Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. At least, it was for Margaret Murray Bloom, who as a local event planner (and a woman tired of hauling around a purse all day) needed a solution to keep her hands free.
“I developed the idea from a true pain point,” Bloom says. “I never knew where to put my phone, wallet and keys. My pockets weren’t big enough for those items and purses never served me well.” So she came up with the Murray Belt, a crossbody belt with “stations” for all the essentials.
It looks a bit like something Wonder Woman or Rey in Star Wars might wear (that is to say, badass), with its thick strap and mobile, removable pouches. But why create a crossbody version? Where a waist belt fails, Bloom says, is in wearability: It doesn’t flatter most figures, has a tendency to pull your pants down and generally isn’t compatible with dresses. Plus, it isn’t particularly secure in a crowd.
“The Murray Belt solves a lot of these problems while giving quick and easy access to core items like your phone,” she says.
Bloom says the belts, which are currently being manufactured at a factory in New York City, are set for an official launch this summer, but she’s already looking toward the next iterations, with a range of textiles to suit different wearers.
“The outdoor collection will be breathable, the production collection will be durable, the utility collection will be water-resistant, the traveler collection will be lightweight, the luxury collection might include leather,” she says.
Late in the evening of Halloween 2008, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakomoto published a white paper to an obscure email list. The paper described a new system of exchanging value, named “Bitcoin,” which wouldn’t require the involvement or intervention of a third party. At the time, the paper was largely ignored. But nearly 10 years later, Bitcoin is worth $150 billion, and a nascent ecosystem of cryptocurrencies and supporting applications has sprung up around it. What happened?
Modern currency fundamentally requires trust in central banks and governments. No one would accept dollars, euros or rubles in exchange for their labor unless they trusted they could spend that money on rent, groceries and gas. But for some people, the idea that a third party can indirectly control the value of their labor this way is irksome. At least for Nakomoto, that motivation seems to have been enough to invent an alternative.
But if currencies require trust, where does Bitcoin’s come from? The paper’s key innovation was to create trust with mathematics and data structures rather than institutional hegemony. Collectively these structures are called a blockchain, so named because transactions are organized into digitally signed groups called blocks, which are then linked together in ways that make it difficult to forge or alter the transactions in them.
In the decade since Bitcoin’s introduction, thousands of cryptocurrencies have been created—and most have languished—each with their own ideas about blockchains. Some have staying power and legitimacy, such as Bitcoin’s more sophisticated sibling, Ethereum. But countless others have proven to be nothing more than meretricious Ponzi schemes that bilked investors of billions.
In such a volatile and unregulated environment, how can one separate the wheat from the chaff? Several entrepreneurs in Charlottesville are coming up with their own answers to this question.
Ryan Adams. Photo: Andrew Shurtleff
Ryan Adams, a longtime technologist and Charlottesville business leader, and part-time blogger for Bitcoin Up Erfahrung, started Mythos Capital to research and explore the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Adams describes Mythos as a “crypto-asset investment company,” whose goal is to determine which visions of blockchain’s future will ultimately survive the test of time and invest in them.
Adams believes that “the playing field is simply too crowded” right now. Eventually, he thinks, “different cryptocurrencies may each take different roles for the distinct responsibilities of money,” in the same way that people use gold bars, credit cards and dollar bills differently.
Others in Charlottesville are coming up with novel ideas for how blockchains could be useful. Seth Baxter and Worth Becker, co-founders of consulting company Neuralux, are working on a new venture called EconomyX to explore how the transparency of blockchains could be used to help investors in private equity markets conduct due diligence. And Moonlighting, a freelance jobs marketplace headquartered in Charlottesville, is promoting its own Moonbit cryptocurrency as a way to help its freelancers get paid.
Blockchain has use potential far greater than just exchanging money; it can be used to preserve historical records, pay parking tickets, even vote. But blockchain technology comes with many trade-offs and regulatory challenges, and there’s a long way to go for any of these ideas to be usable at scale. At one point last year, if you wanted to buy a $5 slice of pizza using Bitcoin, you would pay $50 in transaction fees, wait about an hour for your transaction to clear and consume as much energy as your house uses in a week. That’s a very expensive inconvenience for a cryptocurrency that wants to supplant cash. It’s also a long time to wait for your pizza.
