BLANDY CLOSURE: We sadly announce that effective Tuesday, 31 March 2020, Blandy Experimental Farm and the State Arboretum of Virginia will be closed to the public due to growing concerns over the Coronavirus pandemic. We know that for many of you, Blandy has been an oasis during this stressful time, but in order to encourage greater social distancing, the University of Virginia feels that this is the prudent thing to do. Please stay safe and healthy, and we hope to see everyone back at Blandy as soon as possible.

To support Blandy while many of our fundraising programs are canceled, please consider making a gift to the Foundation of the State Arboretum online using the link at right. Thank you!

2020 Garden Fair is canceled

Mother's Day just

won't be the same

We are very sad to say that the 2020 Garden Fair has been canceled due to concerns about the coronavirus. For more than 30 years, Garden Fair has been the Foundation of the State Arboretum's largest and most important fundraiser and a Mother's Day tradition for our FOSA members and vendors. Many of our vendors will offer plants for sale at their nurseries and greenhouses, and we encourage you to support them during this difficult time. See the full vendor list here. 

The power of the exponent

Why we are doing what we're doing

By David Carr, Director

Blandy Experimental Farm

A Washington Post article a couple of weeks ago reminded me about my days as a graduate student at the University of Maryland.  When I was teaching ecology labs, we used tiny plants in the genus Lemna (duckweeds) to illustrate important principles of population growth. These are among the smallest flowering plants in the world, just a few millimeters in diameter. You commonly find Lemna covering farm ponds throughout Virginia. Although they can reproduce by seeds, most of the reproduction occurs as new plants bud from parent plants, and this can happen at an amazingly fast pace.

What we are up against in a virus pandemic: It's all about the math.

To simplify things, just suppose that a single Lemna plant can split into two Lemna plants in 24 hours. Now suppose that we toss a single Lemna into a small farm pond on day zero of our little thought experiment. Twenty-four hours later, on day one, there are now two of these tiny plants on the surface of the pond. On day two, there are four, eight on day three, and so on. Suppose I tell you that by day 60, two months after the original inoculation, the pond is now completely covered by duckweed. At what point in this process was half the pond covered by duckweed? The most instinctual answer to that question - 30 days - is absolutely wrong. On day 30, Lemna still covered less than 1 percent of the pond. You probably would not even notice the duckweed until the final week. The correct answer - seemingly impossible - is day 59. On that day, the pond is half covered with duckweed. Over the next 24 hours, the number of plants double, completely filling the pond on day 60.

When one becomes two, and two becomes four, and four becomes eight, we have what we call exponential growth. Numbers climb, seemingly in the blink of an eye. That is what we are up against in a virus pandemic. This is why health officials are so worried about a disease that has infected less than one tenth of one percent of the U.S. population. They can do the math, and they know where this can lead.

Fortunately, the simple math is not necessarily our destiny. Unlike duckweed, a virus is unable to reproduce on its own. SARS-CoV-2 needs the help of a human being in order to reproduce, and it is only truly successful when it jumps from one person to the next. That means that we can play a huge role in the spread of the virus, the growth of its population, and the number of people whose health is impacted. The social distancing that we began practicing a few weeks ago is designed to slow that person-to-person transmission, slowing the exponential growth of this virus, and flattening the curve.

That is why in rural Clarke County, with three cases of  Covid-19  reported as we publish this, Blandy is asking our staff and visitors to take social distancing measures so seriously. The time to act is now. By the time the disease is common enough for you to notice, it is too late.

It was with great disappointment that we had to close Blandy to the public. We understand why walks through the Arboretum had become such an important part of people's daily lives as they try to cope with all the restrictions that we need now endure. We canceled our K-12 programming just days before local schools closed. We had to cancel our summer undergraduate research program. 

The Foundation of the State Arboretum had to cancel its two biggest fundraisers for the fiscal year - Garden Fair and the new Summer Solstice Twilight 5K. These were all heartbreaking but inescapable decisions that had to be made to protect our staff, or visitors, and more generally, to do our part to ensure that this pandemic ends as soon as possible with as little long term harm to our community as possible. We appreciate your patience, understanding, and support, and we hope that we see you all back at Blandy soon.

