The Master Gardener Volunteer Association is hosting is annual native plant sale April 16-19 in Wilmington.

Now in its 39th year, the sale will feature more than 8,000 plant varieties, showcasing native plants that support wildlife populations in southeastern North Carolina and enhance the community’s botanical landscape.

Annuals, perennials, herbs and vegetables, azaleas, Japanese maples, and shrubs will be available for selection during the four-day sale, which will run 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Thursday, April 16, through Saturday, April 18, and noon – 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 19.

The sale will be held at the New Hanover County Arboretum and N.C. Cooperative Extension, 6206 Oleander Drive.

The event will host a free seed exchange in the Cooperative Extension’s Plant Clinic. Houseplants will be made available through the Ability Garden, and an expert talk will be held on Japanese maple care and pruning.

Expert guidance will be offered from master gardener volunteers and extension staff on plant selections and they will help with safely and securely transferring plants to vehicles.

Parking and plant carts are limited, so participants are encouraged to carpool and bring their own carts to reduce wait time.

The arboretum will be closed April 13-15 in preparation for the sale.

People like plants.

People love plants.

As long as there have been people and plants, plant lovers have been sharing seeds and snips and starts, probably a holdover from our Garden of Eden days when humans were the Head Gardeners in Charge.

People love beauty, and what could be more beautiful than sharing our love of plants with other people?

Sharing new species of plants is how figs got to the United States, via settlers bringing starts.

It’s how corn and squash and lima beans got to Europe from the New World.

People love to try new foods and new recipes, and you can’t cook a new favorite dish unless you have the proper ingredients.

With new ingredients comes a lot of reward as people expand their palates. It can also come with some risk, as people who have cooked with a certain vegetable for a long time know all the ins and outs.

For example, I said something to an older friend of mine one Fourth of July about eating corn on the cob and how much Americans love it and asked if he and his wife were going to enjoy any while it was fresh and available. His wife was from England. His reply? “Oh no, no, no. The Brit doesn’t eat corn. That’s what you feed to hogs.”

Upon questioning him, he had no idea why, only that it’s the way things were done across the pond.

So, my little over-curious squirrel brain went into action. Researching it, I discovered that when corn was first brought back to Europe, people loved it. Loved it so much in fact, they tried to use it the way we do potatoes. For everything.

What the Europeans didn’t know, and the natives of South America had figured out over a long period of growing and eating corn was that — it’s a bit more involved than I’m making it out to be — but corn, eaten solely by itself, causes horrendous multigenerational birth defects.

Eaten in conjunction with squash and lima beans … Voila! No problem! The other vegetables fill in the missing nutrients, which the Europeans had no idea about, and why would they have?

Plant diversity is awesome. When humans depend on a single source of nutrition — think potatoes and the Irish potato famine — it can be devastating when that plant fails.

Diversity is part of why seed saving is so important, and I went more in-depth on that subject in one of my past articles.

Before there were cameras, thankfully there were explorers and plant junkies who drew scarily accurate renditions of plants they found or saw — intricate renderings of bark, leaves, flowers, and seeds. Thanks also to them for nabbing starts, seeds and seedlings, taking them back to their own countries, and nurturing their finds.

Plant names can often give you an idea of their origins. For instance, japonica means that plant originated in Japan. Chinensis, China. Think camellia japonica, or lorapetalum chinense. Otherwise known as camellias and fringe flowers.

We all know and love azaleas, but did you know that, while most of us are familiar with the gorgeous azaleas featured at Orton and Airlie and Wilmington in general, as well as in our yards, they are not natives. Go figure. North Carolina does have around 15 native varieties.

Many of the plants we know and love have been imported and planted to the point we think they’re indigenous. Some of them are beloved, and some of them, despite people’s best intentions — think kudzu, Pueraria montana — have become insanely invasive.

Kudzu, a native of Asia, was introduced to the U.S. in 1876, via the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. At its introduction to our country, it was initially praised for its fragrant flowers and ease of care. In the 1930s and ’40s, it was touted — subsidized even, by the government — for its uses in erosion control and as livestock feed. Farmers were encouraged to plant kudzu by the acre, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was enlisted to plant it. We all know how well that worked out.

An overabundance of the same type of plants in one place creates the perfect environment for insects and diseases that prey on said plants to thrive. Lantana is super popular here, not only because it’s beautiful and attracts butterflies by the score, but because it likes heat and tolerates drought. During the last few years, because of the excessive availability of their food source, lantana lace bugs (Teleonemia scrupulosa) have become a huge problem on this once carefree plant.

Same with diseases. The disease that’s currently wiping out most of Florida’s citrus trees? Citrus greening, huanglongbing — say that fast five times — is a bacterial infection. Spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, again, the overabundance of the insect’s food source only makes the problem worse.

So, what’s our take on mass plantings of the same nonnative plants? The results speak for themselves.

Not good.

Nonnatives that become invasive, i.e. Chinese privet, (Ligustrum sinense), which was imported as a hedgerow plant in the mid-1800s, while fast-growing and good for delineating fencelines and yard boundaries, yields berries that are attractive to birds, and thus easily spread.  Its rapid growth and dispersal rates make it one of the most invasive plants in the South. Often taking over and crowding out natives, privet is extremely hard to kill. Privet often forms dense thickets, impenetrable to wildlife.

Sharing plants can be a great, inexpensive way to expand our gardens, and plant people love to help other gardeners. Sharing is caring, right?

Am I advocating being selfish? Absolutely not! I am, however, urging a bit of caution. Do your research. We have so much information available to us, information that our ancestors didn’t have when they thought they were doing the right thing by introducing new plants. There are tons of gorgeous natives, and more and more nurseries specialize in native species.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes it truly is only skin deep.

We all like vibrant colors and new show-offs in our gardens, and with a mailbox full of gardening catalogs this time of year that advertise all sorts of gorgeous goodies, what’s a gardener to do? Ignore all the pretties?

Though it is tempting to collect plant specimens from faraway lands — a part of human history that is many, many centuries old and not likely to fizzle out any time soon — there’s a risk to introducing non-native species to your garden.

So, what’s so bad about trying out new plants? Sometimes plants from far off make it, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they thrive, and sometimes they really thrive, to the point of becoming dangerously invasive. Sadly, the only way to find out is to try it, often with disastrous results.

While natives have evolved over centuries to survive in certain soil and temperature conditions, and native pollinators have thrived along with them, non-natives often throw off the delicate balance.

Some pollinators, such as monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), have specific plants for feeding or laying their eggs on. Monarchs love milkweed, both to nosh on and for their nurseries. The plants and butterflies have developed a symbiotic relationship.

Milkweed (Asclepias spp.) is the sole host plant for monarchs. Momma monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed plants. When the eggs hatch, the caterpillars feed on the leaves of the milkweed.

While poisonous to most critters, including humans, the monarchs use the toxins as their first line of defense. Because the milkweeds are toxic to many critters, the monarchs store the toxins in their bodies, thus making them unpalatable to many predators. The butterfly’s bright orange coloring serves as an added warning.

Adult monarchs feed on brightly colored flowers such as zinnias, sunflower, golden rod, asters, and lantana. Since milkweeds are, well, weedy looking, and because people fear them as a poisonous plant, many people rid their yards and woods of the plants.

But wait … can’t you just go to a nursery and buy milkweed plants? Again, native versus non-native.

Native milkweeds die back in winter, encouraging monarchs to migrate. Tropical milkweeds such as Asclepias curassavica, do not die back, confusing the monarchs and tricking them into staying.

Because the tropical variety overwinters, a harmful protozoan parasite (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha) also overwinters on the plant. The spores of this parasite accumulate on the plant and infect monarch caterpillars, causing infection and deforming wings, leading to death. 

Natives versus non-natives are kind of like name brand groceries versus store brand. Some things you can’t substitute. Like peanut butter, for instance. Team Jif all the way. Cream cheese has to be Philadelphia brand or nothing.

It may be cheaper and it may look the same, but the qualities you prize are muted or nonexistent and it won’t do what you want.

Growing up, we all took weedy lots and meadows for granted. They were just there, something waiting to be mowed and maintained to human standards.

Somewhere in the last few decades, or centuries, we’ve lost our appreciation for lush cottage garden-type landscapes and replaced them with sterile, manicured expanses of monoculture.

Monocultures, such as grass lawns, while orderly and green, feed pretty much nothing. In past times, there would still be enough wild places around to offset lawns and support plants and insects and critters. With more and more pavement, more and more houses and stores and buildings sprouting up every day, it’s becoming harder and harder for wildlife to survive.

We are fortunate enough to live in a place with vast tracts of woodlands and fields to support biodiversity. Anybody local ever hike the Patsy Pond loop on N.C. Highway 24 in Newport? Or any of our local trails, really?

At first glance, it looks, well, weedy. Take your time and really look. Because it is so “weedy,” there is a plethora of pollinators and critters.

A patch of purple blazing star (liatris) and honeybees here. Some native grasses and a lizard or toad there. Wild native blueberries and other berries scattered around. Toadstools on a rotting log. Lichens and fungi growing on trees. Beetles. Flies. Gnats. Mosquitoes.

While the insects bother us, they provide an all-you-can-eat buffet for birds and toads and turtles and frogs. Because the plants are all natives, they’re well adapted to the poor, sandy soil, humidity, wind, salt, and heat prevalent in our coastal area.

Walking our trails, in addition to lots of natives, you may also notice invasive plants.

Centipede grass (Eremochloa ophiuroides) tracked in on someone’s shoes and thriving because it found a perfect spot for itself, and because it isn’t being mowed. Did you know it was once an on the books law that it was illegal to plant Centipede within a certain distance of crops?

One of the worst invasives is Elaeagnus, or Russian tea olive. With its distinctive speckled foliage, tannish on the bottom and green on the top, this one is easy to spot. Originating in China and Japan, spreading invasively here by the bird/berry method, this fugitive from Sleeping Beauty’s protective wall was planted as hedges and soil conservation for decades.

Did I mention it has thorns? Nasty thorns. And it’s almost impossible to kill.

So if you don’t want to plant non-native invasives, what can you plant? Kind of depends on where you are, your soil, what your objectives are. Do you want color? Trees? Butterflies? Wildlife? Some combination of all of the above?

What if you love a certain non-native but don’t like its downside? With a bit of research, you can probably find a native with similar qualities.

To that end, check out these resources:

• go.ncsu.edu/CoastalLandscapes
• https://ncwildflower.org/native-plant-nurseries/
• https://homegrownnationalpark.org/keystone-plants/
• https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/
• https://ncseagrant.ncsu.edu/plant-this-instead/
• https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/nbnc/a/accounts.php

These are just a few of the many resources designed to help you help the environment while beautifying your yard. With a little research, planting can be much more than just seeing a really cool plant and sticking it in your yard only to regret it later.

Show Mother Earth some love this Valentine’s Day by gifting her a freshly planted tree.

Alliance for Cape Fear Trees will be giving away more than 1,000 native trees Saturday, Feb. 14, at D.C. Virgo Preparatory Academy in Wilmington’s Northside community.

Northside residents and families of students who attend D.C. Virgo, DREAMS of Wilmington, Boys & Girls Club of Southeastern N.C., and Dorothy B. Johnson Pre-K will get first dibs on a selection of nearly a dozen different species of trees beginning at 9 a.m.

The event will open to the general public from 11 a.m. – noon. Trees will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Available tree species will include southern live oak, overcup oak, bald cypress, blackgum, longleaf pine, sweetbay magnolia, eastern redbud, sourwood, American hornbeam, pawpaw, and persimmon.