It’s difficult to predict where we’ll be in another 10 years, or if the current blockchain ideas will even be around. Perhaps, much like the internet, it will take many iterations on the core technologies before any of them can achieve ubiquity. But one thing is certain: Lots of people are paying very close attention.
John Feminella is the co-founder of analytics startup UpHex and an adviser at Pivotal. He lives in Charlottesville and enjoys solving difficult technology problems.
T-shirt printing company Custom Ink nets "a few hundred million in revenue," according to founder Marc Katz (below). Photo: Courtesy CustomInk
Custom Ink has been operating out of Charlottesville for nearly a decade, but the company has only recently put its name up for all to see.
The custom design and printing firm, which has shown staggering growth over the last 15 years, focuses on its online audience. Wherever you are in the country, if you want a bushel of unique printed T-shirts, CustomInk.com is your huckleberry.
The city in which Custom Ink’s first and largest production facility is located has always been of less importance.
Company co-founder and CEO Marc Katz launched Customink with several college buddies in Northern Virginia in 2000. The idea was to take the largely fragmented custom T-shirt business—serving clubs, social groups, sports teams, bachelorette parties, nerds, goofballs and hipsters—and give it a single home on the web. Inc. Magazine ranked Customink, little more than a web portal at the time, the 55th fastest growing U.S. business in November 2005.
During the next 12 years, the company, which became Custom Ink in 2017, has grown more than 100 times over in terms of employment. While the privately held business doesn’t divulge specific sales figures, Katz says it’s doing “a few hundred million in revenue and growing.” The Washington Business Journal pegged that estimate at $230 million in 2014 and $300 million the next financial year. Katz told the journal he thought Custom Ink could eventually be a billion-dollar company.
“We are a category leader, and yet we have single digit market share because it is such a large, fragmented business,” Katz says. “It’s competitive, but we think we add a lot more to the industry.”
Always focused on letting customers print T-shirts on hundreds of styles and colors with custom or house-designed graphics, Custom Ink also offers bespoke towels, hats, bumper stickers, holiday ornaments, drinkware and promotional products. Much of the swag is printed right here in C’ville.
Custom Ink launched its first production facility, where it does design, printing and more, in Charlottesville in 2011, around the same time it started opening brick-and-mortar stores throughout Virginia. The local plant opened with just 30 team members but expanded in 2014, tripling its floor space and seeing local employment spike to 185.
Then, earlier this year, Katz and his team christened their first storefront in Charlottesville, setting up shop at Barracks Road. Custom Ink today operates 16 stores nationwide—in Virginia, Texas and Nevada—and plans to open another Virginia location later this year. The brick-and-mortars, Katz says, offer a fun experience that might get lost on the web—customers can stroll into the design center and work directly with a Custom Ink team member. The C’ville location uniquely offers same-day digital printing.
Launching the Charlottesville store is a move intended to not only grow sales but also connect Custom Ink to the community, Katz says. For folks who might not have known the fastest growing T-shirt printer in the country was anchored in C’ville, it’s a shining light of its services.
“Sometimes, if I was out with friends or my wife, I wouldn’t have mentioned [Custom Ink],” says Collin Wilson, manager of the new Barracks Road store. “But now that we have a storefront, I’m a little more forthcoming. It’s actually a natural progression, moving from an online presence only to giving customers an opportunity to come in and touch and feel what we have to offer.”
Grafton Boone, a production manager at the Charlottesville printing plant, says Custom Ink has been laying the groundwork in C’ville for years. “When we first moved down, it was like, ‘Hey, this doesn’t feel like Custom Ink,’” he says. “Now we are a part of the community.”
Long before the shop next to SweetFrog on the north side of the Barracks Road Shopping Center, Custom Ink’s been joining local fundraising initiatives and working with community groups like the Greene County Little League.
Now, people with a belly full of froyo can stroll by and see what’s going on at the nationwide dot-com.
“Business has been great,” Wilson says. “It’s been a lot of fun opening the store, seeing the interest from the community that comes along with that.”
Katz agrees—he couldn’t be happier to see the Custom Ink storefront bringing more local recognition to his nationally-focused company. But, big picture, the Charlottesville presence is much more than just a sign on a shopping center marquee.
“There’s a lot of market potential still out there, and we are very much thinking about the future,” he says. “We want to keep the growth growing, and I would expect Charlottesville will be an important part of the picture on an ongoing basis.”
