By Carrie DeJaco and Laura Domingo
The annual meeting of the NC Native Plant Society will be held this June 11 at the Misenheimer campus of Pfeiffer University. The location has been chosen to accommodate our group of native plant enthusiasts, a group that is growing by leaps and bounds in involvement and in new membership.
Registration will be sent via email to members on May 1st. More details will be announced in the June 1 Native Plant News. All members are cordially invited.
We’ll Have a Plant Sale and Auction
(Photo by Lynda Waldrep)
The meeting, hosted by the Southern Piedmont Chapter, will include a plant sale and auction and a picnic. Many members of the NC-NPS are already growing seedlings and potting up transplants to bring for the plant sale and auction. We hope you are, too! Contact Mandy Bloom at a.bloom6510@gmail.com to let her know what plants you intend to bring. If you aren’t sure, just let her know that you will bring something for the plant sale.
Just across the way from the Pfeiffer gymnasium is a large, open area alongside Curl Tail Creek that is shaded by a canopy of oaks and hickories. This will be a perfect outdoor space for socializing, regardless of whatever is going on with the Covid-19 pandemic. We plan to set up the plant sale in that area.
And a Picnic
The picnic will be based in the spacious air-conditioned gym and people may eat indoors or outdoors. Attendees may use the free parking areas on campus; carpooling is encouraged. Misenheimer is roughly half-way between Salisbury and Albemarle, and a half-hour’s drive to the northeast from UNC-Charlotte.
There’s More!
Part of the agenda will include a tour of the new campus rain garden, designed and installed in 2020 by Dr. DeJaco and her reconciliation ecology students. Visitors are welcome to explore the Pfeiffer campus where there has been on-going work in recent years to remove invasive plants from the riparian zone along Curl Tail Creek, which the Falcon Trail, a portion of the Carolina Thread Trail system, follows downstream from campus into the town of Richfield.
Because more native plants are being integrated into the general landscaping on campus, we hope that hosting the NC Native Plant Society at Pfeiffer will increase interest and fan the flames of these efforts! Any donations of native plants for campus landscaping, or of time and effort to help with either planting natives or removing invasive plants, would be welcomed and greatly appreciated.
With our larger venue, we hope to welcome a crowd twice the size of last year’s so that we can continue to spread our plants and our passion further across the state.
Dr. Carrie DeJaco, Pfeiffer University professor of biology and environmental science, is a member of the NC-NPS Southern Piedmont Chapter
Laura Domingo, a naturalist at Reedy Creek Nature Center for Mecklenburg County, is a co-chair of the NC-NPS Southern Piedmont Chapter