Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Promoting environmentally sound gardening practices for over 35 years!
Support pollinators in your own back yard—it's easy. To help guide your plant choices, stop by the patio area at Glencarlyn Library Community Garden to check out our newly revamped pollinator garden.
If you’ve visited Glencarlyn Library Community Garden’s back patio recently, it’s likely that you have noticed a new addition, a Garden Education box. Though it looks much like the Little Free Library boxes that have sprung up across the country in the past few years, the purpose of this one is much more specific to the garden: to provide visitors with helpful information related to gardening on an ongoing basis.
The Glencarlyn Library Community Garden, one of the demonstration gardens maintained by Master Gardener volunteers and interns from the Arlington/Alexandria unit of Virginia Cooperative Extension, is now under the leadership of five coordinators: Paul Nuhn, Alyssa Ford Morel, Wendy Mills, Elaine Mills (not a relation), and Judy Funderburk.
A growing body of research is proving what we know intuitively: Nature is good for us—physically, mentally, and cognitively. When we spend time in nature—whether in a national park or a backyard garden—we feel better.
As I write this column, we have experienced a warmer February but a typically cold and windy March. This warm spell sent many of our plants into believing spring was upon them. Mother Nature sometimes plays us for fools. Plants too.
Flowering trees and shrubs were tricked into opening their buds early only to be hit by winter’s return in early March.
In the middle of what is supposed to be winter, when the days are still relatively short and the nights long, the plants in the Glencarlyn Library Community Garden are responding to the record-breaking high temperatures with a confusing but wonderful mix of blooms, berries, textures, and colors. Never before have we seen such combinations of winter and spring in the Garden. Here are some photos taken on February 21 that made me smile and shake my head and look in wonder.