Spring is traditionally a time of year when the real estate market begins to heat up and people look to move homes. In the Charlottesville area, we have the benefit of a robust economy, stunning natural resources and excellent entertainment. But with our high quality of life comes our seemingly ever-increasing cost of housing.
According to the 2017 Nest Realty Annual Market Report, housing prices in the Charlottesville area have risen each of the last five years to a median value of $295,000 and an average price of $369,551 for 2017. That is compared to a median price of $275,000 and average of $341,534 for 2016. With costs rising across the area, could it actually make more sense to rent, rather than buy? Some argue that renting is tantamount to throwing money away. Others point out that renting a home and investing in other assets, such as stocks, is a more lucrative alternative, with greater liquidity and very little overhead requirements.
Ultimately, the answer to the question of whether to rent or buy a home depends on the needs and circumstances of an individual, or family, and several other complex factors: your level of current retirement savings, how long you intend to own or rent the home and the stability of your job and lifestyle. But, there are other important things to consider.
One oversight people make when deciding if they should rent or purchase a home is in understanding the structure of a mortgage payment. The biggest misunderstanding: Much of the overall interest on a mortgage is paid in the beginning of the contract.
Using the average Charlottesville-area sales price of $369,551, let’s look at the numbers. With a 10 percent down payment and a 4.5 percent annual interest rate for a 30-year loan, the mortgage would cost $1,685.21 per month. No shock there, but dig a little deeper to learn that, for nearly the first 10 years, over $1,000 per month is going directly to interest. For the first month one would pay $1,247.23 in interest and $437.98 in principal. After three years you would still be looking at $1,184.06 in interest and only $501.16 in principal payment. It then takes until November 2032 (more than a decade!) for the value of the equity payments to exceed the interest payments. Including taxes, insurance, closing costs and the other expenses associated with real estate (such as repairs and maintenance), these timelines greatly extend. All this is to say that the ideas of renting as a way of “throwing money away” and buying as “a way to build equity” are both drastic understatements.
David Posner is local investment executive specializing in utilizing socially responsible options for long-term financial goals.
Remember when there was so much talk about supporting the coal industry in West Virginia and it turned out that coal only employed about 12,000 people in a state with a population of 1.8 million? When we make decisions about our community, it’s important to know where we invest our labor force. The university, hospitals, schools and the public sector employ a lot of people in Charlottesville and nearby counties. A surprisingly large number of people work at grocery stores. Some of these big employers are national companies, but more than a few of them have their roots here.
The Virginia state legislature recently passed a bill that will allow farmers to grow hemp statewide. So area kombucha fanatics and music festivalgoers can now update their wardrobes with local goods just like the rest of us.
This, of course, is just the type of joke industrial hemp advocates abhor. Hemp, they say, is a great cash crop, contains a negligible amount of the psychoactive drug that makes weed so much fun and could join soybeans and corn on any farm or make up for former tobacco growers’ lost revenues.
Hemp—it ain’t just for necklaces and Festy bags anymore.
“The reason the industry has so much issue is because of its cousin,” says Jason Amatucci of the Virginia Industrial Hemp Coalition. “But in some states, it has been marijuana that has pushed hemp. We’ve done a lot of research, and people now understand what hemp is and what it is not.”
And what is it exactly? “It’s a great rotation crop,” according to Amatucci and other local agricultural experts.
Photo: Courtesy Steadfast Farm
Hemp history
Thomas Jefferson grew hemp. How bad could it be?
According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, hemp was grown extensively at Monticello in the late 1700s and used primarily for clothes-making. Fast forward a couple hundred years, and the federal Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 put hemp on the same list of controlled substances as smokable dope. The non-psychotropic plant still sits on that list today, though the Hemp Farming Act of 2018, introduced by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is currently on the fast track to the Senate floor for a vote.
This isn’t the first time hemp advocacy has gained ground. As early as 1999, the Virginia General Assembly heeded its constituency and called for the feds to revise their hemp policies. At the time, however, hemp was still closely tied to marijuana, and plenty of folks thought legalizing it meant dank nugs would start popping up in farms all over the country.
Virginia took its own action several years ago, passing the 2014 Agricultural Act and allowing research institutions to work with commercial farmers to grow industrial hemp. The bill did not allow anyone to profit from hemp sales, though, so universities had been confined to exploring future opportunities, with a focus on developing seed and varietals that could thrive in Virginia, exploring applications and processing methods and understanding the soil-fixing properties of the plant.
