While our Carrboro Citizen editor keeps us informed of the political wilderness within the Legislative Building on the north side of Jones Street, there is a natural wilderness in action across the street, beside the Museum of Natural Sciences.
On the legislative side, weekly irrigation and mowing maintain emerald-green short turf accented here and there with evergreen shrub cones and balls for winter interest and potted tropical plants for summer color. This provides a sense of security for the elected officials and staff.
On the museum side, the vegetative wilderness of native trees, shrubs, wildflowers and grasses was designed and planted as a living exhibit of our state’s plant diversity, from the coastal dunes to our western mountaintops. This wild landscape is now home to all sorts of critters, from birds to crickets. Museum curators occasionally harvest leaves of some of those native plants to nourish the wild North Carolina critters maintained inside for the delight and education of visitors.
Last week, while helping hand-water that garden during Tuesday’s early morning hours, when landscape watering is still permitted in Raleigh, a nice woman strolled by on her way to work in the Legislative Building. Her pleasant greeting was: “Are you still watering all those weeds?†Just as pleasantly, I responded: “Yes indeed; and when these weeds are flowering, we call them wildflowers!â€
She lingered to explain to me how, growing up on a farm in South Carolina, her daddy always called those wild plants “weeds†and the children had to help keep them away from the house to make room for the nicer cultivated plants.
She then asked me to identify several clumps of those weeds, which she had growing in her garden. I identified Wild Columbine, Acquilegia canadensis, and she acknowledged that they are pretty garden plants.
And then she described how her granddaddy took her walking in the woods and fields, talking about all sorts of wild plants. One of them she remembered was burdock, Arctium minus, because her granddaddy described it as a really useful medicine. Remembering that lesson, she recently directed her sister — too young to remember her granddaddy’s wild-plant lessons — to a health food store to get some burdock for an ailment that the doctor’s prescription had not cured. That burdock treatment did the trick. This nice legislative staff lady was emphatic that burdock was just one of many useful wild plants that her granddaddy taught her. She wished me good luck watering my weeds and crossed the street.
As I continued watering I was witness to the resident mockingbird defending it’s pokeweed, Phytollaca americana, berries, some unidentified warbler flitting about in the shrubs catching insects, and larvae of both the swallowtail and monarch butterflies eating the leaves of three species of milkweeds: Common Milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, Butterflyweed, Asclepias tuberosa and Swamp Milkweed, Asclepias incarnata.
And throughout that 20-by-200-foot wild garden were a number of robust praying mantises, perched in anticipation of their next meal. It is amazing how such a small managed patch in the city supports so much of North Carolina’s nature.