NARGS and Chapter Events

The Ontario Rock Garden and Hardy Plant Society will host a speaker from South Africa during the coming winter. Louis Jordaan from Minwater Farms near Oudtshooran will be in Ontario at the beginning of February 2014. He is an expert on the Little Karoo ( the semi-desert in S. Africa ) where he lives. He frequently takes people on botanical tours of his farm, and speaks througtout South Africa. We would like to offer him as a speaker to groups who are prepared to pay his travel from Toronto and an honorarium.

Saturday September 7, 2013

Scheduling for The Speakers Tour for 2014 with Martin Walsh Spring Tour in the West and Mike Kington Fall Tour in the East will begin in earnest at the end of July.  Please submit your requests by July 31 to give chapters the opportunity to plan their 2014 calenders.

The new nargs.org website that is on schedule to go online in June will utilize non-technical, member initiated editorial control. This will make for a more timely and dynamic state that is responsive to our membership. We are looking for volunteers to perform near and long term work on the new site.

We have engaged Monarch Digital to develop a new web site for NARGS. One area where member input is valued is around the "theming" of the site, which is the design or the look and feel. This would include page layouts for the various areas of the site, including the home page. It would also include colors, use of graphics, line styles, icons, menus, common header and footer, etc.

I invite you to contribute to the discussion of theming the new site. Maybe you would like to draw our attention to a nicely "themed" web site that you have visited.

You may have noticed from reading the Bulletin Board that the Internet Committee is pursuing the development of a new website for nargs.org.

The most important features of the proposed new site are the following:

As November moves rapidly toward it's conclusion, I thought I'd remind everyone that on December 15 the new online Seed Exchange will be ready for it's initial roll-out. Over the past few years the Seed Exchange has had fewer participants, primarily due to a rather diminished variety of interesting seeds, in particular fewer wild collected seeds. So in an effort to generate more interest we've purchased quite a bit of seed from Alplains for the Seed Exchange, and the variety and quality is unsurpassed.

As some of you may know, Frank Cabot died on this past Saturday at age 86. Here is a link to a tribute to Frank, written by Panayoti Kelaidis. It's beautiful and reflects the collective debt we all owe to the man Panayoti suggests was "the most eminent gardener of our era, and possibly the greatest gardener America has ever produced."

http://www.botanicgardensblog.com/2011/11/21/passing-of-true-gardener/