seed swaps

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Be sure to check out the article about the long tradition of Seed Swaps in the new issue of The Tennessee Conservationist.

Ijams educator and resident green thumb Peg Beute penned the piece and I provided the photographs.

Here is some of what Peg wrote,

"Ijams Nature Center held its first Seed Swap in 1995. On a Saturday in April we invited members, friends and visitors to bring their favorite seeds, cuttings or bulbs to share with others. We discovered it was a chance to share not only plants, but also gardening lore, growing experiences and family stories.

The history of seed sharing is told not only in diaries and journals, but also in letters and oral histories from many of our ancestors. A seed swap was one of the ways our forbearers found out about different successful varieties of plants. We continue that tradition at Ijams, a 275-acre environmental education center minutes from downtown Knoxville, where our Seed Swap has become a rich and rewarding experience over the past 15 years. It is a kind of family reunion where organized chaos reigns. New and old gardeners bring in seeds, cuttings, bulbs and sprouts—anything they have that they want to share."

The rest of the article is in the magazine.

- Special thanks to the statewide magazine's editor Louise Zepp.

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where's the orange?

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"Our word for the color orange comes from the translated 'naranja,' the Spanish word for the citrus fruit introduced to the English-speaking world through the court of Henry VIII in 1512. Oranges are native to Southeast Asia and were once known as 'Chinese apples.' Before the fruit was introduced to Britain, the color was known in Old English as 'geoluhread,' which means yellow-red, a fitting descriptor because orange is the combination of those two primary colors.

Orange flowers get their color from carotene, the same biological pigment found in carrots. And although flowering plants are noted for their wide range of colors, there are pitifully few orange flowers. As it turns out, nature is rather parsimonious with the color.

The famous Peterson's Field Guide of Wildflowers first published in 1968, divides its contents by color. The book contains 1,293 wildflowers. There are 104 pages of yellow flowers, 100 pages of red ones, 96 of white and 50 of violet to blue. But, hold onto your hat, there’s only four pages of orange. Yes, four! There are more pages of green and brown flowers than orange. If you want to become an expert at flower identification, start with orange, there’s not that many to learn.

Why nature shuns the color is a mystery..."

For the rest of the article I penned about the scarcity of orange flowers check out the May/June 2010 issue of the Tennessee Conservationist now available.


Special thanks to editor Louise Zepp and to Kris Light for providing me with the cover photograph.







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