Fall Botany Festival

The Fall Botany Festival will teach participants about the amazing native plants of the Anza-Borrego desert and their role in the ecology of the desert. Plants suitable for home gardens will be on sale, as well as plant books and other botanical items. There will also be guided walks in the Visitor Center garden, and volunteer naturalists will be on hand to answer questions about plants and to help identify some of the desert plants.

From 1 PM to 3 PM, Maureen Gilmer, author, horticulturalist, and landscape designer, will give a presentation in the Visitor Center’s Discovery Lab. Gilmer is well-known in the gardening media in North America through books, television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. She is the author of 15 books on gardening and the environment, and she writes a national syndicated column called “Yardsmart.” Gilmer is also the host and project designer for the television series “Weekend Gardening,” and a frequent guest lecturer at various arboretums, education institutions, and garden shows.

Gilmer’s newest book is Palm Springs-Style Gardening: Complete Plants and Practices for Gorgeous Dryland Gardens, a valuable resource for dryland gardeners everywhere. Offering a unique blend of succulent plants tolerant of high heat, plus desert-adapted trees, shrubs, and perennials, Palm Springs-Style Gardening brings these often overlooked species to communities desperately in need of new plant material better adapted to these trying conditions. Gilmer will be available after her presentation to sign books and answer questions about desert gardening.

This is the first public event scheduled by the newly formed Anza-Borrego Desert State Park Botany Society. The mission of the new society is “to benefit Anza-Borrego Desert State Park by providing a resource for the education, appreciation, and enhanced interest in the flora of the park through training, field trips, workshops, and programs.”

Other activities taking place at the Visitor Center during the day will include:

Plant and Book Sale, 9 am - 5 pm:  Native plants suitable for the home garden, and a selection of gardening books.

Lifestyles of the Hot and Thirsty, 10 am:  Cactus and their adaptations to desert living, a naturalist-led walk in the Visitor Center garden (Free).

Usefulness of Desert Plants Display, 11 am - 3 pm (Free).

Desert Mart, 11 am:  Native American uses of desert plants, a naturalist-led walk in the Visitor Center garden (Free).

Many of the members of the society are parabotanists for the San Diego Natural History Museum collecting plant specimens in the Park for San Diego County’s Plant Atlas Project. The Botany Society welcomes new members. For more information, please contact Kim Marsden, Environmental Scientist, at the Colorado Desert District office for California State Parks in Borrego Springs at 760-767-4960.