This April I went down to Knoxville, TN to visit Lakeshore Park and see our ongoing work there as well as do site analysis for a new project area. The park sits on a bend of the Tennessee River southwest of downtown Knoxville with beautiful vistas down and across the river to high forested bluffs and the mountains beyond. This 185-acre park is the most visited in Knoxville and represents a public/private partnership between the City of Knoxville (which owns the land) and the Lakeshore Park Conservancy (which funds the park and sees to its maintenance, management, stewardship, and development).
Nelson Byrd Woltz was brought on to create a comprehensive masterplan for the park with LWLA providing meadow design and management protocols.
While the installed meadows are still in the early stages of development, we are also in the process of designing a new meadow in Sector 7 of the park, which is comprised of a long slope up to a graded plateau and will respond to both views of the park and river.
As always it was a pleasure to meet with the clients in person to discuss their vision and our goals and role. LWLA is also partnering with Roundstone Native seed to enact site preparation and to provide much of the seed for the project, and it was a treat to meet with and about the design (as well as just generally talk about plants) with Roundstone’s owner, John Seymour.
Additionally, while I was in Tennessee, I took the opportunity to visit some nearby managed natural areas to get to see some of the splendor of Appalachia’s spring ephemeral display. Both Ijams Nature Center and University of Tennessee’s Dean’s Woods still have some excellent intact native flora and I got to see a number of native species I’ve never encountered in the wild, including: Delphinium tricorne (Dwarf Larkspur), Hydrastis canadensis (Goldenseal), Stellaria corei (Tennessee Starwort), and Trillium luteum (Yellow Wakerobin) as well as more familiar species in as yet before unseen profusion like Geranium maculatum (Wild Geranium) and Phlox divaricata (Woodland Blue Phlox).
It was great to visit a project site I’d previously only worked on from afar and to get to see native plants in situ, as always.