In addition to being less than an hour from the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, we are an easy drive to some other places that have impressive collections. The Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond is worth an overnight visit, imo. The Taubman Museum in Roanoke has good stuff, too.
The university collections that we think are worth seeing (and are within an hour’s drive) are The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC-G, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State University. The Gregg is the smallest. But, it has had some excellent exhibitions. The Weatherspoon inherited a lovely collection of work from the Cone sisters.
Swan Lake Iris Gardens in Sumter, SC has an Iris Festival every year on Memorial Day weekend and the local Master Gardeners group has a fundraising plant sale. Most of what they sell are irises. But, one of the MGs is a genius with carnivorous plants and donated several bog gardens to the cause. After some heavy quizzing (because I didn’t want to spend $40 on one to just kill it), I bought one.
New purchase
I chose this one because I liked the variety of colors in the sarracenias and it included a Venus Fly Trap. The one on the bottom left is a S. psittacina, also called a Parrot pitcher. The green pitcher plant is a S. oreophilia. The red and white one on the top left is probably a cross of S. leucophylla and S. rubra and I believe it is small because it is young, not because it will stay that way.
She told me to keep their feet wet (they are bog plants), leave them outside all year (they are native to our part of the world), don’t freak out when they die back in winter and don’t bother to feed them. Particularly, don’t fertilize them. They get nutrients from the insects they trap and, if you fertilize them, they don’t need those nutrients and don’t bother to make traps.
In case you didn’t know, the traps are not the flowers of carnivorous plants. They are modified leaves. On the right is a VFT blossom and on the left is a pitcher plant blossom.
Because the plant sale was a fundraiser, the Master Gardeners didn’t use fine pots for the plants they donated. (I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have either.) But, that meant that the plastic pot my bog was in turned out to be brittle. So, I replaced with a ceramic pot I got from Lowe’s. It is made to survive freezing and is glazed inside as well as out. (Terracotta does bad things to carnivores.)
It does have some soil underneath with a healthy dose of perlite and vermiculite to keep it from compacting too much. And there is sphagnum moss on top to help keep it wet.
The colors got stronger after it moved to my patio where it gets sun all day long.
My husband says it’s his favorite of my plant projects and my kid calls it the Swamp of Eternal Gladness. I am absolutely delighted.
This was the “care card” she included with my purchase.
We went to the Asheville Art Museum on Wednesday. Toward the end of our perusal, Chuck pointed me to a painting by Childe Hassam. I had become a fan when there was an exhibition of his work at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh a few years ago.
His work is some of the best examples of the Impressionist style that I’ve seen.
For an idea of the size. CloserBrush strokes evidentAlmost abstractMuseum notes
I remember getting so mad at my parents when I was expected to go to bed at 8:00 (or 8:30. I don’t remember. It’s been a minute.) in the summer when the sun and school were still out.
A friend shared this with me in celebration, remembrance and teasing.
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
~Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed In Summer,” from “A Child’s Garden of Verses”
I am the Audience 