Tag Archives: USA

Mountain Gardens tour with Joe Hollis

A year ago, on 22nd September 2019, Joe Hollis had invited me to do a walk and talk with him at his Mountain Gardens in North Carolina! Before the event he took me around the woodlands to show me the woodland flora. I made a short video at most of the plants to help me remember what they were. I’ve now put them together into one video (see below). Joe talks briefly about the following plants:
Disporum spp. (trachycarpum?)  (medicinal)
Medeola virginiana; Indian cucumberroot
Hosta sieboldiana (self-seeding)  (food)
Panax quinquefolius; American ginseng
Prenanthes trifolioliata; Gall of the earth (Food and medicine)
Smilax rotundifolia; common greenbrier (Food and medicine)
Acer spp.; maple
Castanea spp.; chestnut
Sassafras albidum; sassafras (Medicine and beverage/spice)
Cacalia delphinifolia? (Far Eastern edible and medicinal)
After the video is a gallery of photos taken on the same tour. Will post more from the walk and talk later.
This is one of several blog posts about my visit to Joe. See more by searching here: https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?s=joe+hollis

 

Joe Hollis’ pharmacy and library

It’s a year since I arrived at Joe Hollis’ Mountain Gardens in North Carolina. I wrote about it here https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=24110 and just added a few additional pictures. 
Here are a few additional pictures from his extensive library, Chinese herb pharmacy and seed store which he offers as a resource for anyone wanting to study the useful plants of the world!



A weekend in paradise: arrival and the Celo Inn

In April 2018 both myself and Joe Hollis were invited as speakers at The Potential of Perennials for Food System Resilience Symposium in Stans,  Switzerland. I also had the opportunity to spend a great day botanising at two of Zurich’s Botanical Gardens with Joe, see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=17040

Joe said to me at the time that I should come visit if I was ever in the US. I already knew at that time I was invited by Sam Thayer and Melissa Price to the Midwest Wild Harvest Festival at the end of September this year, but Joe’s place seemed a long trek south, so I forgot the idea. Then this spring, I was asked if I would be interested to do a talk at the Atlanta Botanical Garden….and I managed to change my travel plans to do this…and looking at the map I noticed it wasn’t too far from Joe’s Mountain Gardens (aka as Paradise)! So I contacted him and he replied: “Good to hear from you and that is great news!  I am very much looking forward to showing you around my garden and adjacent National Forest land, there is a lot to see”.

So it came to past that I arrived in Asheville, North Carolina on 21st September 2019 and picked up a hire car as Joe’s place was an hour or more up in the Black Mountains subrange of the Appalachians. Four hours later I arrived at my hotel, the Celo Inn (as for why it took so long see the album captions).  It turns out that the Celo community is one of the oldest intentiona communities in the world (1937), based on ideals of cooperation between residents and care for the natural environment….and it turns out that a neighbour and old colleague back in Trondheim actually went to school here…small world!

The pictures below show the approach road to Mountain Gardens from the Celo Inn (only a 5-10 min, drive away) and my first look into the garden!

Entering the garden for the first time I spy what is probably the native North American devil’s walking stick Aralia spinosa in full flower. Does this species flower much later than Japanese Aralia elata? My A. elata had finished flowering at home.

The following morning I walked around the grounds of the Celo Inn on a warm sunny day with monarch and swallowtail butterflies on the ornamental Asters. The owners had quite extensive vegetable beds and the ripe chilis bore witness that the summers were hot even up here in the mountains.

A type of swallowtail butterfly at the Celo Inn

2019 US East Coast Fall Speaking Tour

I’m making the most of my invite to the Mid-West Wild Harvest Festival at the end of September, where I get to teach alongside great North American foraging authors Sam Thayer, Leda Meredith, Ellen Zachos and others! I am pleased to announce a number of other events including a walk and talk with the great Joe Hollis at Mountain Gardens in North Carolina and an event put on by the one and only Eric Toensmeier in Holyoke, Western Massachusetts (I’m promised ripe pawpaws and American persimmons!), followed by a series of other talks in New England organised by my friend Aaron Parker of Edgewood Nursery near Portland! Here is the whole list (still possibilities in Boston and New York):

22nd September:  Walk and talk with the great Joe Hollis at Mountain Gardens (near Asheville, North Carolina) (see https://www.mountaingardensherbs.com and https://www.facebook.com/MountainGardensHerbs); details not available yet!

24th September:  Evening talk at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta, Georgia; details not available yet!

26th September:  Visit and talk at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa!

27th-29th September:  Mid-West Wild Harvest Festival (Keynote plus two*3 hour talks /courses); https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildharvestfestival and https://www.wildharvestfestival.org/register.html

1st  October:  Talk organised by author of Perennial Vegetables and other great books, Eric Toensmeier in Holyoke, Western Massachusetts (details not available yet).

3rd October: Talk “Around the World in 80 Plants: New England to the Mediterranean”  organised by Aaron Parker of https://www.facebook.com/pg/EdgewoodNursery in or around Portland, Maine (details not available yet). The talk continues with the rest of the world in Portsmouth the next day:

4th October (19-21):  Talk “Around the World in 80 Plants: The Mediterranean to New England” at the Urban Forestry Center
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA (organised by  Seacoast Permaculture, North Shore Permaculture Collaborative in collaboration with The Resilience Hub & Portland Maine Permaculture ) (FB: https://www.facebook.com/events/842574716098048; Tickets:  https://tinyurl.com/y25tj8wq)

5th October: Looking for organisers for an evening event in the Boston area (possibly a walk and talk in the Arnold Arboretum)

6th October:  Looking for organisers for a daytime event in the New York City area (possibly a walk and talk in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden or elsewhere)