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!

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!

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

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.

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!

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!

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!