Endangered tree exhibit at Quarryhill
In an effort to help educate the public, Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen is displaying the traveling exhibit “Vanishing Acts: Trees Under Threat” from the Morton Arboretum in Illinois. This exhibit takes a compelling look at various threatened and endangered trees and includes 17 displays, located throughout the garden, each highlighting a different endangered plant. By making people aware of these plants, Quarryhill’s hope is that they will better protect them.
The exhibit will be at Quarryhill between now and early May 2014 before moving on to another conservation minded organization in the U.S. To date, this exhibit has been in a number of famed public gardens and universities such as Brookgreen Gardens, Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, Holden Arboretum, ForMar Arboretum, The Gardens at Southern Illinois University and the University of Guelph Arboretum to name a few.
While the total number of tree and plant species at risk is not exactly clear, the estimates that exist are alarming. A study in 2010 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Natural History Museum, London, estimated that one in five of the world’s plant species are dangerously rare or threatened with extinction. And the situation is also dire for trees. According to the World List of Threatened Trees, 10 percent of all known tree species are endangered. Current documented extinction rates are nearly 1,000 times higher than the rate at which species have been naturally going extinct for the past 65 million years.
Quarryhill is located at 12841 Sonoma Hwy. in Glen Ellen. For more information, call 996-3166 or go to www.quarryhillbg.org.