Acknowledgement
"We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."
– Maya Angelou
Part of our mission is to promote dialogue on the history and future of plants, which can't be done without having a dialogue about the history and future of people. Today is Juneteenth, celebrating the end of slavery in America, which puts an important emphasis on the need to confront the entrenched and enduring history of racism in our country.
This history is still alive today. We see it in the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on black and other marginalized communities. We see it in disproportionate levels of poverty and hunger (Black households in America struggle with food insecurity at a rate double the national average).
While we are currently working to support our local community through our food relief programming, we know there is much more we need to do, as individuals and as an organization, to build a just and equitable society.
We delight in the beauty of the Oak Spring and Rokeby landscapes, and often herald the work done by our founder Bunny Mellon during the mid-20th Century to foster such beauty, but not often enough do we acknowledge the history of this land that pre-dates the Mellons. We know that Rokeby was once farmed for profit using the stolen labor of enslaved people. Before being forcibly displaced by the same European settlement that brought chattel slavery, indigenous people occupied these lands. To become better stewards of this land, we need to recognize this history, and to understand how racism connects to the environmental aspect of our mission and to the enormous challenge of climate change.
If you, like us, would like to learn more about these issues, we recommend taking a look at the list we have compiled of articles and essays that examine racism and environmentalism in light of the protests that have swept the country following the needless killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others.
Read below to see some of our latest updates, and we hope you will join us in continuing to learn so that we may all actively work to build a better future – for plants and for people.
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Apprenticeship:
We are accepting applications for a year long, full-time, paid apprenticeship for a 2020 graduate of a Fauquier County High School. This apprentice will work at our Biocultural Conservation Farm from this June until December, and will then assist with various conservation and land management projects across the estate during the winter. Read our flier and apply >
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Fellowships & Residencies:
We are still accepting applications for our 2021 roster of Fellowship and Residency programs. These programs all include funding in the form of an individual grant or travel reimbursement, and are designed to support artists, researchers and writers of many disciplines whose work focuses on plants, the natural world, and humankind's place in it. Application deadline is August 12, 2020.
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Reading the Landscape:
Applications are open for our field course in landscape interpretation, scheduled to take place at Oak Spring from October 25-30, 2020. While we are planning for this course to go ahead as planned, we are carefully monitoring the ongoing need for social distancing throughout the summer, and will notify selected participants by mid-September if we need to postpone the course until 2021.
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Last week we were thrilled to launch Fantastic Flora, an exhibit about plants and the incredible ways they adapt to thrive in a changing world. Every #FantasticFloraFriday, we will add a new digital poster – featuring an image from our library along with some basic information – to the exhibit until early 2021, when print-ready posters from the entire “Fantastic Flora” collection will be available for free download to schools, environmental organizations, botanic gardens and other organizations who wish to use them in their programs.
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Shelter in Art
In May, we put out a call for artists to respond to the pandemic by creating art that re-examines their relationship to the natural world following social-distancing, quarantines, and state-sanctioned stay-at-home orders.
This digital exhibit is the outcome of that program. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we feature another artist, writer, or musician on our social media pages and add them to the exhibit.
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We are thrilled to announce the release of this beautifully illustrated book on the Trompe l'Oeil paintings at Oak Spring. Both scholarly and accessible to all, it provides a fascinating insight into the private world and intellectual passions of Paul and Bunny Mellon through the two trompe l’oeil paintings that they commissioned for their main residence. Read an excerpt from the book or visit our online store to purchase a copy.
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