This is the time when our campus comes alive with Botanical Garden blooms, visitors, researchers, and Nature Center campers from all over. This year, however, it’s been quiet. We spent the winter and early spring planning our annual nature camps, courses, events, and lectures for the Highlands community to enjoy this summer, but we were cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic that led to many canceled plans. 

Like you, we struggled to foresee if our typical summer plans would come to fruition.

Taking things day by day, we came to realize that this summer would not be like most. In accordance to Western Carolina University’s policies and with the safety of our community being our priority, we closed our offices, canceled events and June nature camps, and had to get creative and find new ways to serve our mission to educate our community about the natural world around us. 

This spring, the Highlands Biological Foundation instituted a new Virtual Learning Center for the Nature Center and Botanical Garden on our website (highlandsbiological.org) as well as provided environmental content and natural history resources through the Nature Center and HBS Facebook pages (@HighlandsNatureCenter & @highlandsbiologicalstation). 

These efforts continue on our social media and include our daily ‘Nearby Nature’ series, live streamed Botanical Garden tours with HBF Education Specialist, Paige Engelbrektsson, virtual Botanical Garden yoga sessions with Rachel Kinback of Yoga Highlands, and ‘HBS Science Short Shows’ with HBS Education Outreach Coordinator Patrick Brannon. These programs are suitable for all ages! 

For our adult members, we have our “Weekend Wanders” series that features book, film, and podcast recommendations from our HBF trustees and staff to help you bring the outdoors inside. We hope you will take advantage of our virtual offerings and connect with us during these unusual times this summer!

For more information about our virtual offerings or other programming at HBS, visit our website highlandsbiological.org or call us at (828) 526-2221.

The post Be a Virtual Fan appeared first on Laurel Magazine.

Native plants are presented in natural habitat settings as well as in demonstration gardens for the education and delight of visitors. If you explore the Botanical Gardens this spring, keep a close eye out for the native flora and fauna, which are emerging and interacting as they have for millennia. 

Hundreds of Purple Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea) along the Bog Boardwalk Trail are sending up flower stalks that rise 12 inches or more above their green and red, prostrate, tubular leaves. Each flower stalk displays a solitary red-purple nodding flower that is often visited by bumblebee pollinators. Numerous other insects will be trapped in the cavity formed by the tubular leaves where they are decomposed by digestive enzymes produced by these carnivorous plants and their nutrients released to the plant. Look for Pink Lady’s Slippers (Cypripedium acuale), which are displaying stunning blooms under the partial shade of the conifer canopy on the Upper Woodland Trail. This terrestrial orchid, lacking nectar but using bright color and a sweet scent, tricks bumblebees to enter its pink pouch to collect and deposit pollen as they move from flower to flower. 

Cinnamon Ferns (Osmunda cinnamomea), of an ancient fern lineage, are unfurling fiddleheads covered with silver-white hairs. As you wander along the Fern Trail, you may see hummingbirds collecting the cottony hairs for their nests. Cinnamon-brown fertile fronds are emerging from the crown. Later this spring you may see birds nesting in the vase-like clump of 5-foot-tall fronds. 

The deep pink, funnel-shaped flowers of Pink-Shell Azaleas (Rhododendron vaseyi) in the Azalea Garden are emerging before the new leaves unfold. This unique and delightful azalea, found only in 10 counties in Western North Carolina, provides nectar and pollen for butterflies and bees. 

These and many other spectacular native plants and wildlife that depend on them await the attentive visitor to this soothing haven. The careful observer will experience something new every day. 

by  Ken Conover, Highlands Biological Foundation Trustee

The post See What Unfolds appeared first on Laurel Magazine.