Plant swaps are held the first Saturday of April and October. They usually run from 8 until 11 a.m. The garden, which doesn’t have an address, sits next to Chatham Steel, 501 W. Boundary Street. There is no admittance fee, few rules (except don’t be piggy). Perennials, seeds, roots, rhizomes, bulbs, pots, food to share are all welcome.
Call 912-484-3045 for more information.
It’s not every day you are standing around, in this case at a friend’s first-ever plant swap in Baker County, Ga., when a young woman wearing her hat backward, wading boots and some oversized blue camo pants pulls up to peruse the offerings and mentions in an offhand way she has an alligator in the back of her Prius.
Whoa.
It seems she was checking a turtle trap in the Flint River in her duties as a herpetologist for the Jones Center at Ichauway when she saw the little fellow. One of his legs was damaged. She was going to take him back to her lab, tag him and let him go but didn’t want to miss the chance to snag some plants.
(You shouldn’t either. The biannual plant swap is next Saturday, April 2, although I can’t promise you’ll see an alligator.)
Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News
Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News
By the time I walked over to see him up close and personal with a car window between us for protection he had wriggled over the seat of the hatchback and was comfortably ensconced in the back of her car. Undaunted, she picked him up – somehow she had managed to wrap black tape around his jaws – threw him over her shoulder for a photo op as you would a baby, reinstalled him to his original position and returned to see what plants she could take home.
“I was not going to miss the plant swap,” she said. She was fingering through a couple packets of seeds, including some loufa I brought from earlier Savannah swaps (the seeds were safely protected under a Tupperware cake carrier because earlier that morning there had been rain followed by five minutes of hail a few hours later), considering an orchid planted in a homemade piece of pottery and debating over a mint plant (which I grabbed when she got distracted).
This is what you can see when you get out of town. How a good idea, in this case a plant swap, can be replicated.
Imitation, said Oscar Wilde, is the highest form of flattery.
Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News
Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News
Stribling Stuber, formerly of Savannah and now a scientist at Ichauway specializing in the hydrology of water, had been in the “Garden of Good and Gooder” on West Boundary Street during one of our biannual plant swaps and thought, “Hey, I could do that.” So she did.
Ichauway is a 29,000-acre research center in rural, southwest Georgia. It boasts one of the most extensive tracts of longleaf pine and wiregrass in the country. The ecological center was started and funded by the generous Robert Woodruff of Coca-Cola fame. Woodruff is the same man who backed the brilliant transition of the once privately held Ossabaw Island into a nonprofit foundation, protecting the barrier island from developers and opening it up for fans of wilderness.
Ironically, at 26,000 acres, Ossabaw is nearly the same size as Ichauway. Oh, the things that can happen when people with resources get involved. You gotta love it. OK, so Woodruff loved quail hunting and thought this piece of acreage would be the perfect spot for him and his buddies to do a little sport a couple times a year. But then to dedicate it to people studying woods, water and wildlife in one of Georgia’s poorest counties is a bonus, a legacy.
Credit: Photo by Bryan Stovall
Credit: Photo by Bryan Stovall
The things that can happen when people who work together but don’t necessarily know one another outside of work (or politics) bond over common interests. I could say the same thing about the plant swaps.
For 20 years, the swaps have been a way for people to meet and greet and debate why one person’s lime tree produces and another’s, like mine, just keeps getting taller and taller without putting out one piece of fruit; what to plant when deer want to chomp on everything in sight; how to resist buying forsythia in the big box stores because while it does so well up North, it does not like the heat of Savannah.
I passed on the Mexican petunia. I said no to a cactus. I left the aloe for someone else. I gambled on a single cucumber start. But I’m always looking for something new.
Who knows what will show up next Saturday. Surprise me.
Jane Fishman is a contributing lifestyles columnist. Contact her at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045. See more columns by Jane at SavannahNow.com/lifestyle/.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Building community and meeting alligators while swapping plants
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