President’s Message

Nov 1, 2010 by cnps2011

I want to thank all of the photographers and dessert creators who made out first meeting so successful. There were so many contributions that I think we will have to slightly trim the time allocated per presentation next year, but that is hard when so many of the photographs could have been on national magazine covers.

While most pictures were of interesting and beautiful subjects, there were a couple of4 talks with some solid scientific content, and one, from John Chesnut, showed very real evidence of climate change as desert sagebrush was replaced by hightemperature desert scrubs over the span of a quarter century. This emphasized the dual nature of CNPS as a plant-appreciation group on the one hand, and a science-based conservation organization on the other. You don’t have to have a botany degree to do good plant science, and I am going to suggest that any of you who would like to be involved in scientific data collection, monitoring, photo-surveys, horticultural suitability experiments and the like contact the
appropriate program within our chapter.

As noted in the last newsletter, the third week in April has been designated as Native Plant Week in a California Joint Assembly Resolution. CNPS wants this to be celebrated throughout the county, and this should involve other conservation, horticultural, and natural history-related organizations. If any of you have any special relationships with such an organization, let me know.

We are going to need the usual help at the Plant Sale, but also could use some unusual jobs like sign-wavers to stand on the side of LOVR. If anybody wants to dress up like a daisy or something and dance around, we will welcome them. We have no shame when propagating the use of native plants.!

– David Chipping