State Botanical Gardens of Georgia

Yesterday, I attended a regional Garden Writers meeting in Athens, Georgia. The meeting was held at the State Botanical Gardens of Georgia. I'm not sure why we don't have something so fancy. The meeting was really interesting and I learned some new things. We got to tour the garden also, but unfortunately it was a dreary, rainy day. Much of the garden is in transition from summer to fall, but it's going to be beautiful next spring. They added a new flower garden that has a lot of potential. I only got a few pictures in before the camera battery died. I was too lazy to go back to the car to get the extra.

This was the prettiest thing in the garden at the moment. It's a Confederate Rose in the Heirloom Garden. The Heirloom Garden only has plants in it that were popular before 1900. Lots of plantation garden plantings and so on.


They've got a serious deer problem in the garden as well. They've just planted some fall vegetable crops and are covering them to prevent the deer from getting to them.


I liked the way this looked with the flowers cascading down behind the bench.


Felder Rushing was one of the speakers. He's pretty famous in the south as a garden writer. He usually talks and writes about how gardening is really easy and anybody can do it. As an example, he plants a garden in the bed of his truck and drives around with it. He figures if he can garden at 70 mph, then anybody can garden. His truck garden is seasonally decorated at the moment, too.

Service Gardening

My 4-H club has been given a great opportunity - installing and maintaining a butterfly garden at a local library! My kids are so excited. They love the butterflies and the opportunity to do something for the community. We'll be able to teach our kids about giving back to the community and helping out where you can. This will be a long-term service project for the club. They'll be responsible for maintaining for a long time to come.

I went to visit the library and sketched an outline of what the garden looks like. We're also working with our county horticulture agent, Ms. Wendy.


Here are the plants we'll be asking for donations for.

Nectar Plants
--Fire bush
--Milkweed
--Gaillardia
--Coreopsis
--Mist Flower
--Porterweed
--Tropical Sage
--Snow Square Stem
--Fire Spike
--Pentas
--Mexican Sunflowers
--Zinnias

Host Plants
--Passion vine
--Parsely
--Milkweed
--Cassia
--Wild Cherry Tree
--Wild Lime or Citrus Tree

I'll keep you updated on the progress of the garden and the learning that my club kids are getting.

Free Plants

One of the benefits of working in the environmental horticulture department is that we sometimes get free plants. These are usually leftovers from plant trials or research studies. I don't care where they came from - I get free plants!

Here's what I was able to get this time. I chose a lot of butterfly gardening plants because my 4-H club is getting ready to install a butterfly garden at the local library. I was going to ask for donations anyways, so this works pretty well.

I did get quite a bit of lantana. We won't be putting this in at the library because of the negative views of it. It actually was a plant that I had a really hard time putting in my landscape the first time. I grew up on an orange grove and, in orange groves, native lantana is very invasive and weedy. I spent much of my childhood spraying or pulling up lantana. Now, I love it (when it stays where it's supposed to) and appreciate it as a butterfly plant. We actually have several faculty members working on breeding a sterile version which is very exciting!


I love geraniums. They're so pretty and are great bloomers.


Zinnias for the butterfly garden. I didn't realize there were so many different cultivars and shapes that they came in!


This is the coleus everyone was jealous I got this year. Not sure which cultivar it is, but it's gorgeous! It's burgundy on the top of the leaves and lime green on the bottom. I've been told that it roots really easily from cuttings, so I'm going to to give it a try. Everyone's requesting a cutting once I get them going.


This is the sweet potato vine I was going to put in the container with it. Erin helped me out with picking it out. She's created a lot of awesome containers and has quite an artistic eye for them. I would never have chosen this to go with it, but I think it looks great.