Retrospective – RIWPS
This talk, by Lisa Lofland Gould, was delivered on November 12, 2022 during a Panel Discussion: Seeding the Future at the University of Rhode Island. This event commemorated RIWPS 35th Anniversary. Brian Maynard, Professor of Plant Sciences at URI and RIWPS Board member served as moderator. Lisa Lofland Gould, a founder and former leader of RIWPS opened with this talk. Lisa and the other two panelists Uli Lorimer, horticulture director of the Native Plant Trust, Heather McCargo, founder of the Wild Seed Project, in Maine then went on to discuss where we go from here, in this era of climate change and exploding interest in native plants. Link to a recording of Seeding the Future.
The Rhode Island Wild Plant Society had its beginnings in 1986, in the cookhouse at the Audubon Society of RI’s Eppley Wildlife Refuge, where several of us had gathered to learn about wild plant cultivation. I remember telling the group about the Wildflower Garden Club that my mother belonged to, in North Carolina—a group of people who enjoyed gardening with native plants and also loved exploring natural areas. As we talked, we agreed that it would be great to have a Rhode Island group dedicated to wild plants, both in our yards and in the state’s wild areas, but we quickly decided that we wanted to go beyond gardening and having fun together in beautiful places: we wanted to reach out to the wider community to provide education in native plant appreciation, cultivation, and conservation.
With Betty Salomon and me leading the charge but with many others in the brigade, contacting friends and bringing together like-minded people, within a year we were a fully incorporated organization, with a Board of Trustees, dues, and by-laws (drawn up by the current RIWPS president, Peter Lacouture); within a few months of our incorporation, we already boasted 150 memberships!
I wish I could name everybody who has worked so hard making RIWPS such a great success these past 35 years, but then we would be here all day, as there are so many dedicated people who deserve recognition! However, I would like to name our original Board, as some of you are still actively involved with RIWPS (and far too many who are no longer with us):
First Board of Directors: Lisa Gould, President; Betty Salomon, Vice-president; Nancy Magendantz, Recording Secretary; Martha Marshall, Corresponding Secretary and Marnie Lacouture, Treasurer
Members-at-large: Edith Calderara,Rick Enser, Gilbert George, Roger Goos, Millie House, Katherine Kinsey, Helen Lusi, Margaret Stone, Irene Stuckey and Dorothy Swift
We worked hard to put together a board of people who hailed from all over Rhode Island, and who represented a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Basically, RIWPS was formed around a shared love of wild plants and especially wild plants in context, in their natural communities. That led us to want to go beyond being a garden club and have conservation and educational components. To me, the great success of RIWPS has been its broad base, offering activities of all kinds that appeal to a wide group of people.
Within the first 5 or 6 years of our existence, we were offering 50 or 60 events per year, including walks, plant sales, propagation workshops, lectures, garden tours, and ID classes. The first Seed Starters group was formed in our early years. We conducted many plant inventories for townships and conservation organizations, providing a great deal of valuable data about Rhode Island’s natural areas. We published newsletters, cultivation notes, Fun Pages for children, and informational handouts. We created library displays and Plant ID boards and Plant Discovery boxes to entertain and inform school children, and we were giving prizes at the State Science Fair and small scholarships to college students. We sponsored legislation to add Sea Lavender to the Christmas Greens law. And in our 5th or 6th year, I believe, we were making plans to prepare a display for the first R.I. Spring Flower & Garden show; those displays, as most of you know, won many awards over the years. Kay Kinsey put it well: “Education and Agitation”!
What motivated us? In preparation for our 10th anniversary celebration, I asked a random selection of members to talk about just that. A major theme, of course, was development: the carving up of open land and woodlands into house lots, subdivisions, malls, and roads, and the subsequent loss of the plants and animals that once inhabited our fields, hedgerows, and forests. There was grief over the loss of specific plants—gentians, orchids, lilies–and the loss of wild land you could freely walk over. Others mentioned invasive plants overwhelming our native vegetation. In general, people felt sadness at the changes and powerless to alter their course. 125 years ago, W. Whitman Bailey, who published Among Rhode Island Wildflowers, had the same lament: “Now, in view of the inevitable encroachment of streets and houses, we are silent while the heart is aching. It is hard to see what Nature made so beautiful debased and ruined.”
More importantly, people were motivated by a love of place: Rhode Island’s flora may not be so grand as the flora of the Midwest prairies or the Great Smoky Mountains, but the small scale in itself creates a kind of intimacy, a treasuring of what is here, in the full awareness that there is so little of it. There is such pleasure in greeting old friends, like the first Trailing Arbutus of spring, or being introduced to a plant you’ve never met before, say, Bastard Toadflax. “Flowerizing” was what Ken & Betty Weber called it.
What other small state has as many land trusts as Rhode Island, as well as a very active Audubon Society and Nature Conservancy, both major conservation-land owners in Rhode Island? Rhode Island is about the same size as the county I live in in NC + the county to the immediate east, but those counties, and 7 others, have one large land trust. Rhode Island has 45 land trusts and conservancies!
RIWPS members were also motivated by the delight in being with people who share a common passion and want to spread that pleasure around. Many of us have stories about the people who got us interested in wild plants, maybe during our childhood or by adult friends who shared their excitement and passed the contagion along.
And yes, we were aware of climate change. In 1988, the year after RIWPS formed, I was sent to represent RIWPS at a World Wildlife Fund conference in Washington, D.C., called Consequences of the Greenhouse Effect for Biological Diversity, attended by over 300 people from conservation agencies, botanical gardens, zoos, international, federal, and state agencies, and academic institutions. And kudos to RIWPS: we were the only state plant society represented there. I should note that virtually everything predicted by the ecologists and climatologists who spoke at that conference has come to pass: more severe and frequent storms, melting icebergs and sea level rise, collapsing permafrost, warmer winters, movement of tropical diseases into temperate zones, droughts, floods, and wildfires, and much more, and all of it happening at such a rate that our plant and animal communities cannot keep up with. If you want to learn more about this conference, check out the Winter 2018 edition of WildfloraRI. Climate change has been on our mind, so I’m grateful to participate in today’s discussion about it.
Finally, I just want to say how wonderful it is to be with so many friends today and commend ALL of you for the amazing work you’ve done over these past 4 decades. Whether you’ve served on the Board, written newsletter articles, created websites and blogs, started seeds and tended plants for the sales, kept the office going, led walks, donated funds, inventoried properties, helped create the garden show displays, grew native landscapes in your yard, or simply enjoyed participating in the Society’s activities—whatever you’ve done—you deserve great credit. Kudos to you all and keep up the wonderful work!