- Best Club Website: and you are reading it RIGHT NOW!
- Best Digital Photography (Other Plants)
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| Beebalm |
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| Chickasaw Plum |
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| Indian Blanket |
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| Ironweed |
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| Passion Flower |
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Two FFGC Awards for Us!
We are happy to announce that our club won two awards from the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs this year:
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Sarah Bailey Honored as Miss Aggie 2016
The Mandarin Museum Historical Society honored our long-time Switzerland Garden Club Member, Sarah Bailey, with their Miss Aggie 2016 Award. Several of our members were able to attend the ceremony on March 5 at the Mandarin Store. Enjoy the photos of the event! 
Sarah was the center of much-deserved attention, and not one to rest on her laurels, she proceeded to show us a map of the waterways in St. Johns County and explain how important it is to keep the Julington-Durbin Creek wetlands pristine and undisturbed. If you have never been to the Julington-Durbin Preserve, click the link to see what it has to offer residents by way of recreation and how important it is to preserving our local environment. At the end of this post is an excerpt is from the Mandarin Museum Historical Society's March 2016 newsletter highlighting Sarah Bailey's work and accomplishments.
We
are very pleased to honor long-time Julington Creek resident, Sarah
Bailey, as our 2016 recipient of the Miss Aggie Award. Sarah has been an
active member and leader in this community for decades and has made an
impact that is hard to measure. She has touched many lives.
As you probably know, the "Miss Aggie Award" is presented to a female who has contributed to the community of Mandarin in the areas of business, civic, educational or charitable accomplishment. MMHS presents an annual award in honor of Agnes Jones, Mandarin's Postmistress from 1928-1964.
Few people know and live Mandarin history like Sarah Bailey. For more than 55 years Sarah has owned Needmore Land & Cattle Company on Bishop Estates Road, and from from the late 1960s to the early 1980s she and her husband John hosted the regional Girl Scout Day Camp at their ranch. During her years as a St. Johns County Commissioner, 1982-94, she served on regional Jacksonville-based infrastructure committees, always emphasizing natural resource protection and the cultural history shared between Mandarin and Northwest St. Johns County. She is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Mandarin Museum & Historical Society, and has offered leadership and dedication to the Environmental Education Resource Council. She is an authority on the history of Mandarin, Julington Creek and Fruit Cove.
As you probably know, the "Miss Aggie Award" is presented to a female who has contributed to the community of Mandarin in the areas of business, civic, educational or charitable accomplishment. MMHS presents an annual award in honor of Agnes Jones, Mandarin's Postmistress from 1928-1964.
Few people know and live Mandarin history like Sarah Bailey. For more than 55 years Sarah has owned Needmore Land & Cattle Company on Bishop Estates Road, and from from the late 1960s to the early 1980s she and her husband John hosted the regional Girl Scout Day Camp at their ranch. During her years as a St. Johns County Commissioner, 1982-94, she served on regional Jacksonville-based infrastructure committees, always emphasizing natural resource protection and the cultural history shared between Mandarin and Northwest St. Johns County. She is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Mandarin Museum & Historical Society, and has offered leadership and dedication to the Environmental Education Resource Council. She is an authority on the history of Mandarin, Julington Creek and Fruit Cove.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Monarch Committee Year-End Report 2015 by Mickey Fraser, Butterfly Monarch Conservation Committee Chair
Note: This article is available at our website, www.switzerlandgc.org To read it online, go to the website and look
for the link, Monarch Committee Report, under NEWS in
the right-hand column of the home page. Click here to view a PDF version of the report.
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| monarch caterpillar on native aquatic milkweed |
In the summer of 2014 I shared my photos of the monarch caterpillars in my yard feasting on the milkweed I planted by posting Support Your Local Monarchs on our website. I was captivated by their voracious appetite and by their chrysalises, which soon adorned my shingled home. I felt I was watching a magnificent story unfold with every monarch that took wing. I became interested in the plight of the monarch as a species when I read that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had recently been petitioned by the Xerces Society, the Center for Food Safety, and the Center for Biological Diversity for protection for the monarch as an endangered species. Over the course of 2015, the FWS has been considering the petition's claims that monarch populations have declined nearly 90 percent in the past twenty years and will continue to do so without regulatory intervention. The petition suggested that loss of native milkweed, the monarch's only larval food, was in large part responsible for their decline. Use of neonicotinoid-based pesticides, as well as growing genetically-modified (GMO) food crops were also implicated.
I turned to Monarch Watch to help me certify my garden as a Monarch Waystation and I subsequently obtained the same status for our Freedom Butterfly Garden in Alpine Groves Park containing native pollinator plants. That's when the Garden Club of Switzerland's Butterfly Monarch Committee was born. We spent almost six months researching ways to support our local monarchs, including those suggested in the petition to the FWS. At our May planning meeting we pooled the money we'd made with garden club raffles and resolved to use it to obtain native milkweed for homeowners and public lands in order to promote more Monarch Waystations.
This task proved more difficult than we'd first thought. Our order for native tuberosa milkweed was never filled, as statewide requests for this species outstripped the supply. For several months, all we could find in our local garden stores was the non-native tropical milkweed. At the start of 2015, following the advice of several monarch advocacy groups, we thought that this tropical variety would be an acceptable alternative. Then we read Dr. Jared Daniels findings and the findings of other researchers who found evidence that the tropical variety was not an acceptable substitute for long-term monarch sustainability.
