Opening on May 1 for the 2024 season.
Our shoreline is an often overlooked but beautiful aspect of the Gardens. We’ll take a close look at the wild plants adapted to daily flooding by salt water along the tidal shores of the Back River. Melissa Cullina, Director of Botanical Research and Herbarium, will join us on this tour to give us an expert look at this habitat. Steeper hiking trails and uneven shorelines are a part of this tour.
Plants of salt marsh communities are uniquely adapted to tolerate and survive the stress of repeated, daily salt-water flooding. Learn which members of our wild flora can withstand these harsh conditions and the various mechanisms they’ve evolved to cope with—and even thrive in—environmental conditions that would kill most plants. Melissa will lead you on a low-tide botanical journey into an iconic and vulnerable Maine habitat. Please wear boots or sneakers that can get wet (and maybe redolent of the salt-marsh…).
Identify and collect summer wildflowers, learning to develop your botany skills with resident botanist and Director of Plant Science & Collections, Melissa Cullina. We’ll visit the herbarium, an exciting resource where Melissa and her volunteers have worked to preserve more than 5000 plant specimens! Students will join in, learning how to preserve the flowers collected during class. Each participant will receive their own plant press to take home. Gardens admission included.
Please note this class requires participants to show proof of having received all eligible Covid-19 vaccinations, as recommended for their age by the CDC, in order to participate. Because of the dynamic nature of this situation, we ask that you agree to abide by potential future changes in CMBG’s Covid-19 policy designed to address evolving public health recommendations.
Fridays, August 5 and 12 and Saturday, August 13 | The first step to gardening with Maine’s native plants is meeting them in their wild habitats. Over this two-day class, CMBG’s Research Botanist, Melissa Cullina, will help students recognize 50 or more frequent coastal species.
This class will focus on the identification of 10 – 15 of Maine’s goldenrods. Not only looking alike, but blooming roughly at the same time (late-summer to October) can make them a challenge to identify. Via slideshow, take a close look at our herbarium specimens, and then through field investigations, we’ll look at the features that distinguish one goldenrod from another, becoming familiar with their respective habitats. Please come with a hand lens if you have one, otherwise we’ll provide them. (This class also pairs well with Plant ID & Ecology: Asters, on Friday, September 30, 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.)
We’ll begin at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, then students drive off-site to a nearby nature preserve to continue the class.
Please note this class requires participants to show proof of having received all eligible Covid-19 vaccinations, as recommended for their age by the CDC, in order to participate. Because of the dynamic nature of this situation, we ask that you agree to abide by potential future changes in CMBG’s Covid-19 policy designed to address evolving public health recommendations.
Wednesday-Friday, August 16-18, 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. | The first step to gardening with Maine’s native plants is meeting them in their wild habitats. Over this three-day in-person class, Melissa Cullina, the Gardens’ Director of Plant Science & Collections, will help students recognize 50 or more frequent coastal species. She will cover basic plant identification skills, terminology, and botanical etymology. Guided walks, both at the Gardens and a Boothbay Region Land Trust property, will help students practice skills and collect samples for identification and botanizing native species.
The mission of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is to inspire meaningful connections among people, plants, and nature through horticulture, education, and research.
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