“Every time farmers put it in, they see their other crops do better,” Amatucci says. “It goes deep and opens up the soil, provides nutrients and more aeration into the soil. It’s a great thing for compact and hard clay soils.”
In April 2018, the state legislature and Governor Ralph Northam enacted House Bill 532 and Senate Bill 247, which allow Virginians to grow and process industrial hemp without being a participant in a research program. The legislation has opened the door to farmers all over the state to register as hemp growers and processors, effective July 1.
Tracking Virginia hemp
Industrial hemp has been around Virginia for hundreds of years, but its history has been marked by setbacks.
1774
Thomas Jefferson references hemp seed in a letter. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation notes hemp was grown at Monticello primarily for clothing fabrication.
1937
Hemp goes on the same federal list of controlled substances as marijuana.
1999
Virginia Legislature passes resolutions calling for a revised federal hemp policy.
2014
Virginia Legislature makes it legal to grow hemp in association with a research entity.
2018
Virginia Legislature opens the door to commercial hemp growth and creates a registry for industrial cultivators; Congress pushes the Hemp Farming Act, which would remove hemp from its list of controlled substances.
Hempheads
Until the new legislation takes effect, researchers at institutions like James Madison University, and more recently the University of Virginia, controlled the state’s hemp game. Michael Timko has headed up the effort at UVA.
“One of the research’s points of emphasis is finding the variety that will best perform and offer the best advantages in Virginia,” Timko says.
But UVA’s first successful harvest was only last October, and Timko says it will be a steep climb to fire up Virginia’s hemp production and compete with other states. The two biggest issues are processing the harvest and maintaining a consistent supply of quality seed through replanting efforts.
Timko and his team are replanting seed from last year’s trial harvest and are bullish about its prospects this year. He says they’ll be looking into certifying some of their seed this year, which is not a requirement but would give farmers confidence that the product they’re buying has the cannabinoid levels and performance characteristics they expect.
Timko believes the new bill, which opens the door to non-research entities looking to grow hemp, should only help university research teams, as they’re likely to grow their list of participating farmers. UVA is expecting a number as high as 15 this year.
“We have our eyes on the larger scope of the research and being ready to contribute to the industry,” Timko says. “From a research point of view, this year is a transitional year, and when we move towards farmers being able to grow without being in partnership with the university, I still think they will be engaged in the research.”
Amatucci is similarly optimistic, saying the new law is a “good foundation for businesses to feel comfortable risking the investment of time and energy to create this industry.” He says 2019 should be a good first year of commercialized hemp growth, but there are still roadblocks, as the industry is “in its infancy.”
Photo: Courtesy Steadfast Farm
Hemp hustling
Marty Phipps has been flipping hemp in Virginia longer than just about anyone. As a major distributor of hemp animal bedding, he’s purchased his raw material from foreign suppliers for years. Now that’s changing.
Phipps said that by 2019, he will have a deal in place with a U.S. processor, which will mean good things for his balance sheet and also indicates “the industry is moving faster than [he] thought.”
Animal bedding, oils, clothing and other textiles are just the beginning of the applications in which hemp could be useful, Phipps says. He points out hemp fibers can be blended into plastic products, for example, without changing their customer-facing properties.
And if the market’s there, farmers will follow.
“Industrial hemp allows the farmer to have another option to put in his field for a source of revenue,” Phipps says. “If a farmer is growing soybeans, someone else is setting the price. If he can grow hemp as well, we might see the farmer make more money in those fields. It puts the ball back into the farmers’ hands.”
Advocates say hemp is also good for consumers, pointing to the seeds’ high omega oils content and the processed goods’ low dust and biodegradability.
With much of the stigma associated with hemp a thing of the past, Amatucci and Timko agree the only barriers to growth at this point are sorting out the supply chain, from seed development to hemp processing to sales channels.
“It’s not going to be overnight,” Amatucci says. “But if farmers are interested in this, it will return something on the investment. They just have to be patient, learn a new crop and wait for the market to catch up.”
