WCU Stories      August 5, 2024

By Julia Duvall

For the past four decades, Western Carolina University has hosted the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference, bringing together all kinds of Southeastern native plant enthusiasts including landscape architects, commercial nursery operators, garden club members, botanists and horticulturists.

The conference began in 1984 when the Tennessee Valley Authority had $14,000 available for outreach projects in the Southeast. The TVA directed $7,000 to underwrite a “plant utilization” meeting. WCU was chosen as the location so participants could stay in the dorms and eat in the cafeteria to save on costs.

The purpose of the conference is to increase interest in and knowledge of propagating and preserving native Southeastern plant species in the landscape.

The first conference had 127 participants, but that number has more than tripled in the decades since the first gathering.

This year’s conference, held July 17-20, featured workshops, fieldtrips to places such as the Blue Ridge Parkway, concurrent sessions and talks held on the main stage in the Ramsey Regional Activity Center on a variety of native plant-related topics.

Dawn Sherry, the director of the conference, is always impressed by the range of professions represented every year.

“This conference brings together nursery growers, botanists, college educators and just a diverse range of plant enthusiasts that bring all of these different and unique perspectives to native plants,” she said. “I am a science person and then come here and get the opportunity to hear from a landscape designer, so that is what makes this conference so special.”

Adam Bigelow, a WCU alumnus who organizes the field trips for the conference, has been studying and working with native plants of the Southeast for nearly 20 years.

“I am a direct product of this conference. I came on a whim to one 19 years ago before I started horticulture school and what I learned impacted everything I did going forward,” he said. “People leave their plant silos and come here and the cross pollination, pun intended, that happens is so refreshing and energizing because a lot of us are off doing our own thing and are in our own heads, so here we get to talk to fellow plant enthusiasts and share what we are doing.”

Some of the founders of the first conference were in attendance of the 40th anniversary celebration panel.

“A few of the original folks were talking about how amazing it is to know that this conference is persisting 40 years later,” Sherry said. “They talked about how the original idea was to bring in experts to teach conference attendees new things about the plants but we all now recognize that the experts are also here to learn so it is this great synergy and exchanging of ideas that happens every year that I don’t think is found at other conferences.”

Bigelow is hopeful for what the next 40 years holds for the annual conference.

“In our work, we highlight and celebrate the elders in the plant community by carrying their work forward,” he said. “We get inspired, we learn and we get to teach the young people and they teach us, so it is this beautiful collective energy we create and I am excited to see how the conference continues to grow. Learning doesn’t just happen at the workshops, it happens at dinner, it happens in our evening networking sessions. I like to say, ‘I got my bachelor’s from WCU and I got my master’s and PhD in the parking lot at the Cullowhee Native Plant Conference.’”