In Partnership with the Emerald Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Oregon and Lane Community College, Mount Pisgah Arboretum is excited to present our annual Wildflower Festival FREE in a virtual format for 2021!
Restoration, Recovery, Resilience
The poster plant for the 2021 Wildflower Festival is fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium), representing this year’s theme of restoration, recovery, and resilience as our human and natural communities emerge from the Labor Day wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll be presenting two nights of programming from 5-7:30PM on Saturday, May 15th and Sunday, May 16th, featuring a variety of virtual field trips and presentations on topics like fire ecology, native plant gardening, plant-pollinator interactions, botanical illustration, and more. See here for presenter bios and talk descriptions. Full schedule available soon!
iNaturalist Wildflower Bioblitz:
From May 11-15th, upload your photo observations of plants in Lane County. Your photos will be identified by experts, and these observations will serve as the display at this year’s Wildflower Festival. The dates for this event simulate the plant collections time for the 2021 Festival, which would occur on Sunday, May 16th. At the completion of the project, a species list will be posted at the Mount Pisgah Arboretum & NPSO web sites. The display usually includes 300 to 500 different wild plants collected mostly from Lane County. We hope to create a similar plant list this year, to keep the tradition and data collection alive! For more information, visit the project here. You can also take a look at the great results from last year’s bioblitz here!
Pre-Festival Talk!
The Emerald Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Oregon Presents: Plant Succession 40 years after the Mt. St. Helens Eruption. The Weevil Empire: How Insects Rule and other stories from the Pumice Plain.
Monday, April 19th, 7PM to 9PM
Speaker John Bishop is Co-Director & Associate Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of biological sciences at Washington State University. His ecological research at Mount St. Helens is focused on the effects of herbivores on keystone plant colonists and the resulting cascading impacts on community and ecosystem development. The link for the presentation will be posted here closer to the date.
