Pollinator Rare Plants

04/17/2024

🌸 Vendor Highlight 🌸

Rare, endangered and extinct plants from a Virginia Certified Naturally Grown nursery! 🌼🪴 @ Garden Faire 2024

Pollinator Rare Plants



Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program

04/17/2024

We'll be at the Abingdon Garden Faire this weekend - Friday and Saturday starting at 9:30am outside the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center. Plenty of new and exciting plants! See you there!

🌸 Vendor Highlight 🌸

Rare, endangered and extinct plants from a Virginia Certified Naturally Grown nursery! 🌼🪴 @ Garden Faire 2024

Pollinator Rare Plants



Virginia Cooperative Extension Master Gardener Program

10/20/2023

It's our last weekend of sales for the year, and we're happy to close the season out with a little hometown celebration - come visit our booth at Home Craft Days at Mountain Empire Community College!

You'll find free live music, a whole bunch of food trucks, loads of craft vendors and demonstrations, plus we're giving out free packets of milkweed seeds. We'll have local ecotype native plants, perennial vegetables, and other hard-to-find plants.

The festival runs 10-6 Saturday and 10-5 Sunday, the leaves are turning, and the weather is forecast to be gorgeous.

10/18/2023

Got to check out a fresh controlled burn at The Cedars yesterday. This was a low-priority site without a lot of native plant diversity or any known rarities, but this burn (and each successive burn) will support the recolonization of native plants - hopefully including some Manfreda virginica nearby.

Multiflora rose and Japanese honeysuckle are the only two invasives here that fire is expected to kill outright, but fire helps grassland management in another way: fire-adapted species turn to char and ash, leaving non-native species (like the autumn olive here) exposed and easier to control.

09/23/2023

hello ! We're set up today from 10-5 and tomorrow noon-5 at the Exchange Place, with lots of rare natives and other hard-to-find plants. And the is set up just fifteen feet from us, with lots of succulents and other tropicals!

09/15/2023

It's a beautiful ✨cool✨ morning in Richmond and we're set up with a huge selection of southern Appalachian natives, perennial veggies, and fun weirdos from around the world. Come see us at Lewis Gunter Botanical Garden from 9-3 today and tomorrow!

09/14/2023

hey we're on our way with over 1,000 plants! We'll be at the Botanical Garden 4pm-7pm tomorrow (LGBG members only!), and Friday and Saturday 9am-3pm. We've got mostly native plants, with some hardy tropicals, perennial vegetables, and a sprinkling of plants we've never offered before!

09/08/2023

We're back! Fall is here and it's the best time for planting perennials. Come see us tomorrow, Saturday September 9th at The Botanical Gardens at Asheville. We've got half a dozen species we've never sold before, including two rare mountain mints!

08/11/2023

Thanks to Dave, who saw my Manfreda post, and Laura with the DCR, who teamed up to bring me out for a tour of the Lee County, VA Eryngium yuccifolium (aka Rattlesnake Master) patch!

A member of the carrot family, Eryngium yuccifolium is an awesome pollinator magnet. The species is disjunct in Virginia: found in over a dozen counties in the southern piedmont, but also this one patch in Lee County which about as far west as you can get in the state. It's been used by indigenous people for millennia as a fiber plant, so if they were brought here they may be closely related to E. yuccifolium elsewhere, but nobody's done genetic testing on them yet.

The DCR is managing this patch using those big terrifying roadside mulching machines to reduce canopy cover, letting the mulch sit for two or three years, and then doing controlled burns on the site. A few plants were found in the 1990s, disappeared as the canopy closed in, and reappeared with more active management. Laura says the population grows to 150% of its previous size with each subsequent burn.

We spent some time looking at E. yuccifolium with floppy or snapped stems - one cool piece of ecology with these plants is that they're the exclusive hosts for Papiapena eryngii, the Eryngium Stem Borer Moth. The moth hasn't been documented in Virginia yet, and is critically imperiled in Kentucky.

We don't have any Eryngium yuccifolium for sale this year, though we grow the selection 'Kershaw Blue' (for its glaucous blue leaves) and hope to have some available next year. We do currently have a good number of the rare, moisture-loving, blue-flowered Eryngium aquaticum v. ravenelii from the Carolinas for sale.