Four Seasons Garden Club Lillington

11/05/2026

A huge shout out to Ragan and Judith for a beautiful table and delicious brunch. Many thanks to Eric and Emily from Elliott Orchids and Rare Plants for such a great program on orchids. We learned so much on how to help our plants flourish and bloom.

11/03/2026

Fall leaves get a lot easier to recognize once you start looking at shape instead of color alone. 🍁 I still catch myself stopping to compare leaves when several trees turn similar shades at the same time.

11/03/2026

Hey NC Native Plant community!

We are hoping to launch a rapid-turnaround native restoration project at Raven Rock State Park, and we need your garden thinnings and extra seeds to help make it happen!🌱

Over the next week, we aim to transform a high-maintenance ditch along the Moccasin Branch Road (gravel) campground entrance into a resilient, ecosystem-friendly native plant patch.
Our goal is to test a living pilot project that solves park challenges entirely budget-free and with the help of our community.

📍Location: Raven Rock State Park (Campground Entrance)

We need native plants that can handle full sun. We’re especially interested in:
Grasses:
Pink Muhly Grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris)
Splitbeard Bluestem (Anatherum ternarium)

Wildflowers and Perennials:
Butterfly W**d (Asclepias tuberosa)
Goldenrods (Solidago spp.)
Wild Asters (Symphyotrichum spp.)
Black-Eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta)
Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)
Lanceleaf Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata)
Wild Blue Indigo ( Baptisia australis)

If you’re dividing your garden beds, thinning out your native plantings, or have extra seeds collected this season, we’d love to give them a new home!

We are hoping to get plants and seeds in the ground on 11/9 at 10:00 a.m. so anything you can spare would be wonderful. Plugs, small divisions, and seeds are all welcome, as long as they’re appropriate for direct planting now.

Thank you for helping us bring more native biodiversity to the park!

Questions or comments, please respond to this post.

10/30/2026

Meet One of the Forest’s Most Mysterious Wildflowers: Ghost Pipe 👻🪈

Have you ever spotted a ghostly white flower like this?

Ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is one of the most unusual flowering plants in North America. Unlike nearly every plant around it, ghost pipe contains no chlorophyll and cannot photosynthesize. Instead of making its own food from sunlight, it obtains nutrients through underground fungal networks connected to nearby trees.

Its striking white stems and single nodding flower give it an otherworldly appearance, especially in the deep shade of mature forests where it typically grows. As the flower ages, it turns upright to release seeds before eventually darkening to black.

If you encounter ghost pipe like this example found at our Nags Head Woods Preserve, enjoy it where it grows. These plants depend on delicate underground networks and do not survive being transplanted.

10/27/2026

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay

Artist Eero Järnefelt, 1915

10/25/2026

Spider Science at our Four Seasons Junior Garden Club at Friends of the Robin Paige Boys and Girls Club this week. The students learned out the ecology and biology of spiders in the garden and met Rosy the Rose Haired Tarantula. They then made spiders, planted a spider plant to take home and had some delicious and spooky snacks.

10/20/2026

🎉 NC Governor Josh Stein has proclaimed October 2026 as Native Plant Month!

From the Proclamation: "it is important to encourage p***c awareness about the benefits of North Carolina's native plants to pollinators and other wildlife, to the economy, and to the health and sustainability of North Carolina's fragile ecosystems...."

🌿 Our amazing state hosts around 4,000 native plant species that support regional pollinators, birds and soil health.

October is a special time to celebrate because fall is the ideal window for root establishment. 🍂🌱

How are you supporting in your landscape? We'd love to hear!

📸 credit: Rhododendron catawbiense by Andrea Laine

10/19/2026