trilliums in trouble, with mt. cuba’s amy highland

My guest is Amy Highland, the Director of Collections and Conservation Lead at Mt. Cuba Center, a botanic garden and native plant conservation nonprofit in Delaware, one of three organizations behind the findings.

Amy, a graduate of Purdue’s Public Horticulture program, has traveled throughout the temperate forest of North America to find rare plants in need of conservation. We talked about trilliums and also how we as gardeners can be more involved in conservation of native plants over all. (That’s Trillium grandiflorum‘Quicksilver,’ A Mt. Cuba introduction, above.)

Read along as you listen to the April 25, 2022 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Margaret Roach: Happy spring, Amy. I bet it’s beautiful down there at Mt. Cuba right now.

Amy Highland: It is. Things are popping every day.

Margaret: I bet. I bet. So in the report that I’ve read and all of this information about trilliums that we’re going to get into, I was not surprised to see Mt. Cuba as one of the three conservation organizations behind this report on the endangered status of trillium. But one of the others, the New Mexico BioPark Society, or Albuquerque BioPark, it did surprise me because I don’t think there are any native trillium in New Mexico, are there? So tell us about them