Learn how to identify invasive plants and get tips on how to manage them during the next installment of the webinar series, “Landscapes that Last.”

Featured speaker Robbie Davis, founder and owner of Native Plants Matter NC, will headline the Feb. 27 session, where participants will be given an invasive plant management overview that will delve into how to identify common species of concern and apply practical, effective strategies to control growth on different property types and scales.

North Carolina Sea Grant’s Gloria Putnam will provide opening comments, followed by Davis, who specializes in invasive species removal and native plant installation.

N.C. Environmental Education Certification Program Criteria III or continuing education professional development credits will be available through this session.

Registration is now open for the February webinar set for noon – 1:15 p.m. Space is limited.

Created by Sea Grant and the Coastal Landscape Initiative, “Landscapes that Last” invites coastal residents, local governments, home owners associations and nurseries to explore sustainable practices to protect the state’s coastal environment.

Session topics include expert advice on things like choosing salt-tolerant plants, tree conservation, stormwater pond improvements and sourcing eco-friendly plants.

For questions about the series contact Putnam by email at gloria_putnam@ncsu.edu or by phone at 919-999-7469.

Professional and self-taught artists with a passion for native plants have until March 30 to submit their handcrafted or handmade work to a nationwide, community art contest celebrating the often overlooked wildlife.

In its third year, PlantArte Native Plant Art Contest and Exhibit is a partnership of Arte Sana and GreenLatinos, two Latino-led nonprofits based in Texas, with the goal to use art to help prevent plant-awareness disparity, which is the human tendency to overlook or ignore plants that leads to less support for conservation

The contest “celebrates native plants through botanical art to: build awareness of the importance of native plants; promote native plant advocacy by empowering diverse communities to support conservation and restoration efforts; and honor the ancestral roots and shared ecoregions that connect plants and people,” organizers said.

Pay online via Arte Sana’s PayPal donation account or mail a check to be received before March 30 to Arte Sana, P.O. Box 1334, Dripping Springs, TX 78620.

A contest fee waiver is available for teen students or anyone who may need it to participate. Contact Laura Zárate, Arte Sana director and PlantArte coordinator, at plant.gente@gmail.com.

Handmade refers to items that are crafted entirely by hand, using no machinery or automation in the production process, and handcrafted items are made by hand using some tools or machinery. Organizers gave as examples a wood burner or a tattoo machine used to replicate an original design drawn by hand. Only hand embroidery is acceptable.

Judges will score the work on the quality, design, creativity, originality and overall clarity of the art submitted under the following contest categories:

• Endangered plants — Focus on either threatened or endangered plants.
• Wildflowers.
• Resilience — Focus on freeze and drought-resistant native plants.
• Plants & critters — Focus on native plants benefitting pollinators and wildlife.
• Plants of my people — Focus on native plants/herbs with personal or historical significance.
• Plants beyond borders — Transboundary native plants of neighboring lands.

The online art exhibit featuring the highest-rated submissions is to debut during National Native Plant Month in April.

Arte Sana (art heals) is a national Latina-led nonprofit based in Texas originally founded in 2001 to help bridge the gaps in victim assistance for Spanish speaking survivors of sexual violence. Arte Sana launched the Plants & People, or Plantas y Gente, initiative in 2022, and held the first art contest in 2024 in collaboration with local, state, and national native plant and environmental groups.

The first year of the Texas-born contest saw work from artists in Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma. In 2025, 60% of the art submissions came from Texas and the rest from states like Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York. Visit the 2025 PlantArte exhibit launched April 22, Earth Day, to see last year’s submissions.

This year’s contest is a partnership of Arte Sana and GreenLatinos, a national nonprofit of Latino leaders confronting environmental issues in the Latino community. Additional support is provided by Native Plant Society of Texas, Latino Outdoors, Hill Country Conservancy, Biodiversity Works, Defenders of Wildlife, and Native American Seed.

Rachel Veal, conservation horticulturist with the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, is the featured speaker for the second webinar in the “Landscapes that Last: The What, Why and How of Nature-friendly Landscaping” webinar series created by North Carolina Sea Grant and the Coastal Landscapes Initiative.

The series explores sustainable practices that protect North Carolina’s unique coastal environment. Registration is open for the second webinar set for noon on Jan. 15, 2026, on the Zoom platform.

Veal, in her role at the aquarium, oversees plant selection, installation and ongoing maintenance throughout the facility, and surrounding grounds.

The webinar session will focus on “The What, Why and How of Nature-friendly Landscaping,” organizers said.

What makes a landscape truly sustainable, and why does it matter along North Carolina’s coast? This introductory session explores the core principles of conservation landscaping and how they support healthy land and water systems.

Participants will learn practical, science-based concepts for eco-friendly landscaping that will help you make informed choices and create thriving, resilient coastal properties.

Each session in the “Landscapes that Last” series features subject matter experts who will share practical strategies ranging from choosing salt-tolerant plants and conserving trees to improving stormwater ponds and sourcing eco-friendly plants. The series is for coastal residents, local governments, homeowner associations and nurseries and aims to build shared knowledge and healthier coastal communities.

 Professional development credits are available for the N.C. Environmental Education Certification Program: Criteria III or Continuing Education.

More information about the rest of the series is online.

There’s only a week left to register for a new webinar series created by North Carolina Sea Grant and the Coastal Landscapes Initiative that explores sustainable practices that protect North Carolina’s unique coastal environment.

The 2025-26 series, “Landscapes that Last,” is intended for coastal residents, local governments, homeowners associations and nurseries “to build shared knowledge and healthier coastal communities,” organizers said.

Registration is open for the first webinar but space is limited.

Each session will feature presentations by panelists with a variety of expertise and experience. These include practical strategies, such as choosing salt-tolerant plants and conserving trees to improving stormwater ponds, and tips for sourcing eco-friendly plants. Sessions will end with 15 minutes of audience questions.

The first in the series, “Local Policies for Native Plants,” is set for noon until 1:15 p.m. Dec. 11. The session will feature speakers from North Carolina communities who will discuss their policies to advance landscapes that protect native vegetation and discourage the spread of invasive plants.

This session’s speakers will share how local policies and community guidelines can make a lasting difference. Speakers include Pine Knoll Shores Planning Administrator Charlie Rocci, Bald Head Association Assistant Director Dora Richey and Raleigh City Council Member Jane Harrison.

Rocci, a coastal municipal planner, facilitated development of new landscaping requirements for forest management while updating the town’s Unified Development Ordinance.

Richey, a homeowners association director, is implementing planting covenants on new construction and renovated properties to enhance and protect island properties and the environment.

Harrison, in her capacity as an elected official, has promoted and helped to adopt ordinances to prohibit invasive species and encourage restoration of native landscapes in an urban area.                                                                                                              

Future webinar dates are to be announced as schedules are confirmed.

Professional development credits are available under the North Carolina Environmental Education Certification Program: Criteria III or Continuing Education.

Alliance for Cape Fear Trees is holding its largest tree giveaway yet on Friday, with more than 1,400 native trees up for the taking.

The giveaway will be held in Wilmington noon-5 p.m. Friday at Legion Stadium, 2149 Carolina Beach Road, and will continue starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, if there are remaining trees.

The nonprofit will be offering 14 species of native trees, including stock from Burton Natural Systems and heritage Southern live oaks from Penderlea Farms.

Those interested in participating in the giveaway are encouraged to view the list of available trees in advance to “plan ahead for a tree that will suit your space and needs.”

Trees will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Coastal Review cannot guarantee availability.

Featured Image

A Venus flytrap shows off its perhaps little-appreciated blooms, which are often overlooked, as compared with the other, better-known, insect-trapping attributes of this carnivorous plant that’s native only to a roughly 90-mile stretch of the North Carolina coast between Wilmington and Morehead City. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Most of us know that bees and wasps are pollinators, but what else pollinates flowers and various plants? Sadly, no honey is involved, but no sting, either.

It’s butterflies!

Who doesn’t love butterflies?

Delicate looking as they flutter by, ephemeral, like catching a glimpse of fairies out of the corner of your eye.

Butterflies come in all shapes and sizes and colors. The colors are mostly due to pigments in their scales.

What? No, fish have scales.

Not that kind of scales.

Lepidoptera, the scientific name for butterflies and moths, means scaly wings. Scales on butterfly wings are microscopic and laid down like shingles on a roof. There can be upward of 600 scales per square millimeter. The shape of the scales varies, everything from teardrops and rectangles to more ribbon-like shapes. Scales on different parts of the wing can even be different shapes, such as hair-like or even duck-footed.

If you’ve ever touched a butterfly’s wing — hopefully not a live one — you know that the scales shed off like glittery pixie dust, which is why we’ve been told since we were little children not to touch a butterfly’s wings.

While losing scales impedes a butterfly’s ability to fly and shortens its lifespan, it can be a lifesaver should a butterfly get caught in a spider’s web. The scales will stick to the web, allowing the butterfly to escape, the way a toddler can peel out of your hold on their jacket and scamper off.

Scales aren’t just colorful to make us happy, although they certainly do for many. Butterfly scales serve numerous purposes.

They aid in flight, affecting airflow and reducing drag. Scales can help camouflage a butterfly in order to better hide from predators. The color pattern of the scales can help butterflies communicate or find mates. Some butterfly wing patterns even mimic poisonous kin, the better to fool predators into leaving them alone.

For instance, monarchs, Danaus plexippus, the famous orange-and-black butterflies, are brightly colored to warn predators of their toxicity, or aposematism. In other words, they taste awful. Monarchs can also be toxic to invertebrates.

In a ploy called Müllerian mimicry, viceroys, Limenitis archippus, mimic the coloring of monarchs in a bid to avoid being eaten. Bright colors such as reds and oranges often signal danger, and mimicking the color pattern of something known to be poisonous gives both species a better survival rate.

Some butterflies have spots that look like giant eyes to warn predators, and some use camouflage to better blend in with their surroundings.

Made of chitin, like an insect’s or a crustacean’s carapace, the tough yet flexible scales have ridges and pockets that contribute to aerodynamics. Once lost, scales will not regrow and cannot be replaced. Each scale — actually a modified hair — is attached via a stalk, or pedicel, that fits into a small socket.

Butterflies are cold-blooded, so the color of their scales can also help them regulate body temperature. For instance, the dark bands or whorls on some butterflies can help warm them up by absorbing more sunlight.

They don’t collect pollen in the way bees do, so butterflies are not as efficient as pollinators, but some wildflowers can’t survive without them.

So what kind of plants do butterflies like? Butterflies are drawn to bright colors such as pinks, oranges, reds and yellows. Zinnias are always a favorite, as is butterfly bush, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, bee balm, asters, and coreopsis.

Zinnias are the workhorse of the garden. They’re easy to care for, will grow just about anywhere, like heat and drought, make great cut flowers for bouquets, and they come in a range of vivid colors. Alas, they are annuals, so they have to be planted every spring.

Butterfly bush, Buddleia, is known for its sweet scent and being a butterfly magnet. If you’re worried about it being invasive, as it can be in some areas, native alternatives — summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), and buttonbush (Cephalanthis occidentalis) — can be planted instead.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is an old staple, and it’s perennial. Same with black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) and bee balm (Monarda). Asters and coreopsis, both of which have many native varieties.

Keep in mind, annuals have a longer bloom time but have to be planted every year — annually.

