Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

Archives for the "native" Category

Building Biodiversity

Landscaping in Layers Nature loves a layer. She cements courses of sediment into solid stone. She laminates an annual succession of circles into living trees. She layers an onion in […]

Planting for Nature’s Best Hope

Teddy Roosevelt stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon in 1903 and, looking out across the country’s 1.2-million-acre National Park, made an impassioned plea to the American people. “Leave […]

Invasive Plants: The “Dirty Dozen”

Meet the Plants Over the next few weeks, we will be introducing 12 of the most problematic invasive plants that you’ll encounter in Central Virginia. Unfortunately, we also have to […]

Eastern Redbud Delivers Spring!

This native tree (Cercis canadensis) parades profuse blooms in early spring, but don’t let the name color your thinking. Red herring: The joke’s on you if you think the eastern redbud […]

Ginter Herbarium Steps Out

Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s collection of 4,000 herbarium specimens is now registered in the Index Herbariorum, a major international registry of herbarium plant collections.  This means that our collection is […]

Virginia Bluebells Bloom at Ginter

In April 1776, Thomas Jefferson noted  “a bluish colored, funnel-formed flower in lowgrounds in bloom,” in one of the earliest entries of his garden book. Jefferson certainly wasn’t the first […]

Crazy About Pawpaws

Something special happens to people when they learn about pawpaws for the first time. Their eyes widen, their brows furrow, and they say things like, “What does it taste like?” […]

Conservation Conversation

A visitor recently asked me about Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s conservation efforts. It made me stop and think. So many of those efforts are simply part of our everyday activities. […]

Instagram Highlights

Are we friends on Instagram? We should be! As one of the readers of our blog, you are likely one of our biggest fans. You deserve to be among the first to […]