A remarkable symposium
The Davidson Horticultural Symposium celebrated their 35th anniversary today, a significant accomplishment for a club of some 40 members -- which is a largish garden club, to be sure, but not huge!
Kudos to them for putting on, yet again, a wonderfully run program, with a delicious catered lunch (on plates! with silverware!) and with the most incredible homemade treats for breaks. That's truly over the top.
I've attended the last two years (as well as a couple of times a few years ago) and have been so encouraged by the ecological-gardening tone that these last two years celebrated. Today's "knocked it out of the park" for sustainable-gardening/ecologically-gardening folks like me, and even more encouraging, the audience seemed to love it (the speakers were all outstanding).
The messages were clear; we need to consider our landscapes as part of a larger functional ecosystem. Natural and wild places no longer can sustain us -- we've already altered most of the arable land on the planet, so the "wilderness" that remains is the northern Artic, Siberia, and desert areas in Africa, with patches of land in Brazil, according to one of the images that was shared today.
To hear these programs in such a mainstream horticultural symposium is totally heartening. Maybe we CAN turn the tide towards encouraging gardeners in their home landscapes to think about being good stewards, adding more biodiversity of natives and wildlife-sustaining cultivars.
In a similar vein, a recently received catalog from White Flower Farm, a venerable horticultural source of plants, had me amazed that they'd recently added a native meadow garden to their pre-planned collections of plug-ready gardens. Wow!
Click through for details about the plants they include.
Just to be clear, I haven't ordered anything from White Flower Farm for decades, but receive a catalog still, I guess as a member of GWA.
They'd apparently already had a pollinator garden for sun, a butterfly perennial and shrub garden, and a long-season hummingbird garden, all as plugs ready to plant, presumably also with a planting design.
It's so heartening to see a VERY mainstream nursery embrace using perennials with a focus on pollinators, meadows, etc. I'm excited about this trend.
Kudos to them for putting on, yet again, a wonderfully run program, with a delicious catered lunch (on plates! with silverware!) and with the most incredible homemade treats for breaks. That's truly over the top.
I've attended the last two years (as well as a couple of times a few years ago) and have been so encouraged by the ecological-gardening tone that these last two years celebrated. Today's "knocked it out of the park" for sustainable-gardening/ecologically-gardening folks like me, and even more encouraging, the audience seemed to love it (the speakers were all outstanding).
The messages were clear; we need to consider our landscapes as part of a larger functional ecosystem. Natural and wild places no longer can sustain us -- we've already altered most of the arable land on the planet, so the "wilderness" that remains is the northern Artic, Siberia, and desert areas in Africa, with patches of land in Brazil, according to one of the images that was shared today.
To hear these programs in such a mainstream horticultural symposium is totally heartening. Maybe we CAN turn the tide towards encouraging gardeners in their home landscapes to think about being good stewards, adding more biodiversity of natives and wildlife-sustaining cultivars.
In a similar vein, a recently received catalog from White Flower Farm, a venerable horticultural source of plants, had me amazed that they'd recently added a native meadow garden to their pre-planned collections of plug-ready gardens. Wow!
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| image of a native meadow garden from their catalog - excellent! |
Just to be clear, I haven't ordered anything from White Flower Farm for decades, but receive a catalog still, I guess as a member of GWA.
They'd apparently already had a pollinator garden for sun, a butterfly perennial and shrub garden, and a long-season hummingbird garden, all as plugs ready to plant, presumably also with a planting design.
It's so heartening to see a VERY mainstream nursery embrace using perennials with a focus on pollinators, meadows, etc. I'm excited about this trend.
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