Wild collection of native woodland wildflowers
This was on my radar, but I hadn't actually realized that this was a cottage industry in the Southern Appalachians. Not a good thing. A late afternoon trip to my local big-box store (for snow pea and sugar snap pea seeds) had me noticing a rack of woodland wildflowers packaged in small peat-filled packets. Hmm, what were these, I thought? They're cheap ($2.48); they represent a laundry list of nice woodland wildflowers, but where have they come from? I bought a few as an experiment. They're very small plants (it's hard to imagine wild collection, actually), but they're labelled as nursery-grown (a usual fogging-term for wild-collected, rather than nursery-propagated). And the source - a company called Botanical Wonders in Dobson, NC - doesn't have a website (hmm) -- quite unusual in a digital age. And there are web links to less than upstanding activities, too. The packages that I've looked at so far are quite interesting. The VA bluebells ( Mertensia v...