Perennials — longer word equals longer lifespan — come back every year but have a limited bloom time. Plant a good mix of both in order to keep your flowerbeds, yourself and your pollinators happy.

Watch the roadsides and any weedy lots to see what most attracts butterflies. That will give you a better idea what you need to plant in your garden, and it also depends on what kind of butterfly you’re hoping to attract.

As much as we love butterflies, many of us are not so happy with their offspring. Those nasty little cabbage loopers that destroy our collards and broccoli, for instance.

Butterflies need nectar plants, but they also need host plants for their caterpillars. Monarchs are all about milkweed (Asclepias). Several varieties grow naturally here. Dill, parsley, and fennel are great for eastern black swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes). In fact, if you don’t watch carefully, swallowtails will strip your dill and parsley practically overnight. They love anything in the carrot family, so Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota), which grows wild here, is also on their menu.

Gulf fritillaries love passion vine (Passiflora incarnata). Make sure you get the native one and not one of the hybrids, the take-over-your-world kind. Gulf caterpillars look like something from a Halloween nightmare, virulent red with black stripes and black spikes – and totally harmless.

Caterpillars may freak out some of you, and they can be destructive and yucky but birds eat caterpillars, and birds and wasps feed them to their young.

Long story, short: It’s impossible to have beautiful butterflies — and moths — without first having destructive caterpillars.

Everything has to eat something.

So, if you’d love to see more butterflies, plant pollinator gardens and leave natural areas unmowed.

As with any interest or hobby, gardening has its own vernacular.

Plants have unique names, sometimes specific to localities, such as the shrub we around this part of the coast call “myrkle,” otherwise known as Southern wax myrtle.

That’s where the scientific names for plants come in handy. Whether you call it “tallow shrub,” “bayberry,” “candleberry” or “myrkle bush,” the scientific name is Morella cerifera.

Plants can be named for where they originated, i.e. Chinensis means China, while Japonica indicates Japan. Some plants are named for the person who found them and made them garden staples. Some plants are named for their distinguishing characteristics.

For instance, our own beloved blanketflower, or Gaillardia, is named for a famous French botanist, Maître Gaillard de Charentonneau. Visitors to the Cape Lookout National Seashore may have seen it blanketing the sand around the lighthouse.

There are numerous different varieties of this flower, but most of them have a vibrant orange or red center with a bright yellow ring around the outer edge. Very attractive to pollinators, these tough plants are drought-hardy, salt-tolerant, deer-resistant and they thrive in sandy soil, making them ideal for coastal gardens. Gaillardias can be annuals or perennials, depending on the variety.

Wait, what? That’s a whole lot of gardening gibberish!

Gaillardia pulchella is the scientific name for the blanketflower most common around here.

“Attractive to pollinators” is self-explanatory — big words for nectar-rich flowers that attract bees and butterflies and sometimes moths or beetles.

“Drought-hardy” means these plants can survive with minimal rainfall or water.

“Salt-tolerant,” well, that’s another one that’s self-explanatory.

“Deer-resistant”… one can only hope blanketflower tastes horrible and eating it gives them a severe bellyache. Deer seem to devour everything else quite happily and with no qualms, and it seems like the more expensive the landscaping is, the better they like the human-provided buffet.

“Tolerant” and “resistant” are somewhat iffy descriptions. Neither means immune. “Salt-tolerant” means a plant can take more salt, either spray or windblown or around its roots, than more delicate plants that salt can burn. “Resistant” means less likely to be eaten but it’s not a guarantee. “Resistant” can also mean that even if the deer eat all the leaves off the plant, it has a better chance of rebounding.

“Annual” means the plant has to be planted every year, or annually.

“Perennial” — longer word = longer life span — means the plants come back on their own year after year.

Annuals tend to bloom over a longer period, while perennials usually only bloom for a short while. A good mix of both will insure a longer season of bloom time.

Just like flowers, vegetables have differing terms. Annual vegetables like tomatoes have to be planted every year, while perennials like asparagus only have to be planted once and then a well-tended bed can last and be enjoyed for decades.

Some descriptors for tomatoes are “determinate” and “indeterminate.” “Determinate” means a big flush of tomatoes and then the plant is pretty much done. Determinate tomatoes, while perfectly acceptable for eating, are especially great for canning or freezing.

Indeterminate — again, the longer word is a great memory jog — bear fewer tomatoes at a time but over a longer season than determinate varities.

Determinate tomato plants tend to stay relatively smaller, while indeterminate get sprawly-crawly, since they bear fruit on new growth.

Green beans can be bush or pole varieties. What difference does that make, other than one you don’t have to cut poles for and for one you do?

Bush beans, like determinate tomatoes, bear a big crop all at once. They’ll have a few more, maybe even another crop, depending on the weather.

Pole beans, on the other hand, need something to climb. While they don’t bear as many beans at one time as bush beans, they bear over a much longer season.

Another interesting gardening tidbit: Maybe you’ve heard the older folks talk about planting by the moon. What difference could the moon make? We’re not planting on the moon!

Within our insular homes, cocooned by year-round heat and air conditioning as well as electric lights, many humans barely notice the night sky, much less what stage the moon is in.

You have to figure that anything capable of moving all the water on the planet four times a day must also have an effect on everything else, so …

… while it may sound silly to let the moon tell you when to plant or harvest, it actually makes sense.

Phrases like “by the dark of the moon” or “on a growing moon” were once commonplace and people back then innately understood the references.

Savvy farmers would only plant on certain dates, knowing that planting at the right time resulted in better yields with less insect damage. Usually reserving days with a waxing, or growing, moon for above-ground crops, while a waning, or shrinking, moon was deemed better for root crops. Time between the new moon and the full moon is considered to be waxing, while between the full moon and the new moon is waning.

Not only that, but harmful insects often hatch out in greater numbers around the time of a full moon, so dusting or spraying your crops beginning a few days before the full moon and keeping them dusted or sprayed until a few days after the full moon can significantly dent the insect population.

Oftentimes, if there’s going to be cold or inclement weather, it’s also usually around a full moon.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is getting harder and harder to find in print form, has long been a staple for information about moon phases and cycles. Benjamin Franklin, considered the father of the modern almanac, published his lunar calendar in order to help farmers.

In earlier times, some people would only set eggs to hatch, or get a haircut, or even start building or dig a hole on the right moon. While some moon-tales reek of hoodoo, a great deal of moon lore is spot-on.

While many of us plant whatever whenever the ground is ready and we have a minute, or a day off, paying attention to the kind of plant you’re installing and where the moon is in its cycle at that time can help you reap unexpected benefits.

Featured Image

Daddy longlegs, scientifically speaking, a member of the Leiobunum genus, stretches its legs recently on the leaf of a sweetbay magnolia, or Magnolia virginiana, a native species on the North Carolina coast. Often called harvestmen — there are at least 6,600 suborders of the species — and mistakenly identified as spiders, the insect is an arachnid that has been found everywhere on Earth except Antarctica. Photo: Mark Hibbs

Sierra Club North Carolina‘s Croatan Group has several outreach events planned for this spring.

The environmental organization is to host an Earth Day celebration this week at Carteret Community College, as well as two hikes to see carnivorous plants on nationally protected lands, and a talk on native plants in early May.

Earth Day Learn and Play is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday in the Bryant Student Center on the Morehead City campus. There will be hands-on activities and information booths, a time to “talk trash,” review native plants, and view the living shoreline.

Talks are scheduled on the hour during the Earth Day program, starting with “Wind Energy in NC” at 11 a.m., “Rooftop Solar 101” at noon, “Solar Users’ Experiences” at 1 p.m. and “Training the Workforce of Tomorrow” will close out the day at 2 p.m. Visit the Sierra Club’s website for a full schedule. The college’s Energy and Conservation Committee is partnering with the Croatan Sierra Club on the event.

The nonprofit group is offering the first of two walks to see carnivorous plants in the Croatan National Forest from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, April 26. The second walk is from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, May 24, both starting off N.C. Highway 24 in the Newport area.

“This area is dominated by pocosin bogs and large tracts of well maintained longleaf pine forests and savannas, an ecosystem that once covered millions of acres of the Southeast but has now nearly disappeared because development, logging and fire suppression,” organizers said.

The trip will consist of short, easy walks from various parking sites.

Attendees will be able to see at least 13 species of carnivorous plants, including the Venus flytrap, a variety heaths, orchids and other rare wildflowers, “We are holding two such excursions a month apart, as we expect to find different suites of wildflowers in bloom each time,” such as pitcher plants, organizers continued.

There is no cost to participate but participants must sign a waiver. Participants should wear long pants and substantial footwear. Nonmembers are welcome to join the walks. To register, contact Ralph Tramontano at rrtramon@gmail.com. Specific instructions on how to get to the first site will be given to participants when they sign up.

Gardeners wanting to incorporate native plants will have a chance to learn how from a master gardener starting at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 2900 Bridges St. in Morehead City.

During “The Power of Native Plants,” Carol Peoples is to talk about how to create a more welcoming habitat for birds, butterflies and bees. in addition to being a master gardener in Carteret County, Peoples is a co-leader of the Central Coastal Plain Chapter of the North Carolina Native Plant Society and serves with the Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private collaboration led by North Carolina Sea Grant.

The therapeutic power of gardening has been richly studied and solidly proven, so it was no surprise that a class on how to grow Venus flytraps meandered quickly into something more like group counseling.

Cocktails paired with happy small talk confirmed a safe space to confess what really happened in each student’s own little shop of horrors.  

“I fed my Venus flytrap bacon to keep it alive.”

 “Mine didn’t even have to work. I trapped the bugs!”

“I set up grow lights and everything, but it died anyway.”

The instructor, Franchesca Davis, a certified plant professional, rare plants collector and horticulture degree holder with six different specializations, had heard it all before.

“People will go above and beyond to keep their carnivorous plants alive,” she said. “I’ve heard of cat food … regular fish food instead of raw meat because raw meat stinks over time.”

In “The Little Shop of Horrors,” Audrey II ate Seymour in 10 seconds. Venus flytraps savor their prey over 3 to 5 days. That’s one of the interesting facts attendees learn during Davis’ carnivorous plant classes at Carolina Home & Garden, in western Carteret County.

Around Halloween, interest in Venus flytraps takes off as gardeners of all skill levels imagine their own miniature Audrey II, and Davis provides more than surprisingly simple steps for growing them.

Venus flytraps, native only to an area within about a 75-mile radius of Wilmington, have been around 85 million years. Despite their endurance, native Venus flytrap populations are in trouble. Increasing development razes their habitat and poachers illegally snap up survivors to sell.

Davis said she hopes that helping people understand Venus flytraps will grow greater appreciation of North Carolina’s most famous native plant.

“If we can work as a community to bring awareness to these things and care for them and not use them just as a tourist attraction, then we can probably keep them in the state that they’re most iconic for,” Davis said. “I want people to picture them growing wild…I want people to go home and plant them in the ground.”

Growing tips

Here are some of Davis’ tips for success with Venus flytraps.

Nature copycat containers

Wild Venus flytraps thrive in peat-rich pocosin bogs. The plants draw moisture from below. Therefore, choose a shallow container with at least one substantial hole in the bottom. Rest the planter inside another container that always holds enough water to keep the Venus flytrap constantly damp, as it would be in a bog.

Not just any soil

Forget fertilizer-enriched potting mixes. Enhanced organic mixes won’t work either. That’s because Venus flytraps digest nutrients not from the ground but from the insects they capture. Davis recommended straight peat moss — no added nutrients — or sphagnum peat, free of fertilizers, plus a little pine bark to aerate the sphagnum.