While we were searching for the right milkweed we also mounted an educational project to introduce the topic of the monarch (and other butterflies) to the public. We registered our Freedom Butterfly Garden in a North American Butterfly Association (NABA) Butterfly Circle, the Bartram Trail Butterfly Circle. On June 2 our members participated in the NABA 4th of July Butterfly Count at Alpine Groves Park. Our Publicity Committee Chair, Dianne Battle, wrote a series of newspaper articles to educate the public. Her first, Butterflies Count about our NABA butterfly count activity, appeared in the July issue of our local newspaper, The Creekline. She wrote a follow-up article in the August edition, "How High Does the Swallowtail Fly?" describing how to identify butterflies using various criteria, including flight characteristics and plants they associate with. She posted a slideshow on our website, Butterflies in the Garden, to help distinguish between different types of butterflies.
In July we were able to locate some native milkweed, the white aquatic milkweed, ... We purchased two batches of these plants. Since aquatic milkweed require a swampy environment, these plants would prove unsuitable for distribution to the average homeowner. We were able to locate two additional areas where the plants would be viewable by the public and where there was a steward or knowledgeable person who could speak to the plight of the monarchs and the need for their native larval host plants: Trout Creek Park, a public recreational center and Saturiwa, a conservation easement property dedicated to promoting wildlife habitat restoration. The September issue of The Creekline covered our activities with the story, "Monarchs on the Brink,"
We are proud of our actions this past year to Protect our Pollinators by planting native milkweed and educating the public about the dangers of pesticides to pollinators. We are anxiously awaiting the findings of the FWS regarding the monarch's status as an endangered species, and, regardless of their determination, our committee is making plans to promote the planting of additional native milkweed and supporting the monarch and other pollinators.
Online References:
Saturiwa: A Habitat for Longleaf Pine and Monarchs
Protecting Our Pollinators -
Kickoff meeting of the Monarch Committee
Monarchs on the Brink September 2015 Issue of The Creekline newspaper
Butterflies, Our Blog, and a Blue Moon July 31
How High Does the Swallowtail Fly? featured in the August 2015 The Creekline newspaper
Butterflies in the Garden A Slideshow
Butterflies Count - And So Did We!
Butterflies Count: July 2015 The Creekline newspaper
I turned to Monarch Watch to help me certify my garden as a Monarch Waystation and I subsequently obtained the same status for our Freedom Butterfly Garden in Alpine Groves Park containing native pollinator plants. That's when the Garden Club of Switzerland's Butterfly Monarch Committee was born. We spent almost six months researching ways to support our local monarchs, including those suggested in the petition to the FWS. At our May planning meeting we pooled the money we'd made with garden club raffles and resolved to use it to obtain native milkweed for homeowners and public lands in order to promote more Monarch Waystations.
This task proved more difficult than we'd first thought. Our order for native tuberosa milkweed was never filled, as statewide requests for this species outstripped the supply. For several months, all we could find in our local garden stores was the non-native tropical milkweed. At the start of 2015, following the advice of several monarch advocacy groups, we thought that this tropical variety would be an acceptable alternative. Then we read Dr. Jared Daniels findings and the findings of other researchers who found evidence that the tropical variety was not an acceptable substitute for long-term monarch sustainability.
While we were searching for the right milkweed we also mounted an educational project to introduce the topic of the monarch (and other butterflies) to the public. We registered our Freedom Butterfly Garden in a North American Butterfly Association (NABA) Butterfly Circle, the Bartram Trail Butterfly Circle. On June 2 our members participated in the NABA 4th of July Butterfly Count at Alpine Groves Park. Our Publicity Committee Chair, Dianne Battle, wrote a series of newspaper articles to educate the public. Her first, Butterflies Count about our NABA butterfly count activity, appeared in the July issue of our local newspaper, The Creekline. She wrote a follow-up article in the August edition, "How High Does the Swallowtail Fly?" describing how to identify butterflies using various criteria, including flight characteristics and plants they associate with. She posted a slideshow on our website, Butterflies in the Garden, to help distinguish between different types of butterflies.
In July we were able to locate some native milkweed, the white aquatic milkweed, ... We purchased two batches of these plants. Since aquatic milkweed require a swampy environment, these plants would prove unsuitable for distribution to the average homeowner. We were able to locate two additional areas where the plants would be viewable by the public and where there was a steward or knowledgeable person who could speak to the plight of the monarchs and the need for their native larval host plants: Trout Creek Park, a public recreational center and Saturiwa, a conservation easement property dedicated to promoting wildlife habitat restoration. The September issue of The Creekline covered our activities with the story, "Monarchs on the Brink,"
We are proud of our actions this past year to Protect our Pollinators by planting native milkweed and educating the public about the dangers of pesticides to pollinators. We are anxiously awaiting the findings of the FWS regarding the monarch's status as an endangered species, and, regardless of their determination, our committee is making plans to promote the planting of additional native milkweed and supporting the monarch and other pollinators.
Online References:
Saturiwa: A Habitat for Longleaf Pine and Monarchs
Protecting Our Pollinators -
Kickoff meeting of the Monarch Committee
Monarchs on the Brink September 2015 Issue of The Creekline newspaper
Butterflies, Our Blog, and a Blue Moon July 31
How High Does the Swallowtail Fly? featured in the August 2015 The Creekline newspaper
Butterflies in the Garden A Slideshow
Butterflies Count - And So Did We!
Butterflies Count: July 2015 The Creekline newspaper
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