Junior Board hosts Spring Mixology
On Thursday, April 18, Junior Board of Birmingham Botanical Gardens hosted Spring Mixology in the Arrington Plant Adventure Zone. Sheena Whitaker led a large group which complemented hors d’oeuvres with their own cocktail creations.
Arrington Plant Adventure Zone: The Labyrinth
If you’d like to be notified of future labyrinth plans or have questions or comments, please contact me at jsanders@bbgardens.org or leave me a note in the comment jar in the Plant Adventure Zone.
Photos from 2013 Spring Plant Sale
It was another successful year for Spring Plant Sale, held this year in the former J.C. Penney location at Century Plaza. Thousands took advantage of the wide selection and expertise offered at The Gardens’ largest plant sale of the year. Because of Birmingham’s support, the money raised by The Gardens at Spring Plant Sale allows it to achieve its educational mission, funding programs like Discovery Field Trips which has provided a free, curriculum-based science education to nearly 100,000 Birmingham area schoolchildren over the last decade. Check out some photos of the volunteers and people that made it great!
(Andrea Wulf, Director of Devlopment Olivia Alison, Spencer Lecture committee member Sue Ellen Lucas)
Andrea Wulf and Ben Page headline 2013 Spencer Lecture Series
The 2013 Spencer Lecture Series was held in the Linn-Henley Lecture Hall at Birmingham Botanical Gardens on March 7. New York Times best-selling author Andrea Wulf spoke at 10:30, while renowned architect Ben Page spoke at 6:30 p.m. The morning lecture, preceded by a book signing, saw 137 guests in attendance, while 214 attended the evening session.
(Murray Spencer South, Ben Page, Nancy Spencer Smith)
Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens joins Urban Forestry and Conservation Fair at Boutwell Auditorium
On Wednesday, February 13, Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens staff members and volunteers joined the Urban Forestry and Conservation Fair at Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, Ala. to help educate Birmingham schoolchildren about how the urban environments they are familiar with connect to the environments they often hear about – rain forests, state and national parks, the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and more. The day long fair showed children they can grow up to work in an environmental arena in any setting.
Rite of Spring
By: Betsy Fleenor, volunteer
It happens every spring. The new year dawns, and the new seeds are sown. Always with this goal: grow plants that will be large enough and interesting enough to catch your eye at the spring plant sale. No tender seedlings will do come April. We are looking for robust, healthy plants with a good root system, lots of leaves and we wouldn’t argue about a flower bud or two.
For the volunteers who work with the volunteer propagation groups at The Gardens, work goes on year round preparing the plants for your buying pleasure. But things really start to heat up once the new year arrives. For those growing native plants, it’s time to delve into the rich storehouse of seeds collected from the Kaul Wildflower Garden and pre-treated in various ways. Some are sprinkled, others carefully placed in their soil-filled trays topped with a thin layer of granite chicken grit to improve their chances.
Weeks spent on the mist tables located in the plant sale greenhouse eventually provide the perfect environment for the green miracle. The lifeless, brown seeds are touched with the vital moisture, warmth and light that cause them to germinate.
At first the specks of green are nearly microscopic. Was that a dot of green I saw or not? Soon eyes adjust to the microenvironment and indeed, that dot was just one of hundreds of barely perceptible green dots. They’re off and running!
As the weeks wear on, first leaves give way to true leaves, and roots start to explore the soil. Soon it’s time to rudely tease them from their seed trays into their first individual pots. Volunteers carefully prick out the most tender, pull apart the more robust, and take them to the next step on their journey from seed to sale.
Granite Garden repairs overseen by sculptor Jesus Moroles
Sculptor Jesus Moroles, who created Granite Garden in 1988, was back in town to consult with The Gardens on maintenance and repairs. A severe freeze last winter, coupled with a power failure that knocked out a heater, resulted in a few broken pipes and small cracks in the granite. People may have noticed that water in several of the uprights had not been flowing. With in-kind assistance from City of Birmingham plumbers and Birmingham Botanical Gardens staff, several of the large base stones were removed and several broken pipes were repaired. Moroles is putting together a plan for continued maintenance, and specifications for fixing the cracks, replacing all the copper piping with freeze-resistant polyethylene pipe, and re-setting some of the base stones.
The Gardens houses more than 30 unique works of original outdoor sculpture.