Watering secrets

Rainwater is best, Davis said. Tap, well, bottled and distilled waters are usually too alkaline and mineral rich. If you can’t collect rainwater, Davis suggested trying a pH adjuster like those used for freshwater fish tanks. Assess your water’s pH level and then add the adjuster to achieve a pH in the 5.0 to 5.3 range, Davis said. Outside, flytraps like rainwater that drips from pine trees rather than direct rain, she noted.

Location, location, location

You might think of pocosin bogs that Venus flytraps love as dark places, but flytraps live “on the edge, right on the outskirts of the swamp,” Davis noted.

“They can totally take full sun.” That means at least six hours of sunlight a day. Light intensifies the Venus flytrap’s red colors and ensures the plant’s success after its winter dormancy. Indoors, choose a sunny window. Outside, plant flytraps in well-lit places that are constantly wet, “fingertip-deep wet,” Davis said, like ditch banks and low spots that receive dappled sun, preferably under pine trees. Pine needles allow more sunlight to pass through and help keep the ground below acidic.

Overwinter and forget it

Growers in colder climates have reported ice-covered flytraps in pots coming back strong in spring. The plants need that dormant period so that they don’t exhaust their energy and die.

“They’re pretty prehistoric. Their cycle of energy and how they conserve it is what has been keeping them alive for so doggone long,” Davis said. Slightly damp soil and cold temperatures are all Venus flytraps need for three to six months. They don’t even require light.

Learn more

• Carnivorous Plant Class, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 22, Carolina Home & Garden, 4778 N.C. Highway 24, Newport; carolinahomegarden.com, 252-393-9004.
• N.C. State Fair, native garden featuring Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants, last two weeks in October, https://www.ncagr.gov/divisions/ncstatefair.
• N.C. Native Plant Society news, education and events. The organization promotes the enjoyment and conservation of North Carolina’s native plants and their habitats. ncwildflower.org.
• Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden, 2025 Independence Blvd., Wilmington, 910-341-7852, wilmingtonnc.gov/Parks-Recreation/Parks-Trails/Piney-Ridge-Nature-Preserve-Stanley-Rehder-Carnivorous-Garden.

Drivers can show their love for the Venus flytrap and other native plants with a new specialty license plate that supports the North Carolina Botanical Garden Foundation.

The specialty plate that reads “Home of the Venus Flytrap” features the state’s well-known carnivorous plant.

The foundation gets $20 of the $30 plate fee and it has committed to using the proceeds to support native plant conservation and the restoration of healthy landscapes across the state.

The plates are expected to be available in a few months through the Division of Motor Vehicles, which gets the other $10.

The specialty plate received nearly 800 preorders before heading to the state legislature for approval. Rep. Allen Buansi, D-Orange, and Rep. Frank Iler, R-Brunswick, sponsored the plate that was included in the larger transportation bill signed by Gov. Roy Cooper on July 3, according to a release.

The plate was designed by Preston Montague, a Durham-based artist, educator, and landscape designer.

The main threats to the Venus flytrap, which can be found in longleaf pine habitats in the coastal plain and sandhills of North Carolina and South Carolina, are habitat loss and poaching, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The North Carolina Forest Service will begin taking orders Monday, July 1, for conifer and hardwood seedlings.

The Forest Service Nursery Program produces 16 million seedlings, enough native and genetically improved tree seedlings to plant roughly 30,000 acres, equivalent to nearly 23,000 football fields, each year, officials said Monday.

“Having healthy trees and forests provides many benefits to our state, including helping to clean our air and water and sequestering carbon,” Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler said in a statement. “I encourage residents to take advantage of the high quality trees produced through the North Carolina Forest Service nursery program. Seedlings go quick so you’ll want to purchase them early.”

Genetically improved stock is available for Fraser fir, loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf, eastern white pine and Virginia pine.

“These seedlings offer better volume growth, tree form, disease resistance, straightness, and other characteristics needed to produce beautiful Christmas trees, healthy woodlands and quality forest products,” according to the Forest Service.

Tree seedlings can be ordered from the online seedling store at www.buynctrees.com, by calling 888-NCTREES (1-888-628-7337) or 919-731-7988, or the order form in this year’s nursery seedling catalog that will be available next month in county Forest Service offices. A user-friendly online catalog will soon be available, as well.

The catalog offers information for landowners about the types of tree species, quantities and costs to order. Each species description includes information about ideal planting locations and whether a species is typically used to benefit wildlife, restore forest habitats or as marketable timber.

Most containerized seedlings are available October through March while most bare-root seedlings are available January through March. Seedling orders can be shipped to one of 13 distribution centers statewide for a small fee or through UPS for a charge. Seedling orders can also be picked up from the Forest Service’s Claridge Nursery in Goldsboro or the Linville River Nursery near Crossnore in Avery County.

Customers can pay by check, money order, Mastercard and Visa.

For information on planting trees, customers can contact their Forest Service county office and nursery locations.

Coastal gardeners have an opportunity to learn about native vegetation in the area and how the resilient plants survive in a harsh coastal environment.

Amy Mead, the N.C. Cooperative Extension area natural resources agent for Brunswick, Pender and New Hanover counties, will present “Life on the Coast is Easy? How Native Plants are Built for Life Near the Beach” Feb. 7, at the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City.

Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and the program, which is free to the public, will begin at 10 a.m. Register online to attend.

Mead, a certified arborist passionate about native trees and proper tree maintenance, will discuss issues related to ponds and aquatic weeds, water quality, stormwater, erosion, and native habitat restoration.

North Carolina Extension Master Gardener volunteers of Carteret County are hosting a coastal native plant presentation.

After the event, attendees can pick up a free 1-gallon native plant donated by the Carteret County Extension Master Gardener Volunteer Association in keeping with the presentation of plants that work well in our coastal environment. There will be 100 plants available.

Fire is good for forests. See for yourself.

The Nature Conservancy invites you to explore the Green Swamp Nature Preserve from the comforts of your own home and see firsthand how thousands of acres are regenerating after burning in a wildfire last June.

The conservancy recently launched an interactive map that takes the user deep into the forest to reveal new life emerging in the weeks and months since a wildfire burned nearly 16,000 acres.

The story of the fire in the Green Swamp has the eye-catching title “Pulp Road Wildfire. 15,642 acres burned – 15,642 acres revitalized.”

Using ArcGIS StoryMaps, an online tool created by American geographic information system technology software company Esri, Emma Gwyn, a GIS stewardship intern for The Nature Conservancy — North Carolina in Wilmington, created the story of how the fire benefited the preserve.

Visitors of the site can click on different areas of a map of the preserve to learn about the variety of unique plants and wildlife that call the area home, watch drone videos, view before-and-after images, and a 91-day time-lapse of a pocosin wetland regenerating after the fire.

“It’s still there,” said Nathan Burmester, the conservancy’s coastal plain stewardship manager. “It’s flourishing. It’s better than it was before.”

That may come as a surprise to those who assumed much of the 17,424-acre preserve, known for its Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and decorative orchids, lay in a charred, dead heap following the June wildfire.

But fire is just what the preserve’s two main ecosystems – longleaf pine savannah and pocosin wetland – need to thrive.

As explained in the virtual tour, longleaf pine savanna need low-intensity fires every two to five years. Pocosin, which are freshwater shrub wetlands of the southeastern coastal plains, require high-intensity fires every eight to 20 years.

“Even though a high-intensity fire in the pocosin may look catastrophic, the system recovers incredibly quickly,” according to the conservancy.

“It’s always one of our messages that we’re trying to get out is the importance of controlled burning,” Burmester said. “Part of my goal for making this was to have more education for the public.”

Whether sparked by a cigarette discarded from a car window or a lightning strike, forests are going to burn “someday, one way or another,” he said.

“When that happens, we don’t get to pick the day. We don’t get to pick the weather. So, we’re always trying to get out the importance of controlled burning,” Burmester said.

The Green Swamp fire began as a prescribed burn by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission on June 14 around Pulp Road in Brunswick County.

Related: Green Swamp now turning green again after burn, wildfire

The commission had a permit to burn 400 acres, but the blaze spread after the fire jumped its line and quickly spread into areas that had not been burned in years.

“The smoke was so intense that it sparked thunderstorms nearby!” according to the conservancy.

Winds pushed ash more than 30 miles away to Wilmington and air quality warnings were issued throughout the region before June 29 when the fire was fully contained.

The fire left a black and green patchwork-like landscape across the preserve. Green areas are those that were either too wet or had been burned in a series of controlled fires prescribed within the past year.

These areas served as “critical refuges” for wildlife during the June wildfire.

Burmester said that the preserve was last burned in its entirety 68 years ago.

That equated to 68 years of fuel for some areas of the preserve. There are no roads in the swamp to break the land into smaller chunks. The shrubby, wet pocosin can’t be sliced with fire lines.

“They’re extremely challenging to burn because they’re large pockets of non-divided fuels,” Burmester said.

He said that experts from various agencies, including Wildlife Resources and forest service officials, have begun talks on how they can turn the June wildfire into an opportunity to administer controlled burns in the future.

In the meantime, he encourages people to engage in the Green Swamp fire story.

“The tool’s out there so anything you want to do and show in a map feature is there, which is really cool,” Burmester said. “Enjoy and be creative.”

NAGS HEAD — Standing Wednesday at the end of a short path lined with beautyberries and seaside goldenrod at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, North Carolina First Lady Kristin Cooper told a gathering of about two dozen that, although she was here to celebrate North Carolina Native Plant Week, Oct. 16 to 22, it wasn’t plants that first drew her attention — it was her fascination with birds.

And because native plant species are so vital for North Carolina’s birds and pollinators, Cooper has been a vocal advocate for planting native species of trees, flowers and vegetation almost from the time her husband Gov. Roy Cooper took office in 2017.

Birds, she explained, began to thrive and increase in numbers at the North Carolina Executive Mansion soon after a project that stripped away dozens of nonnative ornamentals that had choked out other species in the garden there and replaced them with native plants.

“We put it (a native plant garden) in October, and the next spring, we had the kids come out and do a bird count,” she said. “Then a couple of years later they came back … and we saw a 25% uptick in the variety of birds that we saw — just in those two years.”

In July, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources instituted a policy that required all landscaping and planting at state parks, including Jockey’s Ridge, historic sites and other facilities the department manages to use only native plants in their landscaping.

“This is government trying to lead by example, by doing this, we’re trying to encourage businesses, homeowners, homeowners associations, other government agencies to embrace native plants as well,” said Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Secretary Reid Wilson, who, along with Audubon North Carolina Executive Director Curtis Smalling, were at the event.

The project at the mansion had sprung from a conversation Cooper had with folks with Audubon North Carolina when her husband was still the state attorney general.

“I’ve got to give a lot of the glory to the Audubon Society,” she said. “Some very astute person must have been at some place hearing me talk about how much I like birds.”

Cooper wasn’t here just to talk about plants. She also joined in planting a persimmon tree by the visitor center at the state park. Persimmon trees are abundant among the dunes and maritime trees of Jockey’s Ridge. The trees are a magnet for wildlife with innumerable birds and mammals gathering at the trees when the fruit ripens.

After the event, Cooper told Coastal Review why she is so passionate about native plants.

“Birds, even hummingbirds, mostly what they eat are bugs,” she said.

And while birds do eat seeds, insects make up the bulk of their diet, she noted. “A native oak tree might have 250 insects they can eat. A crepe myrtle maybe has two.”

