Friday, May 12, 2017 to Sunday, May 14, 2017
Wintergreen Resort
P. O. Box 706
Wintergreen, VA 22958
Spring Adventures in the Blue Ridge
Please join us on the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains for MAC’s 65th anniversary and for what may be the peak of bloom on the mountain top. The location is the four-season Wintergreen Resort, well-known its skiing/snowboarding and golfing activities and as a proponent of native flora through its Wintergreen Nature Foundation. (See www.twnf.org for information about the Foundation’s Spring Wildflower Symposium.)
Wintergreen is located in Nelson County, Virginia just downhill from the Blue Ridge Parkway. The primary entrance is off Beech Grove Drive (Route 664), a turn off VA state route 151. It can also be reached from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The headquarters for the meeting will be the Mountain Inn and its Pryor Porch and adjacent rooms (Fortune, Shropshire, and Piedmont). Lodging will be the same as our Fall 2014 Wintergreen meeting: the Mountain Inn and its adjacent condo building, the Timbers.
The spring meeting will feature talks by David Anhold, noted Greenwood, VA-based landscape architect (see www.anholdla.com), and Mary Baldwin University’s Assistant Professor of Biology, Mary Jane Epps. On Friday evening, David will talk about designing gardens using native plants. Following the Saturday evening buffet dinner, Dr. Epps will talk about her research project studying the pollination of R. calendulaceum.
On Saturday morning before we embark on field trips that take us up and then off the mountain, there will be a chapter business meeting to elect officers and board members. The morning field trips will include visits to an ancient stand of Interrupted fern (Osmunda claytoniana), the Trillium House garden of native flora (Wintergreen Nature Foundation headquarters), the greenhouse where Wintergreen propagates native flora, and the garden David Anhold designed for the Devil’s Backbone Brewing Company. (See www.dbbrewingcompany.com).
In the afternoon, following lunch at Wintergreen’s Stoney Creek Bar & Grill, we will head to the Edible Landscapes Nursery near Afton, VA where George Staten will give us a tour. You may purchase plants at the retail area of the nursery. (See www.ediblelandscaping.com)
The spring meeting will, as usual, offer plants at auction, books about rhododendrons and companion plants for sale at discounted prices, and the ever-popular Plants-4-Members sale.