(Funding for Granite Garden was provided by Arnold and Rose Steiner and the National Endowment for the Arts. The consultation is being funded by The Friends.)
(Emily Bowron, Bill Bowron, Frieda Murfee, Frances Wheelock, George Wheelock)
48th Annual Member Celebration
On Thursday, January 24, Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens held its 48th Annual Member Celebration at the Garden Center. More than 150 members and staff gathered in Strange Auditorium for drinks and hors d’oeuvres catered by Savoie Catering. The festivities moved to the Linn-Henley Lecture Hall for the evening’s featured speaker, Kerry Smith. Smith, the State Master Gardener Coordinator for Alabama Cooperative Extension System (A.C.E.S.) led a talk titled “Your A.C.E.S. in the Hole,” a discussion about the unique relationship between Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Alabama Cooperative Extension System, which houses a satellite office at the Garden Center.
Martha Espy, Fred Spicer, Peggy Bonfield, Orrin Ford, Valerie Abbott
Annette Drummonds, Pat Cosgrove, Bethany O’Rear, Joann Wissinger
Tricia Noble, Alleen Cater, Chris Boles
Orrin Ford, Peggy Bonfield
Coquette Barnes, Tommy Amason, Yates Amason, Bill Barnes
Alpha Goings, Betsy Gresham, Louise Walton
Fletcher Harvey, Roger Clarke, Susan Jackson, Kerry Smith
Nina Miranda, Anita Dark, Bonnie McDonald
Mary Williamson, Lex Williamson
Jeanie Sherlock, Scott Walton, Kelley Walton
Katy Eldridge, Jamey Eldridge
Janet Taylor, Jerry Taylor
Spencer Lecture – Andrea Wulf: Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens – Thursday, March 7 | 10:30 a.m.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens is delighted to welcome Andrea Wulf for the second year, offering a second lecture in the Spencer Lecture Series to complement Ben Page’s talk. This summer an extremely rare celestial event took place – the transit of Venus. In the eighteenth century the transit held the answer for one of the most pressing questions of the age: the size of the solar system. This would require triangulated data to be compiled from various exact points dotted all around the four corners of the globe – all taken simultaneously during the short period of the actual transit. Hundreds of astronomers from European countries and the North American colonies were dispatched across the world to observe the rare celestial encounter. At a time when war was tearing Europe and much of the rest of the world apart, they overcame political, geographical and intellectual boundaries. CHASING VENUS is rich with tales of obsession, featuring Catherine the Great and Captain Cook as well as Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, Benjamin Franklin and American astronomer David Rittenhouse. In CHASING VENUS, New York Times Best Selling and award-winning author Andrea Wulf tells the extraordinary story of the first global scientific collaboration set amid warring armies, hurricanes, scientific endeavour and personal tragedy. It’s a story bursting with action, wonderful detail and scientific excitement, revealing the spirit of the Enlightenment and man’s quest to understand the world.
To reserve your seat online, visit www.bbgardens.org/spencerlecture.
Spencer Lecture – Ben Page: Traditions and Transitions – Thursday, March 7 | 6:30 p.m.
Ben Page comes to Birmingham Botanical Gardens for an intriguing talk titled “Traditions and Transitions.” This beautifully illustrated talk weaves together some historical threads (going back as far as ancient Rome) as well as some history of Belle Meade (area of Nashville where Cheekwood is located).Page will share the influence of landscape architect Bryant Fleming and his personal approach to garden design. He’ll offer a modern relevance and provide context through work he has done on Birmingham-area gardens.
The founding partner in the Nashville-based firm Page/Duke, Ben received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree with honors from the University of Georgia in 1973. A recipient of a 2009 Aurora Award (a design competition for the Southeast Building Conference) and the 2002 Metro Nashville Historical Commission’s Preservation Award, he is a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Southern Garden History Society.
Largely influenced by their childhood experiences in — and love for — the countryside, Page/Duke has expanded the firm’s focus to include equine-management facilities, hunting-plantation management and master planning for environmentally based communities. The goal for every project, whether an expansive public space or an intimate secret garden, is to create a seamless integration of the built environment and its surroundings.
Page/Duke’s impressive national clientele spans the Southeast, the Atlantic Seaboard and Texas. The firm’s work has appeared in numerous magazines such as Veranda, House Beautiful, Traditional Home and Architectural
Digest, and its projects have been featured on HGTV’s “Secret Gardens.”
