Calling all Lakelands Master Gardeners: it’s time to renew your membership for 2020! This annual process only takes a few minutes of your time and is important to help us keep up to date on who is currently active in the organization and how, make sure our contact information is accurate, and ensure we are organizing programming and activities that suit our members’ current needs and interests. Your dues help ensure we can continue to provide great programs and events for our members and horticultural education opportunities for the broader Greenwood – Abbeville community.
Note that if you are in the current Master Gardener certification class, your dues for next year were included in your course fee, so you do not need to pay any dues at this time.
All other LMG members, please take a few moments to complete your 2020 membership renewal form and return it with your dues to our membership chair, Shirley Pate, before our Awards Banquet in February so that you remain in good standing and eligible to vote in our next board elections.
Please join us at Wyatt Farms Village (103 Wyatt Court in Greenwood) for our September panel discussion, at 6:30 PM on 9/26/2019. Members of the public are welcome to attend. LMG members should arrive by 6:00 PM for our membership meeting.
Click below to download this flyer as a PDF document:
The class schedule and several important dates have been announced for those interested in taking the 2019 Master Gardener Course through Clemson’s Greenwood Extension Office. Completion of this course is the first step to becoming a certified master gardener through Clemson University Extension. All of the following will be at the Extension Office, 105 North University Street in Greenwood.
July 15, 2019, 6 PM – 8 PM: Public informational meeting. Meet the course instructor and some of our current master gardeners, and get answers to any questions you may have about the course. (Note that previously this date was erroneously listed as July 16.)
July 31, 2019: Scholarship applications must be received at the Greenwood Extension Office no later than 1:00 PM. Click here for office hours. Scholarship applications may alternatively be mailed to Clemson Extension Service, c/o LMG, Inc. – Scholarship Fund, P. O. Box 246, Greenwood, SC 29648. However, they still must be received by 1:00 PM on July 31 to be considered, so please be sure to mail yours well in advance. You can download a copy of the scholarship form here.
August 9, 2019: Scholarship recipients will be notified. If you have applied for a scholarship, please wait until this date to register for the course, as scholarship recipients will receive special registration instructions with this notification.
August 20, 2019: Scholarship recipients must reimburse LMG for whatever balance of the course fee was not covered by their scholarship, no later than the first day of classes.
August 20 – November 19, 2019: Classes will be held each Tuesday evening from 6 PM – 9 PM.
If you have questions about the course and are unable to attend the informational meeting on July 15, feel free to contact us electronically, or call the extension office at 864-223-3264.
Greenwood has several fun and informative garden tour events upcoming in the month of June, involving master gardeners and our friends at Bee City USA.
Wednesday, June 19, 10:00 AM – Noon: Scavenger Hunt for kids to help them learn what food is pollinated by what pollinator at the Uptown Farmers Market Garden (220 Maxwell Avenue). Look for the Bee City USA Booth.
Thursday, June 20, 5:30 PM: Pollinator Garden and Topiary tour by master gardener Ann Barklow. This is part of the ongoing Festival of Flowers program. Meet at the Veterans Plaza Pollinator Garden at 106 Main Street near the gazebo.
Saturday, June 22, 10 AM – 5 PM and Sunday, June 23, 1 PM – 4 PM: Master gardener Ann Barklow’s Wildlife Habitat and Living Classroom on Pollinators (110 Ferry Cove Road in Greenwood) will be one of the gardens featured on the Festival of Flowers Garden Tours (rescheduled from June 8 – 9). This is presented jointly by the Lakelands Master Gardeners and Bee City USA. We will have master gardeners on hand to show you around and answer any questions you may have. SWAT (“Standing Water Action Team”) will also have a booth set up for mosquito education.
Our native Southern Magnolia, symbol of the South and the state flower of Mississippi and Louisiana, is now showing large fragrant white flowers. Its botanical name Magnolia grandiflora refers to its bloom size.
The Magnolia family has over 200 species and is one of our earth’s oldest flowering plant families, with some fossil records dating back 90 or more million years. The flower especially demonstrates this ancient history. Modern flowers have reduced numbers of female parts (pistils), usually just one, whereas more primitive ancestral flowers have several to many. Magnolia flowers apparently developed before bees, and their sturdy female structures are designed for pollination by beetles. Female pistils, curved cream colored, are surrounded by male stamens with red bases, some of which detach and collect into petals.
