I love Friday mornings; I have Mike Ruggerio’s Woody Ornamentals class, which requires us to walk the NY Botanical Gardens with our Trees book and hone our skills with identifying the Garden’s trees and shrubs by using the guide.
Mike is a font of information that offers quite a few shortcuts – things to look for that might be exclusive to a particular plant/tree. For example, if the leaf is not symmetrical, it’s an elm. If there are multiple buds at the end of a branch, it’s an oak, etc.
This week, Mike harvested a very large white button mushroom that was growing on the lawn on the way to the azalea garden – it was literally as big as my head! He ended up cutting it up and letting us taste it… who knew that it had some great nutritional value?
It’s too bad this class is only two hours long!
Katie's Folly 