Please join us in welcoming Robin Couch Cardillo as the new Director of the Foundation of the State Arboretum.

"Robin is the fifth FOSA Director, and each has brought a new approach to increase the Arboretum's ability to perform our mission," said Blandy Director David Carr. "We are excited about Robin's extensive experience in our local communities and feel that she will do an excellent job helping us expand our reach to new audiences and broaden our base of support."

	Robin Couch Cardillo

 

Prior to Special Love, Robin was Marketing and Communications Specialist for Shenandoah Valley Westminster-Canterbury in Winchester, where she was instrumental in increasing occupancy and fundraising. She also worked as a Business Development Associate for the Winchester-Frederick County Economic Development Commission and Director of Public Relations for Power/Warner Communications Group in Winchester.

 

Robin holds a BA (magna cum laude) in English/Creative Writing from Virginia Wesleyan College and earned certification from the Top of Virginia Regional Chamber Community Leadership Program. She is Immediate Past President of the Tri-State Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and serves on the Hospitality Committee for the Virginia Fundraising Institute.

 

Robin lives in nearby White Post and has been coming to Blandy for years.

Lake Georgette

One of the Arboretum's Living Classrooms

Gardeners will again gather in the library for our annual seed exchange Saturday, Jan. 26, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. This is a free event.

Searching for a last-minute gift? A membership in the Foundation of the State Arboretum is a great gift and the perfect way to show your support for the Arboretum.

By Steve Carroll

Got a Little Love for a Deadly Nightshade?

This Plant Has Few Fans but Bumble Bees Rely on It

Few plants are despised as much as our most common nightshade -- horsenettle,

Solanum carolinense. You probably know the plant. If you walk farm fields, pastures or dry meadows, you'll see it, a spreading perennial with prickly leaves atop pricklier stems. It grabs your ankles like a playful cat as it tears your pant legs, socks and skin, scratching its name in a red and beaded script. Gardeners get punctured through their gloves while trying to pluck it out. They cut the tops but lose the war when the underground stems re-sprout. 

Ranchers hate it because it poisons cattle, but the cattle usually eat around it, giving it room to spread still further. Farmers hate it because it resists the most common herbicides: kill the fields for planting and it comes right back. Humans that eat it? If you get past the spines and ingest the leaves, you get the bidirectional discomforts of vomiting and diarrhea. Eat the fruits and you get circulatory and respiratory problems, and potentially death. 

Who would champion such a plant? It is listed as a noxious weed in seven states, including ones where it is native. Even Ernst Conservation Seed, the most common seed source for the establishment of native field vegetation, skips it. But surely the flowers merit some favor. They range from white to purple, and are long-lived and abundant, stretching out along the stems poised for pollinators. Yet, they produce no nectar and attract no honey bees. Beekeepers find them an annoying weed around the bee yard.

And yet, the plant has its devotees. While the flowers attract no honey bees, they do attract other types of bees. The flowers produce abundant pollen contained within long anthers that never open, except by a small pore on the top. The only efficient way for bees to collect it is to grasp the anthers and vibrate them, causing pollen to stream out the end and dust the bee. This process of vibrating flowers to collect pollen is known as sonication or buzz pollination, named for the short  buzz the bee makes when vibrating the flower.  The bee then cleans itself off, packing the pollen onto its hind legs. 

Of 112 types of pollen collected, horsenettle was the predominant one

Sweat bees and bumble bees are champions at this activity and routinely grab such anthers and shake the pollen out, pollinating as they go along. This past summer, Dave Carr and I, along with undergraduate researchers Sophia Rosenberg of UVa, Leonardo Alphonso of Florida International University, and four technicians surveyed bumble bees throughout the summer at five sites within an hour's drive of Blandy. Every other week we caught bumble bees all day and removed their pollen loads. In the lab we looked at the pollen under the microscope to identify the plant species that it was collected from. 

In total, we identified 112 different types of pollen but the predominant one, at all five sites, was horsenettle. Multiple bumble bee species collected it, and it comprised between 19  and 38 percent of all pollen analyzed across the different sites. Thus, it appears to be a major part of bumble bee diets, and given concerns about declining bee species, especially several species of bumble bee, this much-maligned plant could turn out to be an important food source for bee conservation.

So you might not like horsenettle, but you can't get rid of it anyway.  Don't fight it -- you'll leave bloody and defeated. Just steer clear of it and watch the bumble bees flit through the spines unharmed and, alighting on a flower, go "buzz" and send the pollen flying.