Southern Magnolia flowers do not produce nectar, but bees are attracted by fragrance and for abundant pollen.
Interesting is that another member of the Magnolia family, Tuliptree Magnolia, also called Tulip Poplar, has smaller greenish-yellow flowers with lots of nectar that is great for honeybees!
Tulip Poplar Tree in Bloom
As Southern Magnolia flowers age, petals and pollen-producing stamens drop, leaving female pistils to develop into fruits. Each cone-like fruit is actually a cluster of many individual one-seeded fruits that developed from the flower’s female pistils. These cones turn shades of pink just before shedding seeds in fall. Seeds are bright red and provide food for birds and small mammals, and are considered non-toxic for pets. Cone-like fruits finally turn brown and drop to the ground.
In winter, evergreen Southern Magnolias are even more easily spotted along roads and in yards, when other trees have lost their leaves. Majestic Magnolias are most beautiful when allowed to keep lower limbs that reach down to the ground. An example is the one growing in Due West at the home of Bill and Emilie Lesesne that is beautifully dressed in a full-length skirt!
The Lesesnes’ Magnolia
Sadly, Magnolias often get “limbed up”, stripping them of their natural glorious green “skirts”!
Horticulture has developed several Magnolia cultivars including the following:
“Bracken’s Brown Beauty”, developed by Ray Bracken of Easley, South Carolina. It is a smaller and more compact tree that can withstand colder climates.
“Little Gem”, considered a “dwarf” cultivar, with a column shape, and growing to about 14 feet blooming with many cup-shaped flowers.
As of June 2019, we have transitioned from the old newsletter format to our new Lakelands Master Gardeners blog! This allows articles to be published in a more timely fashion and eliminates the need for our writers to worry about missing deadlines. Historical newsletters will remain available, but from now on new articles that would previously have been published in the newsletter will appear under “LMG Blog” in the navigation menu.
If you are a Lakelands Master Gardeners member and would like to submit an article for publication, please contact Chris Hackmeyer or use the “Contact Us” link in the navigation menu to request instructions.
Registration is now open for the spring/summer offering of Clemson Extension’s Master Rain Gardener course. This multi-week hybrid course provides the knowledge and skill set needed to design, install and maintain rain garden and rainwater harvesting systems. Rain gardens and rainwater harvesting systems assist residents with flood and erosion management, water conservation and establishment of backyard habitat.
As part of the Master Rain Gardener program, participants will learn about:
Rain garden site assessment
Soil analysis
Design standards and elements
Plant selection
Maintenance and more
Participants will also spend time learning about rainwater harvesting system sizing, component considerations, water use and safety measures. The program includes four weeks of online learning modules with hands-on learning exercises. The Master Rain Gardener course offers a Letter of Completion Track (online classroom only) and a Certification Track (online classroom, field session and exam). Master Gardeners will earn 10 hours of CEU’s with completion of Letter of Completion Track. The class starts May 6th.
With apologies for the considerable delay, the LMG Newsletter is back with a new layout and a new editor. In this issue, a recap of our annual banquet, our new board and committee members for 2019-2020, and thoughts about mosquitoes in the garden.
The Lakelands Master Gardeners will hold our Annual Plant Sale on Saturday, April 13th, 2019 from 8 AM to 2 PM at the Uptown Farmers’ Market. The sale is open to the public and will feature a wide variety of plants grown locally by our master gardeners. Please note that this is a cash – only event; checks and credit / debit cards will not be accepted.
Remember, to be a success, we need each member to bring in 10 plants (labeled with name of plant and light / care requirements) to the market on Friday, April 12th from 4PM – 6PM, or before 8AM on the 13th.
Master Gardeners, Volunteers, and Master Gardener Interns:
This is the fun time of year we get to take some of our smaller topiaries to the schools and have the kids line up and put plugs of plants in them. The teachers are very good with lining them up and all you need to do is assist one of the horticultural crew members in keeping the plants coming. If you would like to be involved in this, contact Ann Barklow for schools and times to choose from. It usually lasts 2-3 hours.
