THURSDAY, January 11, 2018
Meeting at the Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH)
I am writing this on New Years' Eve, and thinking about all the great speakers we had over this past year and all the great times at our meetings and events in 2017. I hope that you all will have a great 2018 and I am very much looking forward to our exciting talks and events in the upcoming year!
Thanks so much to our volunteers who put in their time and effort every month, and who share their knowledge and plants with our chapter to make our club an exciting place to be!
Our January 2018 speaker is our chapter member Susie Egan, and she will be speaking about her Wildflower Pilgrimage to the Great Smoky Mountains.
For those of you not familiar with Susie, here is a brief introduction in her own words:
Susie is a local landscape designer, master gardener, lecturer, garden writer and owner of Cottage Lake Gardens, located on Cottage Lake in Woodinville, Washington. Susie also gives talks on many different gardening topics for the local horticultural associations and garden clubs as well internationally most recently in New Zealand, Scotland, and Canada. Susie loves to share her knowledge and passion of gardening and spreading the joy and beauty it brings to others.
Her current focus has been on the study, cultivation and propagation of native and woodland shade plants particularly her favorite flower: the trillium, an endangered wildflower. As part of this endeavor, for the past twenty years Susie has been developing Cottage Lake Gardens into a display garden showcasing trilliums and other rare and unusual plants and it is now one of the few places in the world where all 50+ species of the world’s trilliums can be seen growing in one location intermingled with other woodland companion plants, such a ferns, cypripedium, arisaema, erythronium and wood anemones.
She has also been hosting annual Trillium Tea, Talk and Tours where visitors can enjoy tea and refreshments on vintage trillium china, listen to a talk on trilliums and tour the famous Trillium Trail where they can see these endangered wildflowers blooming in all their full glory grouped by species in a natural setting along nature trails mimicking their native habitats. The tours are usually sold out a year in advance.
Susie is also in the process of establishing a National Trillium Collection at Cottage Lake Gardens whose purpose will be to conserve, grow, propagate, and make available many rare species of trilliums previously unavailable to the public.
Another one of her goals is to see and photograph all fifty species of trilliums in the wild and because of this she has travelled extensively throughout North America and next year in Japan. One of the places where the most number of trilliums grow in the wild is in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee. Susie has made several trips there during their annual Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage and her talk today will share this incredible botanical experience with us.
Join us at the Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH) at 7:00 pm for social time, 7:30 pm for the meeting and program. Our meetings are free and open to the public.
See you all soon!