Saturday, December 3, 2022 ~ The Mountain Laurel Chapter Holiday Social & Potluck. We wrapped up the year with a potluck lunch and informal social event at CT Audubon’s Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center (RTPEC) in Old Lyme’s historic district. Members were introduced to the new board members. On offer was a free copy of Wild Ones’ new Climate Resilience Guide. Native wildflower and grass seeds were available for purchase with how-to information for winter/spring sowing. Activities included seedball making, a book exchange table, and a raffle for Wild Ones-themed prizes. It wonderful afternoon filled with good food, great conversation and an exciting exchange of ideas for future programming.
Saturday, November 5, 2022 ~ S.A.L.T. Conference – Smaller American Lawns Today, co-sponsored by Connecticut College, included the following presentations:
Ohkehteauag: Plants A Narragansett Perspective
SilverMoon LaRose, Assistant Director, Tomaquag Museum, shared the historical and contemporary uses of Indigenous plants including edible, medicinal, spiritual and technological. She shared her and her community’s relationship with plants and expressed the teachings of her elders regarding respect, reciprocity, and traditional ways of knowing.
Creation of the Mary Momoho Garden
Mitchel Ray, Eastern Pequot Tribal Chairman, discussed the resilience of the Eastern Pequot Tribe from first contact through the centuries until today by way of Agriculture and other ways the land was able to provide. He showed how the tribe is using their history to revitalize food sovereignty and economic development by practicing what earlier generations before him did.
Finding Opportunities in the Garden
Meg Griscom, Landscape Architect and Design Studio Professor at Connecticut College, presented unique opportunities for how to design your own garden. Whether engaging in careful editing of a woodland edge, gradual implementation over time around existing conditions, working with extreme topography and water, or adapting a profoundly disturbed site after a natural disaster, each site has its own remarkable story to tell, and in time, occasion to connect people thru larger natural systems and ecologies.
Walk through the Native Plant Collection
Following the presentations, everyone was invited to step outside for a guided walk in the Connecticut College Arboretum’s Native Plant Collection to explore the late fall highlights.
Saturday, October 15, 2022 ~ Turning Over an Old Leaf: An Introduction to Plant-Fungal Ecology. In this walk and talk session, we explored the strange but fascinating world of fungi and the critical roles that they play in our ecosystems, from forests to farmland, highlighting decomposers, plant pathogens, and mutualistic mycorrhizal fungi. This session was presented by Eric Vukicevich, an Assistant Professor of Botany at Conn College who teaches sustainable agriculture and mycology courses. Eric is interested in how we can collaborate with fungi to solve some of our problems such as degraded soils and invaded habitats. We met and had a brief introduction at Buck Lodge followed by a walk and talk in the Native Plant Collection where we visited the new mushroom log farm, discussed how mycorrhizal fungi relate to some of the different types of plants we find, and searched for mushrooms along the way.
September 24, 2022 ~ Seed collection and related program to educate about the need to pretreat native seeds (e.g., stratification) to overcome mechanisms of seed dormancy in order to get germination the following year.
September 17, 2022 ~ Annual native plant and seed sale at the Connecticut College Arboretum.
August 20, 2022 ~ Member Garden Walk & Talk: A Suburban Wild Garden Tour with Joanna Giddings in Cheshire CT. Joanna relocated to Cheshire in 2017, in pursuit of more green and a larger garden. Since then, she’s been working on converting her one-acre lot to native plants. The sun gardens are more fully developed with a large variety of native species. Joanna has planted purposefully in layers at the woods’ edge, so the developing understory will be a point for discussion. Joanna hared what she has learned from her garden successes and struggles, as she has worked toward increasing the ecological value of her garden. Her yard is certified as wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation and registered with Homegrown National Park.
June 18, 2022 ~ Highstead Arboretum tour with Geordie Elkins, Operations Director, 127 Lonetown Road, Redding CT. Highstead encompasses roughly 100 acres of diverse, mostly natural landscapes used extensively for long-term monitoring, ecological surveys and landscape history research.
May 23, 2022 ~ Field trip to Blue Moon Farm perennials in Wakefield, R.I., (program by Jane Case). Blue Moon advertises itself as the largest purveyor of native plants in Rhode Island, and Jane belongs to both the Native Plant Trust and Rhode Island Wild Plant Society. Blue Moon sells both straight species and cultivars of native plants, Eco59 natives and Rhody Natives. Followed by botanizing hike through Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, Charlestown, R.I. led by Judy Preston.
April 16, 2022 ~ Creating Bird Friendly Habitats in Your Backyard Joe Attwater Conservation and Education Coordinator, CT Audubon Society’s Roger Tory Peterson (RTP) Estuary Center. While this program was not recorded, there is information about planting for birds on CT Audubon website.
March 26, 2022 ~ Our chapter meeting returned to New London Hall at Connecticut College and drew a crowd to hear the presentation by Randi Eckel, Ph.D, of Toadshade Wildflower Farm, “If You Plant It, They Will Come: The Importance of Native Plants in the Landscape” Listen to the podcast of the presentation. Her slides can be viewed here.
February 19, 2022 ~ Our chapter meeting included the program “Starting Native Perennials from Seed” by Lydia Pan and Maggie Redfern of the Connecticut College Arboretum. View the recording. More information:
- Wild Seed Project: https://wildseedproject.net/2016/11/ideal-time-for-sowing-native- seeds/
- Prairie Moon Nursery: https://www.prairiemoon.com/blog/how-to-germinate-native- seeds
- Germination Codes and other useful topics available at Prairie Moon Learning Center.
January 15, 2022 ~ Our chapter meeting featured Trevor Smith of Weston Nurseries talking about Regenerative Landscaping and Our Future with Water: The Why, What and How of Storm Water Management. You can view the presentation at https:// youtu.be/7Uk-qwjN3vY
Here are links to some additional resources that were mentioned during the program:
- Rain garden DIY info: https://nemo.uconn.edu/raingardens/index.htm
- Street tree recommendations: https://newlondontrees.org/native-trees/
- Green roof at Mashantucket Pequot Museum (Explore Zinco for more info about green roofs): https://zinco-greenroof.com/references/mashantucket-pequot- museum-connecticut
- UNH Stormwater Center has a wealth of information on green infrastructure includ- ing permeable pavement, street trees, bioretention systems, maintenance of green infrastructure: https://www.unh.edu/unhsc/
- Rain Harvesting systems and products (based in Australia but has U.S. office): https://rainharvesting.com.au/ Trevor knows of this company but has not used their products