It’s not just birds that thrive among native plants.

“I had a problem with a rabbit just eating my native plant, and that’s the point — they won’t eat that (other) stuff. They just hop right through it (nonnative plants) and come over and eat the plants you want there,” she said.

Wilson, during his remarks, also extolled the virtues of native plants.

“They are part of our natural and cultural heritage,” he said. “They are better able to survive and thrive because they’re adapted to our weather and to our soils.”

Smalling, with Audubon North Carolina, said the organization had begun the initiative 10 years ago as a collaborative effort among a group of volunteers including state park staff, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, aid groups and others. It was Cooper’s advocacy, however, that really moved the idea forward.

“One of the significant things that happened early in the process was First Lady Cooper stepped up and really became an important partner for us. Elevating the role of native plants and what they do for birds was really critical to understanding the connection,” Smalling said.

But a big issue that could hurt the campaign to get more native plants in the ground is nurseries’ inventories.

“Now that we want everybody to be planting native plants, we’ve got to make sure they’re available,” he said.

Smalling told Coastal Review that 2014 had been the first year that Audubon North Carolina began the native plants push. He said that initial effort illustrated what can happen when an idea gets too far ahead of inventory.

“The first year we did this, we said everybody needs to plant a spicebush because it’s great for migratory birds,” Smalling said. “Immediately, everybody was sold out of spicebush. We created the statewide shortage.”

Audubon North Carolina has subsequently developed a short list of six or seven plants it recommends each year so that nurseries can plan accordingly. Nonetheless, there are still supply chain issues, but now, Smalling noted, to the state’s native plant initiative is critical to making native plants more available.

“That’s why the policy that Secretary Wilson was talking about is really important. If you can drive that demand, as long as the growers see that there’s built-in demand, they can start ramping up,” he said.

BOILING SPRING LAKES – The rain did not interrupt them as they squatted down, jabbing through thick brush and muddy soil with their trowels.

The sporadic, short-lived rain showers Monday morning in Boiling Spring Lakes were a welcome respite from the swelling morning temperatures that would reach 91 degrees by afternoon.

Rain nor clouds, heat nor shine will stop impending utility construction along the shallow ditch bed in which a group of volunteers fervently worked to dig up as many Venus flytraps as they could for replanting far from the roadside on which they’d sprouted by the hundreds.

Development and lack of burning, a management tool crucial to flytrap habitat, have created population decline of the rare, arguably bizarre yet totally fascinating, carnivorous plants that occur naturally only within a 75-mile radius around Wilmington.

In this small Brunswick County city roughly 8 miles northwest of Southport, Venus flytraps have migrated to ditches alongside roads that were built years ago to accommodate new housing.

These spots offer the wet, open habitat flytraps require to grow and thrive, unlike the areas from which they migrated that are now overgrown by trees and shrubs that filter the sunlight the low-to-the-ground flytraps need.

Efforts to protect the flytraps’ roadside refuge have prompted the city to take over managing street-side mowing in areas that would otherwise be handled by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Now there’s interest to build houses on the vacant wooded lots where the plants once grew. Soon utility crews will begin digging up the areas to install water and sewer lines.

“We’re running out of time,” said Tyler Gramley, vice president of the North American Sarracenia Conservancy board of directors and volunteer. “Hopefully we’ll be able to get them all. The more you look the more there are. It’s great. It’s all great.”

Gramley crouched down to assist others who were gingerly digging underneath flytraps and pulling them up, the plants’ roots concealed in clumps of soggy, black soil.

Many of the volunteers were repeat flytrap retrievers who’d shown up more than a week earlier to remove and replant plants along a different roadside.

The group of about 12 volunteers – young and old(er) – were city residents, conservationists, business owners and out-of-towners lending their time, knees and backs to give the plants considered in North Carolina a “species of concern” a chance at survival.

“We have the largest population (of Venus flytraps) per capita with humans living among them,” said Stephanie Bodmer, owner of The Boiling Spring Lakes Motel. “We live with them. We work to preserve them.”

Bodmer is the volunteer coordinator of the flytrap relocation effort, one spurred by Julie Moore, a woman whose life’s work has centered on habitat protection.

Moore, a retired endangered species biologist who started Venus Flytrap Champions to assist property owners and managers in the Carolinas in caring for flytrap populations, was running late Monday morning. An accident on Interstate 40 left her sitting in highway gridlock as she traveled from her home in Raleigh to Boiling Spring Lakes.

By the time she arrived at the site where volunteers had been scooping up flytraps by the dozens and carefully tucking them into plastic bins for moving, the volunteers were getting ready to head to the site where the plants are being relocated.

Leery of poachers — it is a felony to poach Venus flytraps — Moore asked Coastal Review not disclose the locations of where the flytraps are being removed and relocated. The plants are being replanted within town-owned and -managed land.

Venus flytraps lack threatened and endangered species protections despite their dwindling habitat. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in late July issued a decision not to federally list Venus flytraps.

“There’s nothing else like them,” Moore said. “Taking them is protected, but the habitats are not. That’s the real problem.”

Venus flytraps live in open longleaf pine savannahs, habitat that has dwindled tremendously from an estimated 90 million acres spanning from Virginia to Florida and southwest to Texas to a little more than 3 million acres today.

Conservation groups have been working to preserve and restore longleaf pine forests. Ten years ago, The Nature Conservancy acquired more than 450 acres of longleaf pine forest in the Pinch Gut Ridge, an area crucial in maintaining the Green Swamp Preserve.

The preserve, which spans more than 17,000 acres just north of Supply on N.C. Highway 211, is famous for its carnivorous plants and orchids, the same species that grow in Boiling Spring Lakes, a city experiencing a population boom like much of Brunswick County east of U.S. 17.

When Boiling Spring Lakes resident Amber Townsend moved here 14 years ago she had no idea the plant that inspired the now-iconic Broadway-show-turned-movie, “Little Shop of Horrors,” flourished in the area.

It wasn’t until about four years ago when she visited a local farmers market that she found out the city is a “known hot spot,” according to Moore, for Venus flytraps.

Townsend enthusiastically talked about her intrigue of Venus flytraps as she sat on the ground carefully digging up every plant she spotted. She donned a straw hat decorated with a fake rendition of the carnivorous plant. The hat matched the Venus flytrap earrings she wore.

“I’ve really, really loved these plants and when I found out there’s a way to preserve them I wanted to help,” she said.

She was one of the return volunteers who, little more than a week earlier, relocated about 370 of the plants.

Volunteer Jared Lukavski made the drive from his home in Charlotte for a second time to volunteer.

“I fell in love with these plants a couple of years ago when I saw one at Walmart,” he said. “At the time I didn’t know they were native. It just almost defines nature to have a plant that wants to eat a bug.”

Boiling Spring Lakes resident Kathy Sykes has lived here for more than 30 years. She vividly recalled seeing a Venus flytrap for the first time during a horseback ride on her property.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “This is one unique little area that we live in.”

Moore agreed.

“Boiling Spring Lakes is an oddity in that you can see Venus flytraps just driving down the road,” she said. “They’re just endlessly fascinating. We’ll be continuing to do this. We’re hoping to make the area where we’ve moved the flytraps an educational place.”

Guest commentary

We in the Carolinas share space with a wonderful but imperiled plant, the Venus flytrap.

People everywhere know and love this unique carnivorous plant for its remarkable ability to ensnare insects within toothed, snap-trap leaves with a hair-trigger, allowing them to snap shut around a struggling insect within milliseconds. A century before “Little Shop of Horrors,” Charles Darwin was so enchanted he had collectors send him these “most wonderful” plants for experiments. 

Although they are known around the world, we only find wild Venus flytraps in a few special habitats scattered across the coastal plains of North and South Carolina within about 100 miles of Wilmington. This highly restricted range reflects the flytrap’s needs for open, sunny, nutrient-poor, and wet habitats scattered among seasonally flooded depressions in longleaf pine savannas and along small creeks with shrub thickets in the Sandhills. Flytraps also need recurrent fires. Without them, woody shrubs quickly overtop and shade out these plants.

Development has shrunk the range of the flytrap and extinguished many populations. If you’ve driven to the beach in recent years, you’ve seen golf courses, housing, and commercial areas where flytraps once grew. In addition, poachers who illegally dig up the plants to sell them have depleted many flytrap populations.

The flytrap’s highly restricted range makes it particularly vulnerable. Remarkably, more than 75% of all wild plants occur in just four large populations on Marine Corps Base Camp LeJeune, NC state game lands, and in the Green Swamp (owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy). Small populations on private lands are vulnerable to losing the habitat patches or the fire and water regimes that sustain them.

These threats and concerns led botanists and conservationists to petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) in 2016 to list the Venus flytrap as federally endangered. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assigned the plant to “Vulnerable” status on its Red List in 2020.

Despite these threats, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has ruled that the Venus flytrap “is not facing an imminent threat of extinction now or in the foreseeable future” (July 25, 2023, decision). They point in particular to eight “highly resilient” populations they rate as stable, protected, and well-managed, which should suffice to sustain this species, eliminating any need for federal regulatory protection.

We hope the USFWS is right. We fear they acted on incomplete information and with more optimism and confidence than is warranted. They pin hopes for this species on land managers’ abilities to successfully protect and manage a few remnant populations. History is littered with failures to sustain large and apparently stable and well-managed populations of other species that crashed unexpectedly from unforeseen threats.

In making this momentous decision, the USFWS underestimated the risks Venus flytraps face from climate change. The large flytrap populations that the USFWS rates as most resilient and crucial for viability grow at low elevations along the coast. Sea level is now rising faster than predicted even a few months ago, increasing risks from saltwater flooding during storm surges (which are also increasing). Prolonged droughts are also becoming more common, threatening the moist habitats flytraps depend on. 

The pace of development has accelerated on the Carolina coastal plain. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in its Sackett decision that isolated wetlands beyond navigable waters are no longer protected from development. This halves the area of wetlands formerly protected. Compounding this threat, the North Carolina Farm Act of 2023 (Senate Bill 532) strips North Carolina wetlands of longstanding safeguards and compensatory mitigation. This further frees developers to drain ephemeral wetlands like those that support flytrap populations on private lands. The USFWS’s decision did not anticipate how these actions would threaten flytrap populations.

The smaller flytrap populations on private lands play important roles by connecting large and small populations that enhance viability and slow inbreeding. They also provide the pathways for flytraps to migrate north and inland as climates change.  

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service decision not to federally protect the Venus flytrap doesn’t mean this unique species is secure. To ensure that wild Venus flytraps remain part of our Carolina natural heritage, consider what you might do:

• Ask landowners with Venus flytraps on their property to request assistance at Venus Flytrap Champions. This organization recognizes and assists landowners and land managers in the Carolinas who want to ​care for populations of this rare species.
• In North Carolina visit Carolina Beach State Park and The Nature Conservancy’s Green Swamp Preserve and in South Carolina visit Lewis Ocean Bay Preserve to learn about the Venus flytrap.
• Donate funds to support the ongoing habitat protection and restoration efforts (see www.VenusFlytrapChampions.org website).
• Support the North Carolina Plant Conservation Program, which also maintains properties where Venus flytrap grows, via Friends of Plant Conservation.
• Spread concern for the Venus flytrap among your friends, social networks, and the media. Encourage writers or newspaper editors to cover this story in depth.

Extinction is forever. If these populations vanish, we lose a unique branch of life and the world’s most popular plant.

