Plant it, and they will come. And so they did. In a real life version of Field of Dreams, bees and butterflies began visiting the new pollinator garden in the greenhouse-barn area at Brook Run Park before Dunwoody Garden Club and Community Garden volunteers finished firming soil around the last root ball during plant installation work day on Saturday. Certainly, the pollinators found what must have looked to them like a nectar buffet. Among a small sampling of their choices were Calamintha nepeta, that the bees went for first; butterfly weed, Asclepias curassavica (a re-seeding annual in …

If imitation is the finest form of flattery, the Dunwoody Garden Club paid the stewards of the Tucker Butterfly Garden a nice compliment last week. The Dunwoody club is co-sponsoring the new pollinator garden in the greenhouse-barn area of Brook Run Park. Club members and volunteers from the Community Garden, the other project co-sponsor, tilled the ground and amended the soil in the garden last Saturday. Both groups began planting the garden on Saturday. As preparation for installing plant material, Karen Converse led the Dunwoody Garden Club on a visit to the Tucker Butterfly Garden last …

Reaching into a mound of freshly delivered Pro mix, mushroom compost and chicken manure, Betty Dworschak scooped up a double handful of the rich soil amendment, inhaled its earthy fragrance, turned to her fellow volunteers and shouted, “I’ll never go hungry again!” The accent of the co-president of the Dunwoody Garden Club didn’t quite match the syrupy sweetness of Scarlett O’Hara’s Southern drawl or the dire circumstances of the heroine in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. But any butterflies, bees or other insects within earshot got the message: They’re not going to go hungry – or …

Student leaders of Grow Dunwoody are creating a broad-based city-wide alliance of schools, businesses and community organizations as part of an $85,000 organic gardening and sustainability program designed to enhance the quality of education at the Dunwoody cluster schools. The program was unveiled to a light turnout of parents, teachers, administrators, elected officials and fellow students at an informational meeting about the program at Dunwoody High School last week. Grow Dunwoody co-director Danny Kanso said the partners in the alliance include Georgia Perimeter College, the Dunwoody …

Dunwoody residents who have never met Bonnie Barton know her through her work in beautifying the community. She’s developed the shade garden and cared for the vegetable beds at the Donaldson-Bannister House, devoted countless hours to the Dunwoody Farmhouse and the Dunwoody Library and this year oversaw the replanting of much of the landscaping at Dunwoody High School after a major renovation. In recognition of her many years of service on these and other projects, the DeKalb Federation of Garden Clubs on Wednesday honored the longtime member of The Dunwoody Garden Club by naming her a Life …

Note: The informational meeting about Grow Dunwoody has been moved to Wednesday evening (it had been scheduled for Tuesday but has since been changed). A loose-knit coalition of parents, students, teachers and community organizations is seeking to establish and maintain sustainable organic gardening programs at the eight schools in the Dunwoody cluster. One of the groups in the coalition, Grow Dunwoody, a student-led environmental organization that has its origins at Dunwoody High School, is attempting to serve as an umbrella organization that would coordinate the efforts among all of the …

If anyone complained about Monday’s rain washing away outdoor plans for Labor Day, they probably weren’t gardeners. It will come as no surprise to those who like to garden that the Atlanta area has been drier than average this summer, with only about half of the typical amount of rainfall, according to Brad Nitz, meteorologist for WSB-TV, Channel 2. In response to an email inquiry asking just how dry it has been in Atlanta during the recent drought, Nitz wrote back and said that for the months of “June-August we received 6.38 inches of rainfall. The average is 13.12 inches, leaving us 6.74 …

The changing of the seasons is bringing a new look to the greenhouse complex at Brook Run Park Part of the new look is the installation of raised gardening beds that meet the Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines. An old wall of railroad ties beside the main greenhouse was torn down, courtesy of the city, and was replaced with a new wall of treated timbers that is slightly farther from the greenhouse than the original wall. Relocating the wall is the first step in the ADA gardening project and creates an aisle wide enough to allow people in wheel chairs or those who use walkers to have …

As August fades into September and summer begins easing into autumn, the occasional cool mornings and mild evenings are a hint that it’s time to start preparing the garden for the changing of the seasons. Adding mulch and compost to ornamental and vegetables beds is a good first step to prepare the garden for fall. However, mulch and compost, volunteers staffing The Master Gardener Helpdesk at the DeKalb County Extension office reminded me recently, are not the same thing. Mulch is organic matter that has not decomposed and is put on top of the ground in layers three-six inches thick to …

How can a gardener tell it’s a good day? Here’s one way:  having to talk louder than the cicadas are singing to hear what a fellow plant lover is saying. As Debra Power and I sat at an outdoor table in the cool, mid-morning shade near a trail head into the urban forest of the Dunwoody Nature Center one day last week, the dog-day cicadas (Tibicen canicularis) high above us were in full chorus. These are annual cicadas that emerge in late July and August, the dog days of summer and hence their name. Perhaps they were singing Debra’s praises. Debra is the program manager at the Dunwoody Nature …

