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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.