To stimulate discussion and debate, Coastal Review welcomes differing viewpoints on topical coastal issues. See our guidelines for submitting guest columns. Opinions expressed by the authors are not necessarily those of Coastal Review or our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Certain state cultural sites and state-funded parks are now encouraged to go native when it comes to landscaping choices.

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources announced Wednesday a new policy directing and encouraging the use of native plants at departmental locations and at local government sites receiving grants from the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund.

Related: New landscaping guide suggests ‘Plant This Instead!’

The policy, effective July 1, is to help the department meet its mission of protecting the state’s natural heritage, officials said in the announcement.

“Native plants are an important part of North Carolina’s natural and cultural heritage,” said Secretary D. Reid Wilson. “There are many environmental benefits to native plants, and they are much more likely to thrive in our weather and soils. We encourage others — homeowners, businesses, government agencies — to also plant beautiful native plant gardens.”

As the policy notes, native plants are adapted to the state’s environment and more likely to thrive, especially during drought. Unlike invasive plants that are nonnative species, they do not overwhelm natural ecosystems. They support pollinators essential to food production and ecosystem health and boost otherwise declining bird populations that depend on insects associated with native gardens. Native plants, especially grasses, are better able to store carbon, thereby reducing greenhouse gases.

The department said that landscaping for all its properties “shall only use seeds and plants that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has classified as native to the Southeastern United States. Additionally, landscaping for all projects funded by the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund shall only use these seeds and plants.”

Exceptions are made for plants used in crop cultivation, scientific research, botanical or historical gardens, turf grass, plantings for wildlife, or plantings for exhibits or for animal consumption at museums, zoos and aquariums.

The department, along with the Department of Administration, installed a new all-native-plant garden in front of the department headquarters on Jones Street in Raleigh.

The department manages more than 100 locations across the state, including 27 historic sites, seven history museums, two art museums, five science museums, four aquariums, 35 state parks, four recreation areas, dozens of state trails and natural areas, the North Carolina Zoo, the North Carolina Symphony, the State Library, the State Archives, the N.C. Arts Council, the African American Heritage Commission, the American Indian Heritage Commission, the State Historic Preservation Office, the Office of State Archaeology, the Highway Historical Markers program, the N.C. Land and Water Fund, and the Natural Heritage Program. For more information, visit www.ncdcr.gov.

Part of a series on pollinators.

When people shop for ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers for their gardens and yards, visual appeal is usually top of mind. Chain stores and nurseries offer lots of striking choices, but often plant species native to the North Carolina coast are hard to find.

Biologists say that’s a problem.

It can take some effort to find a retailer selling native species, and professional landscapers often fail to include them in their designs, but these plants play a critical role in providing for bees, butterflies and other pollinators here.

Amy Mead of the North Carolina State Extension for New Hanover, Pender and Onslow counties explained to Coastal Review last week that native species are the foundations of coastal ecosystems. For insects like bees and other pollinators, native plants provide nectar, but that’s just one facet of their importance, Mead said.

“Especially for butterflies and moths, so many of our native plants are host plants for their caterpillars, and so they’re looking for these plants to lay their eggs on,” she said. “These native plants are providing the food source for those caterpillars to complete their life cycle. They are absolutely critical, and then that moves up the food chain to these birds looking for these caterpillars to be able to complete their life cycles, as well.”

It’s not an unusual sight in North Carolina: Vines of kudzu or wisteria sprawling across the landscape, reaching up, wrapping around, covering and choking the life from trees and other vegetation and creating a mess that’s not only unsightly, it’s also bad for the environment.

Though common, these vines aren’t native to this area, they were introduced as ornamental plants and subsequently became invasive. They’re just a couple of high-profile examples of plants that cause ill effects because they don’t belong here.

So, how can coastal property owners and landscapers avoid harmful landscaping plants? What plants native to North Carolina would be better alternatives?

A collaborative called the Coastal Landscapes Initiative has compiled a new guide of what it describes as “attractive eco-friendly plants” to substitute for commonly used “bad actors” that the initiative has identified as landscaping plants to avoid.

The Coastal Landscapes Initiative, a public-private partnership created more than five years ago to promote beautiful, functional, cost-efficient and environmentally friendly coastal landscape designs, recently released its free guide, “Plant This Instead!” The publication is available in print at county Cooperative Extension offices and online at the North Carolina Sea Grant website in PDF form.

“The Coastal Landscapes Initiative was started to find ways to promote and support landscaping practices at various scales, practices that meet our human needs and our desires, but also protect and enhance our coastal resources, resources like water quality fisheries and wildlife habitat,” said Gloria Putnam during a webinar in March that shared the title of the new publication.

Putnam, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal resources and communities specialist who leads the Coastal Landscape Initiative, said that the North Carolina coast has diverse ecosystems, and each has its own distinct set of plants that are naturally found here – they are native to the area.

“The type of soil, the amount of water and the temperature are really the primary determinants of the type of plant that can live in an area, and the type of plants that are there determines the kind of animals that can exist. In other words, native plants are naturally adapted to the local soil and climate conditions. These plants co-evolved with other species in the area. Some of these plants have highly specialized relationships with animals, and they work as a system,” she said.

Putnam, during the webinar, cited the cedar waxwing and the eastern red cedar as an example.

“Eastern red cedar is actually Juniperus virginiana, so it’s not a cedar at all. It’s juniper, which is why it’s important to know the scientific name,” she said. “Red cedar is very common on barrier islands, and they’re adapted to the conditions there. They’re adapted to the soil and salt aerosols and drought, and the waxwing depends on the cedar for food. And the cedar depends on the waxwing for seed dispersal.”

Invasives can be costly

A big problem with nonnative species is that they can outcompete the native plants, and often with devastating results, environmentally and economically.

According to the publication, estimates of invasive plants’ economic effects can vary. But costs to control just one ornamental species, Lythrum salicaria, commonly known as the European purple loosestrife, and the loss of forage associated with the invasive plant are estimated at $45 million each year in the 48 states where it is found.

The publication cites a 2018 University of Delaware study of residential yards in the Washington, D.C., area, which found that Carolina chickadees there could sustain their numbers only where available plants were at least 70% native species. That’s because Carolina chickadees mainly eat caterpillars that often rely exclusively on a limited number of native plant species for their food.

“A single clutch of chickadees, hatched from 3 to 10 eggs, consumes up to 9,000 caterpillars in the 16 days it takes to develop into fledglings,” according to the publication.

Native plants in coastal landscapes support numerous other birds, as well as other animals and insects, including bees and butterflies.

The guide includes alternatives for commonly used nonnative species, with options for various landscape uses, such as trees and grasses as accent plants, shrubs for foundations and borders, privacy screens and hedges and ornamental deciduous vines to add “vertical interest and flowers.”

For example, the guide suggests Amelanchier canadensi, or serviceberry, and Cercis canadensis, or redbud, trees instead of commonly used Pyrus calleryana, or callery pears, that include Bradford and other cultivars.

Bradford pears, which bloom beautifully in March along much of the North Carolina coast and are frequently featured in landscape designs here, were bred to be sterile, but because they are grafted onto other pear rootstock, which can send out suckers that flower, they can cross with other pear trees nearby.

“Bradford pears can’t crossbreed with one another but they can crossbreed with other cultivars and other pear species,” Mead said during the webinar.

Mead said the Bradford pear had become a “poster child” of good intentions. Structurally weak and “malodorous,” she said that, while it is a beautiful, spring-blooming tree, “I have heard the blooms described as (smelling like) rotting fish or urine, not something that I want to have in my yard.”

Alternatives to the Bradford pear include Cornus florida, or flowering dogwood, Magnolia virginiana, or sweetbay magnolia, and Acer rubrum, or red maple.

For shrubs, plant Ilex vomitoria, or yaupon holly, instead of Nandina domestica, or nandina.

Instead of ornamental grasses like Cortaderia selloana, or pampas grass, the guide suggests planting taller cultivars of native Panicum virgatum, or switchgrass — or Muhlenbergia capillaris, or pink muhly grass, where plant height is not a priority.

Supply and demand

So why aren’t native plants more widely available in stores here?

“It’s sort of a chicken and egg — there’s got to be a demand for the native plants in order for box stores to start carrying these, but then it goes all the way back to the supply chain. The nurseries need to have the demand from the box stores to be able to start growing these plants,” Mead told Coastal Review.

She said it’s not always easy growing native plants on a commercial scale. There’s the matter of the native seed supply, and then figuring out how to grow them.

“And then there’s the psychology, too, of what plants people will buy in the box stores. It has to look pretty and be blooming, and so there’s so much more that goes into it rather than just saying, ‘Hey, you should grow more native plants,’” Mead said.

The effort to increase awareness of the importance of native plants is so that it will drive more demand. “So people will start going into these large home improvement stores and asking for native plants and then they will start asking the growers to grow these plants as well. We’re hoping to drive that supply and demand and we’re starting with education,” she said.

Knowledge could steer folks away from what Mead calls “the starter pack of crepe myrtles and loropetalums,” plants easily found in stores and widely used – sometimes to the exclusion of all other choices – in residential landscaping.

Mead said there are so many more plants to choose from that will thrive on the coast and provide benefits to the environment. These plants can be added to established gardens, including those planted with nonnative species.

“I’m not a native purist,” Mead said. “We don’t live in a natural forest, but I would say add plants. I’m a big fan of expanding your garden beds, adding in plants. If you’re ready, if you have failing or older plants, it’s a good opportunity to plant something new.”

She advises trying to plant 70% native species, and then ornamental plants can be included as “ornaments in your yard.” Sometimes a few nonnative plants can simply bring joy.

“I have a beautiful gardenia bush that reminds me of my childhood. And so that’s something that gives me pleasure, and I can have it in my yard. It’s important that something is beautiful and gives me pleasure,” Mead said, adding that Japanese maples are similar. “Something that I really enjoy having in my garden, as well. Those are going to be beautiful, they’re not going to be invasive or cause any harm.”

Find a nursery

To find native plants, contact your county office of the N.C. State Extension, which also offers the following links to help you locate a nursery near you that sells native plants:

• North Carolina Botanical Garden
• North Carolina Forest Service
• North Carolina Native Plant Society

Garden Lovers’ Weekend will be in bloom Friday through Sunday at Tryon Palace in downtown New Bern.

The public will be able to view the gardens on the historic site at no charge from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday and from noon to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Garden enthusiasts will have a chance to purchase herbs, vegetables, native plants, hanging baskets, annuals and perennials grown at the palace during the plant sale set for 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday just inside the palace gates.

Area artists are expected to be painting in the gardens as part of the citywide Arts in April events that weekend and on Saturday, under the Palace Colonnades, there will be music from the 17th and 18th centuries performed by the Craven Consort, a recorder ensemble.

Tickets are required to tour inside the buildings and see exhibits.

For more information, visit the Tryon Palace website or call 252-639-3525.

Coastal Review is featuring the work of historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the North Carolina coast. Cecelski shares on his website essays and lectures he has written about the state as well as brings readers along on his search for the lost stories of our coastal past in the museums, libraries and archives he visits in the U.S. and across the globe. 

When my wife and I were in London last summer, we visited the Natural History Museum to see the collection of plants that the naturalist, explorer, surveyor and sometimes fur trader John Lawson sent to the English naturalist James Petiver in 1710 and 1711.

Lawson, himself an Englishman, collected the plants on parts of the North Carolina coast near where I grew up: by the Neuse River, by the Trent River, at Thomas Pollock’s plantation on Salmon Creek, and along the shores of the Pamlico Sound, among other sites.

