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!

Free expression... that's what a blog's about, right? Saying what's on your mind, and things of that nature. Well, what's on my mind at the moment is this- chronic garden abuse. Known as CGA by those psychiatric professionals unlucky enough to specialize in it, Chronic Garden Abuse is most likely not an entirely new phenomenon. I'm sure the Egyptians and Babylonians had their share of folks damaging their oases and hanging gardens. I bet they had very creative ways to deal with them as well. Well, my playbook of punishments for those folks who do damage to the Blomquist Garden is pretty limited. Let me tell you, sometimes I wish for the good old days...

The abuse I'm talking about comes in many forms. I have folks who leave trash wherever they please. I have folks who carve their initials into all my artistic benches and structures. I have folks who steal the plants right out of the ground, leaving nothing but a hole behind. I have folks who walk right through the planting beds to get a closer look at or a photograph of a plant. I have parents who let their children roam free through the garden, whether they stay on the paths or not. I have botany professors who dissect my flowers in full view of garden visitors and then say they aren't doing any harm. I have school groups whose chaperones would rather whistle in the wind and look the other way than EVER discipline a child about their loud, obnoxious, disrespectful or destructive behavior in the garden. I have folks who create shortcuts through my beds because they're too lazy to go a few minutes out of their way. In short, I have a plethora of people who have no idea what they're doing: bit by bit, destroying a natural treasure that has taken 30 years to create. How are they destroying it? Well, I'm glad you asked. 

Any time you set foot off the path in the Blomquist garden, you are killing plants. If you aren't stepping on a visible plant, you are trodding on a dormant one beneath the leaf litter or compacting the soil next to one, thus damaging that plant by association. Trash, graffiti or carvings take my time to remove or repair, thus taking time away from other tasks such as gardening. Disciplining children and college students about destructive behaviors take my time

and raise my blood pressure, both of which reduce my productivity in other tasks such as, say, gardening. Replacing dead plants that have been stepped on or killed due to soil compaction caused by foot traffic take me away from things like gardening.  A month ago I spent two days repairing a wanton act of vandalism to a part of our irrigation system. Nothing was stolen, just broken beyond recognition for no reason other than just plain random stupidity. That's two days not spent gardening. These types of examples are not anecdotal. One or more of them happen on a weekly basis. Why? I ask myself that all the time.

The optimistic answer is that they simple know not what they do. If they truly appreciated how much attention and dedication went into producing the garden they're visiting, (not on my part, Mother Nature's) they surely wouldn't do it, would they? I mean, even the irrigation pipe smasher person, if he or she knew what a special place the Blomquist Garden was, how it is a living museum of nature's wonder,they wouldn't still smash, would they? Well, some of them would. We'll probably never be totally rid of the carvers and smashers. What about the plant smooshers, stealers and clippers? How do I get them to stay on the paths and leave their trowels and pruners at home? I'm serious, how do I get the public to respect the garden?

Don't get me wrong, as is usually the case, the few can often distract us from the respectful many. Most of the people who come to the garden know how to act. How do I deal with

 and educate those who don't? This is not a rhetorical question. I would love to hear from folks who work in public settings about how they handle situations like these, and more importantly, what strategies they use to head them off (effective public information campaigns, etc.) I look forward to hearing from as many folks as possible.

Okay, so it's been a bit since my last post.... I'll try to do better, I promise. Seriously, I have been working on another online project recently that I wanted to mention. I've created a full website for the Blomquist Garden of Native Plants that has pages for all the major thematic areas of the garden with links and photos. You can check it out at www.blomquistgarden.com.
One of my favorite parts of the site is the "Sneak Peek" page, that has a number of Blomquist garden photos as well as a link to the entire Blomquist photo collection on the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center photo database. Not only can you view every photo I've taken from the Blomquist garden, but I've made the images available for free for any non-profit use.

Lots of bird activity in the Blomquist these days... The most fun has been watching a nesting pair of Red-Shouldered hawks. They have a nest high in a pine tree not far from the pond with the millstone crossing. The best way to find them is to listen- they call to each other constantly, and one or the other is often busy bringing food back to the bird minding the nest. So far it seems that snakes are the food of choice. Also, Pine Siskins are recent arrivals at the feeders. Cedar Waxwings have been spotted finishing off the Winterberry Hollies as well.

Spring wildlfowers are really getting going. It looks as if the beginning of April will be prime time for the largest variety of blooms. Join us on the first Thursday in April for the monthly Blomquist guided tour. The April tour will be all about Spring Wildflowers in the Blomquist Garden.

The bridges in the Wildlife Garden will be going in this weekend (3/28). The planting in the garden is basically all done. Next step will be finding a few choice mossy logs and stumps to give it that "lived in" feel. Pine straw comes next, and then once the bridges are in place over the stream, the path is the last thing to be built. We're hoping to have it open for business by the middle of April. Come by!

Finally, I wanted to say thank you to all the Dirt Gardeners at the recent gardening symposium at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. I gave a speech there about native spring wildflowers, and enjoyed myself immensely. A generous, attentive group who made me feel right at home. Thanks again! Till next time...

