GFWC Shades Mountain Womens Club meeting

The club meets at Shades Crest Baptist Church in the fellowship hall on March 13 at 7 p.m. for a photo-rich botanical journey to meet some of Alabama’s most interesting, rare and beautiful plants.Patrick Thompson grew up on Shades Mountain near Birmingham. Thompson is the curator of special collections at Auburn University's arboretum and coordinator of The Alabama Plant Conservation Alliance. Auburn University’s Davis Arboretum has a mission to collect and display the plants of Alabama. In the years that he has been the primary plant collector working to accomplish this mission, it has become increasingly evident that Alabama is a hub of biodiversity for the eastern United States. His talk will illuminate the botanical life that grows in Alabama and the places he has gone and methods he uses to protect these plants in the wild and bring them into cultivation both for conservation and for display in home gardens.