The collection is a wonderful array of coastal flora, including, just to name a few, a specimen of southern live oak (Quercus virginiana),  an American persimmmon (Diospyros virginiana), a patch of Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), two kinds of sunflowers (Helianthus sp. and Eupatorium dubium), a yellow-fringed orchid (Habenaria ciliaris) and a bit of woolgrass (Scirpus cyprinus), among much else.

Many are species that Lawson wrote about in the work for which we know him best, “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

Of the live oak, for instance, Lawson wrote in “A New Voyage to Carolina” that it bears an acorn “as sweet as chesnuts (sic), and the Indians draw an oil from them, as sweet as that from the olive, tho’ of an amber colour.”

According to Vince Bellis, an esteemed botanist who taught for many years at East Carolina University in Greenville, there are 295 specimens of Lawson’s at the Natural History Museum. To my knowledge, they are the only relics of Lawson’s life that have survived to the present day.

Deep in the museum’s inner recesses, they are preserved in a simple, but effective fashion that botanists have employed for nearly 500 years: dried and pasted onto linen paper pages, now grown yellowed and brittle, and bound together.

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Lawson collected the plants soon after he published “A New Voyage to Carolina.”

First appearing in London in 1709, “A New Voyage to Carolina” is by far the most important account of North Carolina’s natural history and native peoples written at any time prior to the American Revolution. Today it is widely considered a classic of early American literature.

In a way though, the path of Lawson’s plant specimens to London’s Natural History Museum began almost a decade earlier.

I think the story really begins when Lawson first settled on the North Carolina coast. That was in 1701, at a time when there were not yet any English towns or villages in the territory that the British would soon begin to call “North Carolina.”

Almost immediately, Lawson recognized the potential to do pathbreaking natural history work in his new home. No naturalist had yet done any serious collecting there. Neither had any colonist or settler yet written with any depth of knowledge about the Tuscarora, Neusiok, Coree or other native peoples who inhabited the region.

After a long journey through Carolina, and after spending much of that time in the region’s Indian towns and villages, Lawson contacted James Petiver, who was a well-known apothecary, naturalist and collector of plant and animal specimens in London.

In a letter dated April 12, 1701, now preserved at London’s Royal Society, Lawson wrote Petiver from “Bath County on Pamphrough (Pamlico) River.” In that letter, Lawson offered to collect plant specimens for Petiver, as well as shells, butterflies, fish and insects.

He told Petiver that he was willing to do so there by the Pamlico River and on a trip that he was planning to the Outer Banks.

At the time that Lawson wrote to him, Petiver was building one of the world’s great herbariums.

Beginning in 1695, Petiver published a series of booklets called, in Latin, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima Rariora Naturae Continens. They featured descriptions of plants and other specimens that had been sent to him from around the world. At the end of every volume, he encouraged readers abroad to send additional specimens to him. Lawson may have first contacted Petiver in response to that plea.

Herbaria, the singular is “herbarium,” are collections of plants kept for scientific study and teaching. Some herbaria focus just on vascular plants (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowering plants, etc.). Others feature an even more astonishing degree of botanical diversity.

The herbaria at the Natural History Museum, where Laura and I were, for instance, make up one of the world’s largest botanical collections, totaling more than 3 million specimens in all.

In addition to the General Herbarium, the museum is home to quite a few other, more specialized herbaria. There is a herbarium just for mosses and other bryophytes, another for algae, one for ferns, yet another for lichens and even ones for slime molds and diatoms.

The museum’s bryophyte herbarium alone houses 900,000 specimens, all of them tiny evolutionary descendants of what are believed to be the first terrestrial plants on Earth.

Yet another of the museum’s herbaria holds 300,000 diatoms. Resembling a pillbox and its lid (to borrow Rachel Carson’s description of them), diatoms are one-celled, microscopic organisms that, by some estimates, produce 20 to 30 percent of the air that we breathe.

Because of their hard silica shells, fossilized diatoms have also proven tremendously useful for studying changes in environmental conditions over the centuries.

Botanists have long used herbaria to advance our knowledge of plant taxonomy, the branch of science that identifies, describes, classifies, and names the world’s plants.

But in recent decades, with the advent of DNA analysis and other new  analytical tools, scientists have also begun to use herbarium specimens to study historic changes in local ecological systems and to investigate key questions about global diversity and climate change.

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A physician and botanist named Luca Ghini (1490-1556) created what is believed to be the world’s first herbarium in the early 1500s, during the Italian Renaissance. A professor at the University of Bologna, he pioneered the process of preserving and displaying plants by pressing them and gluing them to a page of paper, then binding them into a book.

The earliest herbaria, including Ghini’s, were created in order to catalog, study and exhibit plants that had medicinal uses. At that time, botany was fundamentally a branch of medicine. Few scientists were interested in the study of plants if they did not have healing properties.

That soon changed, however. Over the next couple centuries, physicians and other healers, including apothecaries such as James Petiver, began to expand herbaria to include nonmedicinal plants as well as medicinal plants. The modern science of botany was born.

Luca Ghini’s herbarium has not survived, but the herbarium of one of his students, the artist and herbalist Gherardo Cibo, is believed to be the oldest extant herbarium in the world. Dating from 1532, Cibo’s herbarium is preserved at a public library in Rome, the Biblioteca Angelica.

The oldest herbarium in the United States is generally believed to be at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The Academy’s herbarium holds a wealth of specimens from the early 19^th century, including all but a few of the plant specimens that the Lewis and Clark expedition collected in 1803-06.

I should add though that at least some historians of botany consider a much smaller herbarium at Salem College, a small women’s liberal arts school in Winston-Salem, N.C., as being even older.

That herbarium—for many years occupying just a few drawers in a filing cabinet—was started in 1772, the year that Moravian settlers founded the school. However, the oldest plant specimen that remains in Salem College’s collection today is apparently a common snowberry (Symphoricarposalbus albus) that was not collected until 1817.

James Petiver’s herbarium was not one of the first herbariums, but he certainly compiled one of the largest and quite likely the most geographically diverse in early modern England.

Judging by his surviving specimens, Petiver began building his herbarium in 1683-84, while on medicinal plant collecting excursions into the London countryside that were sponsored by the Society of Apothecaries, one of the city’s trade guilds.

Petiver did not build his herbarium by traveling widely outside of Great Britain, however. He only traveled overseas once in his life, and that was not until he visited the Netherlands in 1711.

Instead Petiver relied on hundreds of correspondents around the world to send plant specimens to him. Like John Lawson, most of those correspondents were somehow connected to the colonial or imperialist aspirations of the British Empire.

From his apothecary shop, Petiver corresponded with naturalists, naval officers, ship surgeons, explorers, merchants, physicians, missionaries and an astonishing number of individuals who were involved in the trafficking of Africans to slave labor camps in the Americas.

In a 2013 journal article, Kathleen S. Murphy observed that seagoing men made up the largest number of Petiver’s correspondents in the Atlantic Basin and that nearly half of them sailed on the routes of the slave trade. See Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade, ” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 70, No. 4 (Oct. 2013).

Murphy’s article is part of a growing body of scholarship revealing how tightly even the most enlightened spirit of scientific inquiry in Great Britain was entwined with colonialism and the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Petiver’s correspondents, including those involved in the slave trade and those who were not, lived or traveled in much of the world, including Western Europe, India, China, West Africa, and the Americas.

By one count, he corresponded with at least 80 individuals just in the British colonies in North America.

Above all, Petiver cultivated relationships with that far-flung network of correspondents in the hopes that they would collect plant specimens for him, as well as share with him any knowledge they might discover about their medicinal uses.

If they proved willing to collect for him, Petiver sent detailed instructions to them on how to gather, preserve and ship the specimens so that they would arrive in London in good shape. He often sent collecting supplies and scientific instruments to his correspondents as well.

The relationship between Lawson and Petiver unfolded slowly. While Lawson first offered to collect plants for Petiver in 1701, there is no record of him having done so for another eight years.

During much of that time, Lawson was busy with matters other than the study of natural history. He was a surveyor by training. In that capacity, he laid out the colony’s first English towns.

For years, he served as the official surveyor for the Lords Proprietors, the eight Englishmen to whom King Charles II had given the lands that the English called “Carolina” to use for their own profit and gain. (They were absentee landlords; none ever set foot in the territory that is now North and South Carolina.)

Lawson also worked hand in hand with the local British colonial leaders, a motley lot that we remember today largely for their corruption, perfidy, and rapaciousness.

Some were mere penny-ante charlatans and opportunists. Others were more like Thomas Pollock, on whose lands Lawson collected quite a few specimens that are now at the Natural History Museum. Pollock was a land baron, a trafficker in African and Indian slaves and an ardent, often brutal enemy of the region’s native peoples.

I have often struggled to reconcile the heartfelt sympathy that John Lawson showed native people’s culture in “A New Voyage to Carolina” and his eagerness to serve those that did so much to threaten the survival of Native American people.

After meeting with Petiver on a return trip to London in 1709, Lawson did finally begin to send both botanical and zoological specimens to him at his shop in London.

After that meeting in London, Petiver described Lawson to a friend as “a very curious person & hath lately printed a Natural History of Carolina wherein he hath treated the Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, & Vegetables, particularly the Trees, with a great deal of Judgment & accuracy.” (Petiver to William London, 7 Sept. 1709, Sloane Papers, Royal Society Archives.)

Petiver was referring of course to Lawson’s “A New Voyage to Carolina,” which was published in London that year.

Lawson sent a first shipment of specimens to Petiver in July 1710. (They apparently included some zoological specimens that have been lost.) A year later, he sent a second package, which he described in a letter to Petiver as “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

The shipment of that second package of plants may have been Lawson’s last contribution to the field of natural history.

By the time they arrived in London, everything had changed back on the North Carolina coast. War had broken out between the Tuscarora ( or, in the language of the Tuscarora, the Skarù:ręˀ), and the English. Six or seven smaller Algonquin tribes had also joined the war on the side of the Tuscarora. Towns had been laid to waste. Many killed.

By the time his plants reached London, John Lawson was dead too, the war’s very first casualty.

The details of Lawson’s death are far from clear. The sources are few, and the sources that we do have are generally secondhand and far from trustworthy. Nevertheless, most scholars believe that Tuscarora leaders captured Lawson and sentenced him to death because of his leading role as an agent of British colonialism.

I would not be surprised if that was the case.  By the beginning of the 18th century, anyone, native or newcomer, could tell that the British were an existential threat to the region’s native peoples — and Lawson had become one of the most public faces of British colonialism.

Correspondence between Lawson and Petiver indicates that Lawson had dreamed of doing important new work in natural history. Those dreams would not be fulfilled. He left us only “A New Voyage to Carolina” and the plants now at the Natural History Museum, many of them having been in the “one book of plants very Lovingly packt up.”

-To be continued-

Deciding which plants to use for a foundation, privacy hedge, groundcover or other landscaping project can be a challenge. Landscapers and property owners can now register for a free one-hour presentation in March on the best plants to choose for landscaping projects in coastal North Carolina.

Webinar organizers say that plants that we often see growing in the region are sometimes selected without regard to whether they support or harm North Carolina’s coastal environment.

The “Plant This Instead” webinar is set for 9:30 a.m. March 14 on Zoom. Register now to reserve your free seat.

The Coastal Landscapes Initiative has identified landscaping plants to avoid because they are “bad actors.” The initiative has selected what it describes as attractive, eco-friendly plants to use instead.