Blandy Twilight 5K canceled

Coronavirus is taking a toll

We were hard at work (remotely) on the first-ever Blandy Summer Solstice Twilight 5K when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced the statewide stay-at-home order through June 10. Shortly thereafter the University mandated that Blandy Experimental and the Arboretum grounds must be closed to the public until further notice.

The order means that we must cancel the Twilight 5K for this year, although we have tentatively set the date to the closest Saturday to the 2021 summer solstice. Next year's race is now set for June 19, 2021.

Taking This Time to Reflect on Our Priorities

We will get through this, but we need your help

By Steve Bauserman, President

Foundation of the State Arboretum

Spring wildflowers:

A delight of old-growth forests

By Jack Monsted, Assistant Curator

Virginia Native Plant Trail

Spring has arrived, and with it the enchanting transformation of our natural landscapes. Cold gray days yield to warmer weather. Rain showers are frequent, but so are sun showers - especially in the forests that are dark and shady throughout the rest of the year. The combination of sunshine, warmth and rain creates one of the most underappreciated, yet breathtaking displays in America: the spring wildflower bloom. 

Every spring, hundreds of species of wildflowers bloom all over Virginia's forests in the same two- to three-month window between late March and May. Throughout our woods, pastel life awakens, racing to catch sun rays and the attention of early-season pollinators before the tree canopy closes.

Visiting a forested valley or hillside rich in spring wildflowers is a jaw-dropping experience - a seemingly limitless display of color, accompanied by the faint sweet scent of decomposing leaves and pleasant buzzing of bumblebees and sweat bees flying lazily from flower to flower.

	Blue-eyed Mary  (Collinsia verna), Sessile trillium (Trillium sessile), and Wood violet ( V iola sororia)  are blooming in this photo, but there are four others in foliage only. Can you name them? Scroll down for the answer.

Once one learns how to recognize some of the flower species, what was once a nice display of color becomes a fascinating web of plant interactions. It becomes a joy to discover your favorites growing throughout the understory. Fields of Virginia bluebells blanket lowlands, their broad leaves and charismatic clusters of blue flowers creating a delightful display. Populations of blue Phlox, interspersed with white dutchman's breeches, bloodroot, Trillium, and yellow trout lilies create a mosaic patchwork across forest understories. Dangling above these on tall, slender stems are the otherworldly red flowers of the wild columbine and diminutive bell-shaped flowers of Solomon's seal. Meanwhile, the tiny, less showy flowers of spring beauty, purple cress, and rue anemone hide beneath the green mass, poking their blooms up through any exposed corner they can find.

Dutchman's breeches  (Dicentra cucullaria) and Downy yellow  violet  (Viola pubescens) .

I highly recommend any nature lover with an adventurous spirit to venture out in April and search for wildflower patches (when and where you can, given social distancing guidelines). To find a dense patch of blooms, you should seek out large, old forests with moist soil. Most spring wildflowers require a specific kind of habitat - the deep shade of a long-established forest. Such forests have dense canopies with the oldest trees being centuries old, and multiple layers of smaller understory trees and shrubs providing even more shade. There is usually a great deal of fallen woody debris on the ground - decomposing trees that have grown, died, and rotted away, allowing other trees to take their spot. This combination of very old and young trees creates a deep, cathedral-like shade in the summer, which prevents all the weedy and invasive plants from growing - and provides a haven for our beautiful native wildflowers to establish in the spring without being smothered.

The spectacle of an old growth wildflower patch is truly an unforgettable experience, but the sight is not as common as it once was. That's because old growth forests have become exceedingly rare. While they once covered 95 percent of Virginia, clearance for agriculture, cities, logging and other human land uses has all but eradicated them from our landscapes. And though in the past century many of our forests have started to regrow, ecological studies suggest it can take upwards of 150 years for the forest to recover the populations of spring wildflowers it hosted before being felled.

 

Happy hunting, but remember that wherever you find spring wildflowers, treat them with care and take only photographs, so they can be enjoyed for generations to come.

They are a little hard to read: Dutchman's breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), Honewort (Cryptotaenia canadensis), Wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), Wood violet (Viola sororia), and Waterleaf  (Hydrophyllum macrophyllum).