Diversity in Planting: Designing for Pollinators in Our 2016 Summer Display
This year’s theme for the summer display at the Boathouse is Fiesta!, or a celebration of summer colors. The design is in a cottage garden style, where a diverse number of plants intermingle harmoniously to make up a single display. Inspired by a visit to Chicago's Botanic Garden and Michigan Avenue, the lively rhythm of the display is accented by the raising of the center of the bed, held together with a wall of cobblestones recycled from streets around St. Louis. With every color of the rainbow represented, our planting list comes out to be 27 different species of flowers and foliage accent plants. Most of these 27 species originated in the Americas, with 12 coming from Mexico, 5 from South America and 3 from North America.
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Secrets of the East Side: Full Circle Healing Garden
Not far from the beautiful grove of Magnolia trees we focused on in a previous blog post, you can find the Full Circle Healing Garden.
The Full Circle Healing Garden was established in 2001 and is a 6000-square foot space located just east of the Steinberg Skating Rink parking lot. But this is no ordinary garden. Formerly turfgrass, this area is now truer to its roots with around 25 species of plants native to Missouri. The idea for the Healing Garden originated with Gary Skolnick (a Senior Statistical Data Analyst at Washington University School of Medicine), who witnessed the vibrancy of places like the Kennedy Savanna (on the west side of Forest Park) and was inspired to make a change.
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Expanding Forest Park's Biodiversity One Plant Species at a Time
Species diversity is what has allowed life to spread across our planet and should be a guiding principle for any planting plan. Forest Park is already an extremely diverse landscape, but we are always working on making it better! On December 9, 2015 we introduced a previously unrecorded native species, Forestiera acuminata, commonly known as swamp privet. A riparian species (native to stream banks and wetlands), swamp privet is a woody plant species that straddles the line between tree and shrub depending on the environmental conditions that shape its growth. Riparian species often do well in urban areas because of their tolerance for low levels of oxygen in soil. This is a common problem in urban soils due to compaction from human actions ranging from construction to heavy foot traffic.
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Restoring a Natural Icon With the Help of Americorps' St. Louis Emergency Response Team
Forest Park's John F. Kennedy Memorial Forest is a unique example of forest habitat that sits in the center of a city environment. Sections of Kennedy Forest are old-growth, dating back to well before the outer limits of the city of St. Louis even made it to the land on which Forest Park now sits. The Kennedy Forest Restoration Project, made possible by a lead gift from the Mysun Charitable Foundation, is an ambitious one-year restoration plan focused on revitalizing a 10-acre portion of the forest. The project is led by Forest Park Forever, in partnership with the City of St. Louis and with considerable help from Americorps' St. Louis Emergency Response Team.
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Beauty at the Boathouse: The Art and Science of Annual Plantings in Forest Park
Forest Park Forever Horticulturist Patrick Greenwald shares a glimpse into the art and science behind the annual displays he creates for the Boathouse. The tropical floral display that wowed visitors over the summer has been removed to make way for a new annual display to emerge in the spring of 2016. Click through to learn more about Patrick's process and the hard work it takes to make the floral displays in Forest Park possible.
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Forest Park Forever Takes KSDK's Heidi Glaus to a Hidden Treasure of the Park
KSDK's Heidi Glaus recently asked us to take her to a 'hidden treasure' in Forest Park. One spot jumped immediately to mind: the Deer Lake Savanna, located here....
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Maintaining a Masterpiece: How Forest Park Forever Is Tackling Urgent Repairs & Establishing a Long-Term Maintenance Plan
It isn’t every day you can paddle-boat across a basin built over 100 years ago, watch a musical in the country’s oldest outdoor musical theatre or run through a grove containing dozens of plant species. But in Forest Park, not a day goes by without someone taking advantage of what this destination has to offer....
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