A statue sits amid the greenery in the garden of Gardner and Larry Ligo, one of six on the symposium’s tour.

By LAURIE DENNIS
DavidsonNews.net

If you’d like to learn about perennials and ferns for your garden, attract more songbirds to your yard, or peek at some of the town’s most interesting gardens, consider registering for the 2008 Davidson Horticultural Symposium, sponsored by Davidson Garden Club Monday and Tuesday, March 3-4, at Davidson College. Registration closes Feb. 25.

This year’s symposium is the 24th annual, and has the title “Herbaceous Havens: Creating Garden Sanctuaries.”

A panel of five speakers, including an internationally known garden writer from Ohio and a horticulture professor from Pennsylvania, will offer workshops and lectures, and there will be book signings and plant sales and an optional tour of the Davidson College Arboretum.

“What I’m looking forward to is getting ideas for improving my flower beds for year-round interest and creating a wildlife-friendly habitat,” said Mary Wilson Stewart, who handles publicity for the event. “I want to draw more butterflies and birds to my garden.”

The symposium is organized by the Davidson Garden Club, which Ms. Stewart joined shortly after moving to Davidson three years ago. She was quickly put to work and now serves on the symposium steering committee, which is chaired by Lacy Dick.

Ms. Stewart described the garden club as “women who share a love of gardening” and meet monthly. The symposium is their main activity, and planning takes about a year. Member Robin Wilgus, who is also an artist, paints the brochure cover (left) for each symposium. This year’s painting features a country garden a-bloom with pink perennials, white alliums and decorative grasses.

“She takes our theme and she runs with it,” Ms. Stewart said, adding that the original painting will be auctioned at the symposium.

Registration for the symposium can be done through the garden club website and costs $27 for the Monday garden tours, buffet supper and roundtable discussion, and $85 for Tuesday’s lectures, workshops and lunch. The symposium will be held in the Davidson College union (the Knobloch Campus Center).

“People come from all over the southeast for this,” said Ms. Stewart, saying that so far the longest commute will be for a woman from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

GARDEN TOURS

Tours of local gardens are a fairly new addition to the symposium. The garden club selects a new roster of gardens for each year according to the symposium theme. This year’s tour will be of wildlife-friendly, perennial based gardens at the homes of:

• Jane and Bob Avinger, 207 Avinger Lane
  
• Gardner and Larry Ligo, 565 N. Main St.
• Jane and Jim Elliott, 471 Pine Road
  
• Margo and Bill Williams, 783 Concord Rd.
  
• Mark Stanback and Nancy Popkin, 515 Pine Road
  
• Streetside planting Jodi and Betsy Seymour

Registrants will receive tickets and maps for the garden tour. However, the tour can also be purchased separately from the rest of the symposium events for a fee of $10 at each home. The self-guided tour runs from 3-6 p.m. Monday, March 3.

Ms. Stewart noted that early March gardens will not be in their full verdant glory. Photos will be posted within gardens to show how they will flower over the summer and fall.

“Plus, these gardens all have ‘good bones’ that you can look at,” she said.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS –

One change for this year’s symposium is the Monday evening schedule. While in past years the garden tour has been followed by a formal dinner, this year there will be a casual pasta buffet followed by a roundtable conversation with the five speakers.

Tuesday is marked by keynote lectures in the morning and workshops in the afternoon. This year’s featured speakers are:

• Traci DiSabato-Aust, known as the “Queen of Dead-heading,” will speak on “The Well Designed Mixed Garden,” which is also the title of one of her books. She has worked at the Knightshayes Court in England, the Montreal Botanical Garden in Canada and the Longwood Gardens in the United States.
• Stephanie Cohen is an alumni fellow at Temple University, Ambler, where she is also the former director of the Landscape Arboretum. Her lunchtime talk is titled, “New and Underused Perennials.” Ms. Cohen is known as the “perennial diva” and has appeared on televised gardening shows and writes for a number of gardening publications.

Afternoon workshops will be led by the featured speakers and also John Hoffman of Sandhills Community College, a specialist in native grasses; Tom Goforth of South Carolina, owner of Crow Dog Native Ferns and Gardens; and Mary Stauble of Charlotte, an environmental educator.