Holy Frijoles! It's March already?! A rainy, cold Sunday by the fireplace with a cat at my elbow soaking up the warmth. I am officially obsessed. No, not with the cat, with my job. The construction of the latest addition to the Blomquist garden has taken on a life of it's own inside my head. I wake up thinking about it. I dream about it. When I get home I want to eat dinner and go back to work with a flashlight. I've always enjoyed my work here, but this project has taken it to a new level. I think it's all about confluence. All the different hats I wear on a daily basis have come together in this endeavor to the degree that it's a bit scary. The Blomquist Wildlife Garden has brought the ecologist, gardener, writer, contractor and latent workaholic in me all into focus at once. I really feel that gardens like this, that focus on tying together issues like global warming, development, botany and wildlife ecology, are a huge source of hope for our future. I don't mean to imply that I think I can save the world with this garden. I do feel that I can influence and inspire others to possibly emulate elements of it's construction, and in doing so, spread the word about integrating nature back into our everyday lives, rural, suburban or otherwise. Truth to tell, it most likely looks like a pile of mud at the moment, after this weekends rain. It's a small space, really. You might come by and wonder what all the fuss I'm making is all about. Give me another month or so and check back. I'll be doing a tour of the garden once we have all the plants and interpretive signs in place- check this blog for dates (most likely the first Thursday in May). When it's completed, and it makes a contiguous tour route with the Endangered Species and Carnivorous Plant Collections to the south, visitors who might otherwise not take the time to appreciate this garden in the woods that is the Blomquist will follow the signs through these projects and leave a bit closer in spirit with the world out of doors. Who knows. Maybe I just need to believe I'm making a difference or I'll just fall on my spade. That would be messy. Let's save my fellow gardeners a nasty chore and save the planet, shall we?

Hi there! I just got finished writing some of the text for a new interpretive sign in the Blomquist Garden, and I thought I might share a bit with you. With each new garden area we develop within the Blomquist Garden, we incorporate some type of informational signage to help visitors appreciate the area. As we near completion on the wildlife garden, I've been thinking alot about how to convey to the public how important gardening for wildlife is. For me, it's a lens that I look through for all the gardening I do in the Blomquist. I try to make sure that every new design incorporates the idea of food, water and shelter for insects, birds and mammals. I do this because it gives me another chance to reference this topic with visitors wherever we are in the garden. Insects feed birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Insects, birds and mammals provide plant species with pollination and seed dispersal services. Plants provide insects, birds, mammals, etc with food as well as shelter in the form of nesting materials or places for insects to develop between life stages. We rely on plants for everything. We'd die without them, and thus it's in our best interests to maintain healthy ecosystems by maintaining plant diversity. One of the ways we can do this is by helping maintain the diversity of the wildlife species that plants depend on. Please, garden for wildlife by adding plant species to your landscape that supply their needs. Each of us can make a difference-really. For a great book on this topic, pick up a copy of "Bringing Nature Home" by Doug Tallamy. http://www.timberpress.com/books/isbn.cfm/9780881929928/bringing_nature_home/tallamy. Also, feel free to contact me through the blog with questions or comments on this or any other native plant related topic. Till next time....

Hi all! A few days have passed since my last entry- my how time flies when you have two kids with the flu.... I wanted to give a hearty thank you to my two tough tour attendees last Thursday. We walked the Blomquist Garden and talked about many of the issues affecting birds in our local wild habitats and gardens. It was most likely below twenty degrees with the wind chill, so a big hats off to you both. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the next tour will be on March 5th, and will focus on the early botanical explorers that so many of our natives are named for, and the latin naming system used by them all to describe the wondrous plants they found.

I also want to say welcome to those visitors who learned of this blog through the NC Native Plant Society website. http://www.ncwildflower.org/ This is a great, well-run organization that does a lot of good work for native plants. If you are not familiar with them, visit the website to learn more.

As I'm in the process of doing the final design work on our new Wildlife Garden, I thought I might mention a few nurseries that I use that have a good selection of natives for attracting our local birds and insects. For great native perennials, I am very partial to Niche Gardens (http://www.nichegardens.com/). Most of my native shrubs and small trees come from either Carolina Native Nursery http://www.carolinanativenursery.com/ , Rarebird Nursery 919-853 3969, or Cure Nursery http://www.curenursery.com/. You can also get links to these and others at the NC Native Plant Society website in their sources section- www.ncwildflower.org/natives/sources.htm

Till next time..

Where's the snow? I woke up this morning at 5am like a third grader and peeked out the window to see how much white stuff we had gotten.....NOTHING!!!??? Seems to be story of our lives the last few years; folks to the south and north get the winter wonderland and we're left wondering what did we do to deserve this? (At least that's what my boys were thinking when they got up this morning- no doubt they had the day planned out in their heads: throw snowballs, play video games, eat- repeat till dark). Oh well, life goes on in the garden, snow or no snow. The stream in our "under-construction" wildlife garden is almost complete. Come by next week to see it flowing-probably Thursday or Friday. Planting will begin soon after, with a heavy dose of Viburnums, Hawthorns, Hollies, and other bird and insect attractors. We also have a new feeding station near the Pitcher Plant bridge (just south of the Endangered Species garden). The bridge has footrests for sitting and watching the birds and other wildlife come to eat and drink. My Blomquist crystal ball also tells me that in the next month on this blog will debut the Blomquist Botanical Cinema (BBC). Short informational movies produced by and starring yours truly (I got the bug in"L'il Abner" in junior high, and i've been looking for an avenue back to the stage ever since). The subject matter will be ecologically eclectic, with a heavy dose of Invasive Species management, Endangered Species education, and Gardening for Wildlife. Just remember, we have no makeup artists here at the Duke Gardens, so please no comments about my hairdo, etc.

Oh yes, just a heads up- the March 5th "Walk on the Wild Side" tour in the Blomquist Garden will focus on the early botanists who helped identify many of our native plant species, with an introduction to botanical latin thrown in to help us speak their language. Hope to see you there.