AHS Awarded for Heat-Zone Map
For its development of the AHS Plant Heat-Zone Map—and ongoing programs to teach gardeners how to use the map to select plants appropriate to their region— AHS has been elected to the Associations Advance America (AAA) Honor Roll, a national awards competition sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives in Washington, D.C. The AAA awards recognize outstanding efforts—through education, economic development, business and social innovation, knowledge creation, standards, and community service—to make America a better place to live.


 

Plant a Row for the Hungry
Once a working farm under the ownership of George Washington, River Farm—now the headquarters of AHS — has a long history of producing fruitful harvests. This spring, however, a section of ground at River Farm will be set aside for a rather special vegetable garden. The produce from this garden will be donated to Plant a Row for the Hungry, a nationwide campaign in which gardeners and gardening groups set aside space in their gardens to grow fresh vegetables and fruit to be donated to soup kitchens and shelters for the homeless.

The Plant a Row for the Hungry campaign, now in its fifth year, was developed by the Garden Writers Association of America (GWAA), a non-profit group headquartered in Manassas, Virginia. GWAA’s members are spreading word about the campaign through newspaper columns, magazine articles, radio and television broadcasts, and lectures. The ultimate goal is for Plant A Row participants to pledge a million pounds of food by the Millennium. James Wilson, a well-known garden writer and former co-host of the public television series “The Victory Garden,” will talk about the Plant a Row campaign in one of the concurrent sessions at AHS’s annual conference in Boston this summer.

According to Jacqui Heriteau, chair and coordinator of the Plant a Row campaign, major publicity will result from the recently announced sponsorship by Home and Garden Television Network of Knoxville, Tennessee. To find out more, visit the GWAA Web site at www.gwaa.org, or e-mail Heriteau at jacquiheriteau@email.msn.com. And this spring, we urge you to consider joining us in planting and harvesting an extra row of vegetables to help provide nutritious food for our nation’s hungry.


 

River Farm Fiesta
On Sunday, October 4, nearly 800 chili pepper fans from as far away as San Francisco converged on River Farm for the first annual AHS Chili Pepper Festival. Despite an overcast sky and a few rain sprinkles, the festival was a rousing success.

A flamenco guitar band provided music and set the mood for dancing, craft displays, raffles, prize give-aways, tours of River Farm’s pepper display gardens, and plenty of spicy food tastings. Twenty seven varieties of Capsicum in a wide range of sizes, shapes, colors, and heat—including ‘Habanero’, ‘Poblano’, and ‘Ancho’—were artfully displayed for vistors to sample and purchase.

Widespread publicity before the event, including a four-minute television spot on WJLA, Washington’s ABC-affiliate, encouraged many newcomers to visit River Farm and introduced many to the Society. As one festival-goer put it, “This is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington!”

The date for this year’s Chili Pepper Festival will be announced in a future issue of the The American Gardener and on the River Farm events calendar of this website.


 

Rockefeller Center Tree Project
AHS has joined several other organizations in the development of a series of children’s educational projects offered through an interactive Web site. The site — initially developed to highlight the festivities associated with the annual Christmas tree display at the Rockefeller Center in New York City — has expanded to include a variety of projects centered on learning about trees. Other participants in the program include the Rockefeller Center, the U.S. Department of Education, the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education, and the American Forest Foundation.

The Society’s contribution to the Web site is a project that describes how to integrate trees into a schoolyard butterfly habitat. Butterfly gardens are one of the most popular garden-based activities at schools, but many such gardens focus on herbaceous plants and don’t take into account the role woody plants play in the life cycles of butterflies. The information provided by AHS teaches school groups how to research, design, build, and maintain a sustainable butterfly habitat. For more information, visit the Rockefeller Center Tree Project.


 

Southern Living Gardening School
AHS and Southern Living magazine are co-sponsoring a series of gardening schools to be held at some of the top botanical gardens and horticultural showplaces across the Southeast. The schools, taught by Southern Living gardening experts Bill Slack and Rick Ludwig, are hour-long lectures on topics such as landscape design, use of color in the garden, and four-season gardening.

Dates and locations of the upcoming gardening schools are available on-line. For more detailed information about schools at individual locations, call the host institution.


 

Great American Gardener Lecture Series
As part of the Society’s Great American Gardener lectures, in October AHS sponsored talks by prominent national horticulturists at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Featured speakers for the event were John Alex Floyd Jr., vice president and editor of Southern Living magazine; John Elsley, vice president of product development at Wayside Gardens in Hodges, South Carolina; and Katy Moss Warner, director of horticultural and environmental initiatives at Walt Disney World and chairman of the AHS Board of Directors. The event, held at the Ponte Vedra Inn and Club, was organized by Carolyn Marsh Lindsay, a Ponte Vedra resident and former chairman of the AHS Board of Directors.


 

World's Oldest Flowering Plant Unearthed
A team of Chinese and American scientists may have discovered fossil evidence of the world’s oldest known flowering plant in Liaoning province in northeastern China. Radiometrically dated at between 142 and 148 million years old, this woody-stemmed plant dubbed Archaefructus liaoningensis—with 35 pod-shaped fruits—predates by more than 20 million years what was previously regarded as the oldest angiosperm, or flowering plant.

But scientists are not only marveling about the fossil’s age. Close study of the three-inch-long Archaefructus specimen—a fossilized imprint in which portions of the cellular structure are preserved—reveals the beginnings of several ovules, or seeds, enclosed in podlike fruits much like a pea pod. This is a trait absent from other claimants to the title of the oldest known angiosperm. “Some scientists on the discovery team originally thought this specimen was a legume,” says team member David Dilcher, a graduate research professor with the Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida in Gainesville, but microscopic examination did not reveal any of the scars that would be expected to have been left by the sepals, stamens, or pistils of a legume. Because the surfaces of the podlike orbs are smooth and the seeds are enclosed in fruit, Dilcher and his fellow scientists conclude the fossil is the oldest known angiosperm found to date.

“The structures we today recognize as fruit developed 60 to 70 million years ago, when plants developed the covering of fleshy pulp that enticed birds and rodents to carry seeds great distances,” says Dilcher, who notes that this latest discovery elucidates an important step in the evolutionary process. “Without this development,” adds Dilcher, “the co-evolutionary relationship of flowers and animals, including our primate ancestors, would have been radically different.” The discovery was first reported in the November 27, 1998 issue of Science magazine.


 

Goodbye ACG—Hello NACGS
For the last five years we have enjoyed some of the best garden writing around in the pages of The American Cottage Gardener, a quarterly magazine edited—and mostly written—by garden writers Nancy McDonald and Rand B. Lee. Alas, this philosophical and informative magazine has ceased publication. Lee is now trying to rally the magazine’s subscribers and others interested in American-style cottage gardening to join a fledgling North American Cottage Gardening Society (NACGS).