Dedication to Virginia Smith

The dedication to Virginia Smith was Thursday, September 26th with Virginia’s Son, Frank, and wife, and granddaughter as well as the latest generation, her great-granddaughter!

Carol Mueller, BTPL director, gave a welcoming speech and Frank Smith spoke mentioning a sign that his mother, Virginia, had in her window at home: All a person needs in life is a Library and a Garden.

Trustee, Judy Lindstrom, also mentioned the look of the garden, designed and installed by Jim Slezinski, senior landscape designer/horticulturist of Goldner Walsh Garden & Home with his landscape team: Victor, Troy, and Julian. The Birds & Butterflies Garden is surrounding the Virginia Smith Tricolor Beech tree that she donated to the Bloomfield Township Public Library in May 2018.

The garden includes trees, shrubs, perennials, and spring-flowering bulbs all to attract butterflies, pollinators, and birds that feed on the fruits, berries, and seeds as well as hummingbirds that feed on the flower nectar during the summer. One of the shrubs, in fact, is named Clethra ‘Hummingbird’ which has white, fragrant flowers in July/August that are magnets for the hummingbirds!  The small Sargentina flowering crabapple will have tiny red “apples” that will attract the over-wintering birds as well as some of the berries on the several viburnum shrubs.

Other perennials that are relished by the butterflies, as well as other pollinators for the nectar in flowers, include the Rudbeckia, black-eyed-Susan; the purple coneflower; the blanket flower, Gazania; the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’; and the asters.  The tubular flowers of penstemons will also draw hummingbirds as well as the flowers of coral bells, heucheras.  Goldfinches will feed on the seeds of the coneflowers and coreopsis during late fall into winter.  Some of the first spring-flowering bulbs: daffodils, alliums, and hyacinths will bring out the early pollinators.  And the earliest flowering hellebores, Lenten Roses will push through the snow and perhaps some pollinators will find that earliest nectar then!