Big weekend for Raleigh garden lovers

This Saturday afternoon, the Triangle Land Conservancy and the Reid Chapter of the N.C. Native Plants Society are holding a Raleigh Conservation Gardens Tour.

The gardens featured on the tour are the Margaret Reid Wild Flower Garden, a 1.5-acre woodland garden surrounding a home at the corner of Dixie Trail and Lewis Farm Road; the Joslin Garden, a 4-acre spread in the White Oak Road neighborhood; the Hooker/Myers Garden, a permaculture wonderland on a sixth of an acre in the Kirby Street neighborhood near N.C. State; the Kinney Garden, a 2-acre residential woodland garden overlooking Richland Creek on the edge of William B. Umstead State Park; and the Spearman Garden, which features a large sculpture collection and is located between Ridge Road and the Beltline. For details about the garden and the tour, click here.

And should you get inspired by the garden tour and find yourself lusting after a certain specimen, you might want to visit the Pi Alpha Xi plant sale set for this Saturday and Sunday at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum. For more information about the sale, including lists of available plants, click here.

Permaculture lecture at Arboretum Thursday

This Thursday, the J.C. Raulston Arboretum will be hosting a lecture on permaculture by Will Hooker, a professor of horticulture at N.C. State University. According to the Arboretum's announcement:

Permaculture is a sustainable living methodology, with the word itself being a contraction of two words, PERMAnent and CULTURE, or agriCULTURE. At its basis, permaculture encourages people to take greater responsibility for meeting many of their own needs, – food, water, waste recycling, energy, shelter, etc. – thereby reducing their ecological and carbon footprints. (To prepare yourself for this talk, you might want to take the two quizzes at http://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp and http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator/.) The principles of permaculture will be highlighted, and then Will will discuss the work that he, his wife, Jeana Myers, Ph.D., and their son, Eli, have done at their home in Raleigh, known as the Bitty City Farm.

I've been lucky to have reported several stories about the important work that Will and his family are doing, including their efforts to encourage chicken-keeping in the city and to raise people's consciousness about the link between the food we eat and energy consumption.

The lecture starts at 7:30 p.m. and is free for Friends of the J.C. Raulston Arboretum, N.C. State students with ID, and Department of Horticultural Science faculty and staff. For all others it's $5. For directions, click here.

(Photo from N.C. State University Web site)