The Dunwoody Community Garden is celebrating its second birthday on Tuesday of this week, but that’s not the only milestone the 67 members are cheering. Team Food Pantry, one of the Community Gardens16 volunteer teams, has reached its goal of a “Ton for Hunger” – harvesting 2,083 pounds of locally grown organic produce for charity so far this year. A pear gleaning on Saturday at the home of Dan Davis in the Spalding Chase subdivision in Sandy Springs just across the Dunwoody City line pushed Team Food Pantry over its 2,000-pound goal for the first time since the garden was founded Aug. 23, …

In the waning days of summer, with football practice under way and cool autumn nights suddenly seeming not too far off, should gardeners continue growing warm-weather crops or pull them from their vegetable gardens and prepare the beds for fall planting? It’s a question I have seen more than once in the last week on a Dunwoody message board. Perhaps we should ask the plants. Tomato, pepper, squash and other summer vegetable plants, after all, do talk. And it’s not that hard to understand what they are saying. Diana Wood’s Clemson Spineless okra, for example, is telling her it’s quite happy in…

The changing of the seasons is bringing a new chapter to the vegetable garden behind the Spruill Art Gallery at Ashford Dunwoody Road and Meadow Lane. The Spruill Center for the Arts, which manages the gallery and grounds of the historic circa 1889 farmhouse, is seeking new volunteer leadership for the garden. Shawn Bard and volunteers from the Community Garden at Brook Run Park refurbished the garden beds in time for the June 10 opening of a major outdoor summer attraction at the gallery, a delightful sculpture garden. The volunteers built two raised beds and installed three other beds at …

With the Dog Days upon us, gardens and gardeners alike are showing the stress of the hottest days of summer. What’s a gardener to do? You might, of course, give thanks for air conditioning and the refuge it grants from the heat. This, obviously, is an option the ancients didn’t have when they came up with the name “Dog Days.” The term refers to their belief that the Dog Star (Sirius) caused late summer’s hot weather due to the brightness of the star and its proximity to the sun. I like to think of Dog Days as an opportunity to renew life in the garden. There are three ways to do that during …

When Dunwoody schools open their doors today to begin a new academic year, many students will be exposed to more than readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic. For some, there will be tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, several kinds of potatoes, cucumbers and a variety of herbs. And not just in the cafeteria, either. Students will be tending and harvesting vegetables and herbs such as these in organic gardens on several school campuses. The plots and raised beds are part of the green movement that has brought horticulture in the form of urban farming into residential communities and now neighborhood schools…

The Cullowhee Native Plant Conference has become a highlight of my gardening calendar. It is one of the nation’s premiere conferences on native plants and is sponsored by and held in mid-late July at Western Carolina University, just a two-and-a-half hour drive from Dunwoody. Even though the conference is close to home and offers a wealth of information on natives, I have found that few people in our gardening community are aware of it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I randomly asked a registrant at the bookseller’s tables in the vendor area if I could take a picture of her and discovered …

Team Food Pantry, a leading Dunwoody volunteer organization that donates fresh produce to families in need, is undergoing a change in leadership effective today. Pattie Baker, who has been a co-chair of Team Food Pantry and the inspirational driving force behind the Community Garden, of which Team Food Pantry is a part, is stepping down from the leadership position she has shared with fellow co-chair Sally Malone. While it’s hard to imagine Pattie straying too far from the action, she is leaving the day-to-day operations of Team Food Pantry to finish a book, Food For My Daughters, in which …

When taking a walking tour of gardens in Paris, it helps to have a guide who knows the city. The alternative is to plot a map-in-hand, self-guided search with a hit-or-miss strategy. During a recent stay in le Marais, the historical heart of Paris located on the Right Bank of the River Seine, my wife and I placed a sure bet on the former rather than roll the dice on the latter. We hired a guide who was born in Paris and who lived in Dunwoody when her husband’s job brought him to the United States.   Brigitte Rose was a resident of the Redfield subdivision, and we became friends through a …

If you think rain barrels aren’t exciting, you’ve never heard Bonny Putney talk about them. Bonny, headwaters outreach coordinator for the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, led a rain barrel workshop at Dunwoody City Hall Thursday evening. Several dozen residents of Dunwoody, Sandy Springs and nearby communities attended the class, which was held at the invitation of Dunwoody’s Sustainability Commission. For $35, attendees received a 60-gallon rain barrel, a kit with all the parts needed to make the rain barrel work and an informative and inspirational talk by Bonny about the importance of …

Dunwoody’s vibrant gardening community offers those who like to dig in the dirt a chance to meet a host of interesting people, sometimes in places other than the garden. I met one such person on a search to find a restaurant owner or chef who uses sorrel, a little-known vegetable in the spinach family that is not available in grocery stores and is rarely offered on restaurant menus. That search led to Alison Norris, owner of Alison’s Restaurant in the Shops of Dunwoody Shopping Center. Last weekend I stopped in Alison’s, which recently was voted "Best of Dunwoody - Restaurant Category" by its…