Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Promoting environmentally sound gardening practices for over 35 years!
Alice Nicolson has been a master gardener since 1980. She began volunteering at the Help Desk at Cooperative Extension that year and has been an unfailing participant in Master Gardener activities ever since, sharing her expertise, her love of taxonomy (it’s even part of her e-mail handle) and her keen sense of observation with each generation of incoming students.
Twenty-six years ago, Bon Air Park’s Quarry/Shade Garden was neither a quarry nor a garden. The 40‘ x 30’ site, once used as a quarry for inferior- grade building stone, sat idle and overgrown...It is fitting that the idea for reclaiming the present site was conceived during an Earth Day celebration in Bon Air Park in 1988. It would become the first of seven demonstration gardens in Arlington and Alexandria, developed and maintained by MGNV.
If you grow ornamental shrubs (especially those that are marginal in winter hardiness like rosemary, lavender cotton, heaths, evergreen azaleas, etc.), then you may have observed bark splitting.
Written by Mary Free, Certified Master Gardener After one of the warmest winters on record, the March Shade Garden (pictured below) in Bon Air Park was awash in color with …
The Audubon at Home Wildlife Sanctuary Program (AAH) helps people create and maintain natural habitat (for birds, amphibians, reptiles and the insects that support them), around their homes and community space. Our own backyards provide an opportunity for conservation, even as natural habitat is decreasing. Key components of the program include conserving water, removing invasive plants, using native plants where appropriate, reducing the use of commercial fertilizers and pesticides, and providing habitat via shelter, water and food.
Audrey Evans was born on a coffee farm outside the town of Nyeri in Kenya in 1941. She recalls the “small” 600-acre farm as a beautiful place, with steep hillsides, rivers, bush, and a view of Mt. Kenya. Her father, who went to Kenya from South Africa, started the farm in 1911. Her mother, his second wife, went to Kenya in the 1930s from England as a nurse and met her future husband when he was a patient in the Nairobi hospital where she worked. “He fell in love with her voice,” as the story goes.
