WPTF Afternoon News
Tony Avent, Proprietor of Juniper Level Botanic Garden \ 05-06-24
opening for visitors but only for this weekend. The Juniper level Botanic Garden opens for the public only once each season. In this month, they are opening on this Friday and they're going to stay on until May the 12th, the Sunday. And after that, the magical secret garden won't hold another open garden day until next year. And joining us now is the proprietor of Juniper level Botanic Garden at his Tony event. Tony, how are you? I'm doing great. Hope you are. Not bad at also. What can people expect to see at the Juniper level Botanic Garden? Well, they can expect to see pretty much anything that looks like a plant. Our collection has over 27,000 different kinds of plants. They'll see plants that they could only dream of. They'll see plants with five, six foot tall flowers. They'll see plants from literally all over the world including the largest selection of southeast native that they'll find anywhere. It's really incredible. Our goals are to inspire and to overwhelm. That's a lot to do. But do you find yourself doing that when you open up this garden? We do absolutely. That's the one comment we get from people that are especially first-time visitors. I'm completely overwhelmed because most people think of gardening when they look at their neighbors. They say, "Oh, well, my neighbors did this. They put eight little green shrubs across the front and clipped them into meatballs." And that's what I should do. And we bring them in here and we sort of make their minds explode because they've never seen anything like this. They don't realize that having a garden is, gardening is relaxation. Gardening should be lumped with golf and boating as opposed to lumped with pulling weeds and building fences and washing driveways and things like that. We want to teach people a different way to garden. That's an interesting way to do it because right now you're offering one of the largest plant collections anywhere in the world. In fact, how big is your plant collection? I'd say it's the 27,000 different kinds of plant. So it's one of the top five plant collections in the entire country right here in the triangle area. We love to show people things they don't think they can grow. We've got a huge collection of century plants which are normally desert native. We've got 13 in flower. Some of the flower spikes are reaching 30 feet in the air. Pretty incredible. People think they can't grow these. We're here to tell you, "Here's how you can grow them. Here's the ones you can grow." We've spent 38 years researching what will grow in this area. What is your relationship? What is the Botanic Gardens relationship with plant delights nursery? Well, when we started this 38 years ago, we said, "All right, we'd like to make a Botanic Gardens but we have no money and we have no government backing. So we're going to start a nursery that will propagate from the garden, propagate these rare plants, and then all the money that a normal business would call profit goes back into the staff to build a garden, to maintain the garden." So that's really how it works together. One feeds off the other. And seven years ago, we gifted all of this to North Carolina State University. So we're working with them now to fundraise for an endowment to make sure that this remains intact for the next generation of gardeners. Absolutely. And people can see this now coming up. Why is it only open one weekend a year? Well, we open four times a year. We do one each season. So we've already finished our two weekend winter old mouth. And this will be the second weekend of our spring. Then we will do this two weekends in July and two weekends since September because most people, because they have such a small plant palette, they think the garden looks the same all the time. When you have this many plants, the garden changes every day. So people that come now and then come back for the summer and the fall will see completely different plants that they didn't even realize were here. One thing that is a mainstay though is the mystic waterfall. What is that? It is. We've got two waterfalls on the property. Both that we built, both with help from former workers at the North Carolina Zoo where they were all trained to build these amazing zoo habitat. And we hired a couple of them that come help us build these waterfalls that you can climb all the way to the top. And it's pretty amazing to add water to your garden. And you just have a lot of different kinds of things. And also one of the things about it is that it can host any kind of garden that people might imagine, correct? Exactly. We want to teach people how to build habitat. You've got a small garden, you can have a desert garden, you can have a wetland garden with with the native pitcher plants all within a very small 10 by 10 area. So we want to teach them about habitat garden. We want to teach them the things that they may not know about plants, how plants communicate with each other, how plants communicate with insects. There's so much going on in the natural world. And that's our mission is to share some of the many things we've learned and some of the incredible things that goes on in nature. So this is coming up and people can get in for free, correct? They can. We're open Friday through Sunday, this weekend, 9 to 5. They can go to our website. We have two websites, one for the nursery, but that's plantdelight.com. And then the garden has a completely different site. That's Juniper Level Botanic Garden or jlbg.org. So that's not a dot com, that's a dot org. And we do a, if you can't make it out, we do a blog every day from the garden showing you some of the incredible plants. So they can just log on to the website, sign up for the blog, and in case they can't visit this weekend, come see us later, but live vicariously through our blog. And where can people find that blog? J-L-B-G, Juniper Level Botanic Gardens dot org. Okay. And that's fantastic. It's coming up this weekend. It'll be open Friday and we'll stay open until Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And people can take tours over 27,000 plants, trees and shrubs that you cannot find anywhere else. We open this weekend at the Juniper Level Botanic Garden. It's fantastic that people can experience this for themselves here. So we're here on a Monday and already making plans for next weekend. Tony, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you. The Juniper Level Botanic Garden.