Presenters will include Gloria Putnam of North Carolina Sea Grant, Amy Mead of North Carolina State Extension for New Hanover, Pender and Onslow counties, and Shawn Banks of North Carolina State Extension for Carteret County.

Attendees will also hear advice the Coastal Landscapes Initiative team has gathered from experts at the North Carolina Aquariums in Manteo and Pine Knoll Shores, Coastal Roots Garden Design and coastal chapters of the North Carolina Native Plant Society.

Professional development credits are available for the following:

• N.C. Landscape Contractor License Landscape/Technical credit.
• N.C. Environmental Educator Program (Environmental Education Certification credits under Criteria III or continuing education).
• N.C. Master Gardener (information at local Cooperative Extension County Offices).

The North Carolina Forest Service is selling conifers, hardwoods and native plants as part of its annual tree seedling sale that began Friday.

The nursery and tree improvement program produces around 15 million seedlings annually, enough native and genetically improved tree seedlings to plant around 30,000 acres each year. The Forest Service is a division of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

“Healthy trees and forests are as important as ever for North Carolina and a benefit to our environment,” said Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler in a statement. “To have a Nursery and Tree Improvement Program producing quality understory plants and nearly 50 native tree species available to landowners across the state is North Carolina’s good fortune, and I encourage landowners to take advantage of it.”

Momi fir, eastern red cedar and Virginia pine as well as genetically improved loblolly, longleaf, shortleaf and white pines as well as other species are available this year.

These seedlings offer better volume growth, form, disease resistance, straightness, and other characteristics needed to produce quality forest products, officials said.

A catalog available at the Tree Seedlings & Nursery Program link at www.ncforestservice.gov and at area Forest Service offices includes information about types of tree species, quantities and cost to order. Each description includes information about ideal planting locations and whether a species is typically used to benefit wildlife, restore habitats or as marketable timber.

To order tree seedlings, which can be done by check, money order, Mastercard and Visa, visit the online seedling store at www.buynctrees.com, call1-888-NCTREES, or 1-888-628-7337, or mail the order form in the catalog to Seedling Coordinator, 762 Claridge Nursery Road, Goldsboro, NC 27530.

Seedling orders can be shipped to one of 13 distribution centers statewide for a small fee or via UPS for a charge. UPS shipments will be made once a week from December through mid-April, depending on weather conditions.

Seedling orders are also available for pickup from the Forest Service’s Claridge Nursery in Goldsboro or Linville River Nursery near Crossnore.

Contact information for the local Forest Service county office is available at  www.ncforestservice.gov/contacts.

NEW BERN — Tryon Palace is ushering in the cooler weather with a special weekend just for garden lovers and a heritage plant sale.

The fall heritage plant sale will be from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 8-9 on the palace grounds, just inside the gates on the Daves House lawn. There will be perennials, herbs and shrubs either grown locally or in the Palace Garden’s nursery yard.

Garden Lovers’ Weekend is taking place in conjunction with the plant sale. Tryon Palace’s 16 acres of gardens will be open free to the public to come explore and enjoy the vibrant mums, and other fall blooming plants.

Garden Lovers’ Weekend at the palace is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 8-9 and from noon to 5 p.m. Oct. 10.

Daily tours of the palace and the exhibits at the North Carolina History Center are also available with the purchase of admission.

Garden Lovers’ Weekend coincides with New Bern’s Mumfest, a festival celebrating chrysanthemums and featuring entertainment, shopping and dining.

For more information, www.tryonpalace.org or call 252-639-3500.

Three videos highlighting the merits of different native plants, its main attributes and growing requirements, such as pollinator attraction and drought tolerance, are now available through the Coastal Landscapes Initiative.

“We chose species that are ideal for a variety of coastal landscapes,” said Gloria Putnam, North Carolina Sea Grant’s coastal resources and communities specialist and project lead, in a statement. “We hope that these videos will inspire home gardeners and professional landscapers alike to purchase these species at local nurseries and incorporate them into their plantings.”

A video is available on YouTube to introduce the “Native Plant Pick: North Carolina” series, which features native plants ideal for coastal landscapes. The first three videos are on North Carolina Sea Grant’s YouTube channel and feature the red buckeye, a small tree with tubular scarlet flowers, the American beautyberry, an understory shrub with stunning purple fruits, and the sweet pepperbush, a deciduous shrub with aromatic white flowers.

Future videos in the “Native Plant Pick” series will profile more shrubs and trees, as well as flowering perennial and grass species.

“Our team narrowed down a long list of potential plants to a dozen that stood out for a few key reasons, including their versatility, attractiveness, and wildlife benefits,” said horticulturist Kathy Mitchell, of Coastal Roots Garden Design. “The series really does have something for everyone.”

The videos add to a growing number of free resources from the initiative. Other materials available include a set of 10 landscaping design templates, as well as a handy booklet and brochure featuring 34 native plants that flourish along the coast. Those products are available in print as well as online.

“CLI members want to help people choose plants that are naturally adapted to thrive in the harsh conditions of the coast — the strong sun and wind, the dry, sandy soil, and the salty air and water,” Putnam said. “By incorporating native plants into your landscaping, you can enhance local ecosystems while cutting maintenance costs.”

The initiative is a North Carolina-based effort to create landscapes that are “beautiful, maintainable, cost-efficient, and environmentally beneficial” is headed up by North Carolina Sea Grant and is in partnership with nonprofit organizations, universities, and state and federal agencies, according to Sea Grant.

The Native Plant Pick video team also includes horticulturist Rachel Veal of the N.C. Aquarium on Roanoke Island; consumer horticulture extension agent Emilee Morrison, of N.C. Cooperative Extension in Onslow County; conservation horticulturist Freda Pyron of the N.C. Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores; Charley Winterbauer, co-chair of the Southeast Coast Chapter of the N.C. Native Plant Society; and North Carolina Sea Grant science writer Julie Leibach. Sea Grant’s Scott Baker produced the videos with assistance from videographer Shane Moore.

EMERALD ISLE – You won’t have to wander far at the N.C. Coastal Federation’s Native Plant Festival this weekend to bump into a Parrot Head. They will be everywhere – waiting on customers, hauling plants to cars, directing traffic in the parking lots.

The Emerald Isle Parrot Heads, year in and year out, supply the most volunteers to the annual plant festival. There will be 18 of them roaming around the festival grounds in Ocean today and Saturday.

We’ll let you in on a little secret as long as you promise not to tell Jimmy Buffett: Some may not like his music. Heck, one or two may not even know who he is.

The Parrot Head clubs – and there are more than 200 of them spread across the country – were inspired by Buffett’s music and the tropical lifestyle he personifies. But you apparently don’t have to be much of a fan to be a Parrot Head.

Ken and Sue Stone

“There are some in the club who never heard of Jimmy Buffett,” Ken Stone says.

Stone is a Parrot Head and, for the record, likes Buffett’s music. His wife, Sue, is the club’s secretary. Together, they organize the club’s plant festival volunteers.

“A lot of people think the club is made up of a bunch of old Jimmy Buffett fans,” Sue explained. “It’s only very loosely a Jimmy Buffett club. It’s more of a social club that has a lot in common with Jimmy Buffett.”

Yes, club members like their margaritas and, yes, they like to party. “But we party with a purpose,” Ken said.

Some of that partying last year raised more than $3,000 for wounded veterans. Other monthly parties and events benefitted Habitat for Humanity, the Humane Society, Toys for Tots, battered women, cancer patients and stray cats. When they’re not partying, club members may be out along N.C. 58, picking up roadside trash near the Emerald Isle bridge.

“People see us as a bunch of partying drunks,” Sue said. “But we have a lot of members who don’t drink. Everything we do we do for a good cause.”

The club added the Plant Festival to the list several years ago. “We just started asking people if they wanted to help,” said Sue, who along with Ken, is a federation member. “Now, it’s become a tradition.”

Mike Haut, the owner of the Emerald Club, started the local Parrot Head chapter 10 years ago with about 15 members, Ken said. Membership now fluctuates between 240 and 300, depending on whether tourists are on the island. Haut is still the president. “Because he owns a bar,” Ken added.

Ken and Sue joined soon after moving to Emerald Isle seven years ago. They came from Albany, N.Y., where both retired from state government. It was their first home in the South.

“The club really helped us get acclimated,” Sue said. “That’s where we met people.”

While the club’s activities have benefitted many local charities, club members get something in return. “We both have pensions, so you could say they’re paying us to volunteer,” Ken explained. “But the truth is that we all feel good what we do because we’re giving back to our community.”

OCEAN – It’s a fun, family-friendly event full of beautiful native plants; coastal artists and craftsmen; entertainment and special guests. You’ll want to spend the day at the N.C. Coastal Federation’s annual Native Plant Festival on Saturday, April 28. (Or become a member of the federation and get a sneak peek the day before.)

The festival takes place at federation headquarters, 3609 N.C. 24 in Ocean – about halfway between Morehead City and Swansboro – from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The members-only preview takes place Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. You can become a member on-site that day if you wish.

“Each year the festival gets bigger and better,” said Rose Rundell, a federation administrative assistant and the festival’s primary organizer. “It’s taken on life of its own.”

Come early to beat the crowds and to get the best pick of the plants.

The festival has several new features this year. Special guest Dr. Orrin Pilkey will offer discussions and answer questions about global climate change during the festival and during the members-only preview. Pilkey is director emeritus of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, now at Western Carolina University, and the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences. He recently published a new book, Global Climate Change: A Primer.

A lively and sought-after speaker, Pilkey is sure to challenge and entertain. He will discuss and sign his new book on Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. On Saturday he’ll also be on hand from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Craftsmen and artists will surround the federation grounds with hand-crafted pottery, jewelry, baskets, bird houses and art. Popular folk artist Frank Gaines will entertain with songs and ballads. Hungry festival-goers can enjoy fresh-baked muffins and deli sandwiches from Garden Gate Deli.

Saturday afternoon, Second Wind Ecotours and Yoga Studio of Swansboro will offer an afternoon session of Qi Gong from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Dea Daniels, a registered nurse, will conduct the session, which is appropriate for most physical levels. Qi Gong is a powerful system of healing and energy medicine from China that uses breathing techniques, gentle movement and focus to cleanse, strengthen and circulate life energy. The session is free, but donations will be accepted.

Festival goers buy plants by the wheel barrow full.

Of course, the main attraction is the almost 4,000 native plants, flowers, shrubs and trees that will be available for sale. Native plants have evolved over thousands of years in a particular region. Coastal natives, for instance, have adapted to the geography, hydrology and climate of the region and will thrive with less care. Native plants also provide habitat for a variety of  wildlife species such as songbirds and butterflies, turning your yard into a haven.

Native plants also provide a beautiful, hardy, drought-resistant, low-maintenance landscape that benefits the environment. Once established, they save time and money by eliminating or significantly reducing the need for fertilizers, pesticides and water.

This year’s plant collection offers the best-sellers of festivals past, including fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. Black cherry trees, elderberry, blueberry and persimmon trees do well in our coastal area and will be available. Local food doesn’t get more local than your own backyard.

Federation members get a sneak peek at the massive plant assortment on Friday, April 27, from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., an early opportunity to buy plants and a chance to meet and chat with Pilkey. Members are required to show their membership card for admittance. Guests and visitors may join on-site or online at the federation’s Web site.

To learn more about the Native Plant Festival or to join the federation and attend the Members’ Preview, look at the list of plants and artists below or call 252-393-8185.

• List of available plants
• List of artists, craftspeople