Three success stories for the Friends in 2023 are presented in the Winter issue of our newsletter. The inaugural year of the CelebriTree (such as the one above) program was a sold-out success, the Used Book Sale was another fine fundraiser, and our Arboretum Tree Tours, such as the Autumn Colours Tour, remained as popular as ever.
The perennial beds in the Ornamental Gardens are looking great again, after the pandemic break, and a special thanks goes to the Friends’ Perennial Team led by Nicki Quintero, who have worked with AAFC grounds staff to refresh the beds. The newsletter features a profile of Nicki.
There is another profile in the newsletter, this one of Shannon Asencio, collections manager of AAFC’s herbaria, including the renowned Vascular Plant Herbarium. Her love of nature has taken her from pressing flowers as a child to overseeing well over a million plant specimens in support of Canadian and international scientific research.
Also in the newsletter, Will Knight, curator of the agriculture and fisheries collections at Ingenium, celebrates 40 years of the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum with an article about museums at the Central Experimental Farm.
Finally, we can look forward this winter to more of the intriguing snow spirals on tree trunks in the Arboretum, according to local artist Raymond Roy (pictured below), who tells us in the newsletter about the ephemeral “treelines” he created last winter on his favourite trees in Ottawa.
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