discuss is an event I'll be attending in June. The Triangle Land Conservancy in hosting a "Green Jamboree" on June 20th at Irvin Farm in Chapel Hill. I'll be conducting a wildlife gardening seminar during the event. It will involve both instruction on the principles of gardening for wildlife as well as a hands on event in which participants will help me plant a small wildlife garden during the seminar. I'm looking forward to it. As far as what's happening in the Blomquist Garden, at the moment it's weeding, weeding, weeding (rinse, repeat). Warm temps plus abundant rain = an explosion of green things popping out of the ground. The Poison Ivy is particularly agressive this year. Fun, fun, fun! As far as invasive weeds are concerned, Youngia japonica is the weed du jour. This Aster family member is a pain in the rear. It grows fast and goes to seed faster, meaning that if you better not turn your back on it or....POOOF! Job security in the form of thousands of Youngia japonica to deal with next year. Want to learn more about it, just Google "Pain in the @#%$#". I mean, just Google Youngia japonica and prepare for a deluge of hand-wringing and curses. A last note: the "walk on the Wild Side" for June (6/4) will focus on native fern species. Hope to see you there!

2009-05-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Singing in the rain... just when it seemed we were about to enter another hot dry prelude to summer, voila! The rains the past few days have really perked things back up again. The weeds appreciate the rains as well, unfortunately. Oh well, that's what we call in the green industry "Job Security". For any of you interested in attending the monthly walk in the Blomquist Garden tomorrow, the topic will be the newly completed Wildlife Garden. We'll discuss the design and construction of the collection, as well as go through a number of related topics such as a) the connection between plant and animal diversity, b) neighborhood scale wildlife gardening, and c) the importance of using native plant species to sustain native wildlife. I hope you can make it. If so, meet me at the gatehouse entrance for the Blomquist Garden @ 11:00. See you then!

2009-05-02T04:11:00.000-07:00

Hi there! I'm about to go to work at my "other job" (landscape contracting), but I thought I'd drop a line or two about recent goings-on in the Blomquist Garden. It's hot and dry all of a sudden, and watering has begun in the garden as a result. Rain is called for this afternoon and evening perhaps, a cruel irony of sorts as the Sarah Duke Gardens 75th anniversary gala dinner is tonight, and a portion of the proceedings are outdoors. We need the rain, but perhaps not until the dinner bell, if that can be arranged. Beautiful flowering continues in the Blomquist, with the native azaleas continuing to steal the show. Check out our website at www.blomquistgarden.com to see photos of what's in bloom right now on the "What's Blooming" page. Since that site was created on an Apple computer, it looks it's best using a windows version of the Safari browser. You can download this browser at http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ . Our spring board of advisors meeting is in full swing as we speak, with folks from across the region coming into town to catch up on what's been happening in the gardens over the last six months. Finally, try to catch the Columbine "meadow" before it's gone. Adjacent to the Endangered Species collection is an area covered in thousands of pendulous Columbine blooms. As is always the case, if your in the garden and you see a guy with a wide brimmed hat and sunglasses who happens to be covered in dirt, it's probably me. Feel free to ask me about what deserves a look in the garden, or just to stop and say hi.

2009-04-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

Hey there.... Lots of things happening in the garden right now. I'll try to hit the highlights. First, the Trillium have been spectacular this year. Come in soon before they're all bloomed out. This has been the best spring wildflower season I've seen in a long time, and the garden bears that out. I've got to say thanks to the Triad chapter of the NC Native Plant Society, and especially to Linda Waldrep. Linda helped organize a plant rescue in the Burlington/Greensboro area that was attended by Cheryl and Jeff Prather, both Duke Gardens volunteers and Native Plant society members. The Prathers brought back approximately 100 beautiful Trillium cuneatum that would have been destroyed. We look forward to adding them to our collections this fall. Thanks again Linda! The plant sale is coming up this weekend (4/25). The native plant collection will focus mostly on wildlife attracting species. Check back on Thursday for a complete list of plants you will be able to purchase from the Blomquist collection. The wildlife garden is basically finished- just some last minute details to take care of. It will be open to the public the weekend of 5/2. Another plant group that is on fire in the garden right now are the native azaleas. The piedmont, pinxterbloom and florida azaleas are going crazy right now- don't miss them. Bottom line: the rains this winter and spring have created the perfect storm for gorgeous spring floral displays- come in soon and stay a while! Enjoy!