The Quarry Gardens at Schuyler were active soapstone mining sites in the 1950s, ‘60s and ’70s, and then the property served as a community dumpsite for about a decade. Current owners Armand and Bernice Thieblot bought the 600 acres in 1991, and have spent decades cleaning them up and creating a public garden, which features more than 30 galleries of native plants. Photo by Stephen Barling
There’s a sardine can in Schuyler that holds decades of history.
Imagine, sometime in the mid-20th century, a worker sitting down to eat lunch on the ground. He unrolls the top from a can of sardines and eats the fish, then maybe stretches out for a brief nap in the sun. When it’s time to get back to work, he rises and takes his metal lunch box with him as he strides a few steps away to the huge, square-cut hole in the earth, where he and other quarry workers spend their days cutting massive blocks of soapstone.
He leaves the can lying where it came to rest: right next to a small seedling, a tree called devil’s walking stick that sports fearsome thorns along its stems. Seasons pass, rain falls, and the little tree slowly grows thicker. Eventually its bark forms a swollen growth around the can—metal and wood enveloping each other, the quarry worker’s forgotten lunch becoming a physical part of the living tree.
More time passes; no one knows exactly how much, but most people know what happened in Nelson County on the night of August 19, 1969. In some spots around the old quarries—which were soon to be abandoned—the deluge delivered by Hurricane Camille scoured away several inches of topsoil, including from around the base of the walking stick tree. And the sardine can, which had been resting at ground level, was still held by the tree, but it was now 12 inches in the air.
Twenty-two years later, Armand and Bernice Thieblot—a Baltimore couple who owned a successful consulting business—bought a broad swath of this land, including the old quarries. “We wanted something we could improve,” says Bernice.
To turn their post-industrial land into a public garden site, owners Armand and Bernice Thieblot enlisted the help of the Center for Urban Habitats, which identified 400 plant species on-site, 40 not previously catalogued in Nelson County. Photo by Tom Daly
The Thieblots intended to eventually retire here, but that would be a long time coming. They used their 600-acre Schuyler property as a country retreat, and they spent a lot of weekends cleaning up trash; for a decade after shutting down, the quarries had been used as local dumps. The land had also been clear-cut. The Thieblots added onto the little house, planted wisteria along the patio and focused more on stopping erosion into the small lake near their house than on the deep, mysterious quarry pools that lurked further away, in the woods.
Botanical dream
In Charlottesville, meanwhile, people were talking about a distant idea.
Eugene Ryang was in landscape architecture school at UVA in the 1990s, and he remembers students in Warren Byrd’s studios working on an assignment that, at the time, was fairly theoretical: a master plan for something called the McIntire Botanical Garden. The idea was to create, for Charlottesville, a garden like those found in many larger cities, a place for people to stroll through galleries of ornamental plants, so they could learn and enjoy as they went.
Although there were plenty of people who wanted to make the botanical garden a reality, it would not be easy to do. It took two decades or so (and a lengthy community battle over the John W. Warner Parkway) before Ryang arrived at the moment in early May 2018 when he stood under a white tent, in an overgrown corner of McIntire Park, and heard his firm’s name read aloud as one of the designers of the McIntire Botanical Garden.
As MBG Board President Linda Seaman remarked just before she announced the two landscape architecture firms the board had chosen—Ryang’s Waterstreet Studio will partner with Boston-based Mikyoung Kim Design—the garden is meant to be a long-term investment in Charlottesville’s future. “It is our hope,” she said, “that 50 to 100 years from now the McIntire Botanical Garden will still be a delight to everyone living here.”
Signs of the times
The planting of a garden is a gift from one generation to the generations that will follow. And like a museum or a library, it reflects the values and priorities of the generation that creates it. Just as New York’s Central Park or Philadelphia’s Longwood Gardens are artifacts of their eras, so will the MBG grow from the soil of its times.
The Thieblots, too, came to embrace a distinctly contemporary idea as they considered what to do with their land in Schuyler. After they retired full-time to Nelson County in 2013, they took a trip out west—“the great American road trip,” Bernice says. One of their stops was Butchart Gardens, a botanical garden created more than a century ago in a former quarry in British Columbia. Host to more than 1 million visitors annually, it looks something like the land of Oz: a fantasy of candy-colored flowers, winding paths under blooming archways and gushing fountains.
“That approach didn’t appeal to us,” says Bernice. Nonetheless, she and her husband took inspiration from the idea of transforming post-industrial land into a beautiful public attraction. Bernice had taken Master Gardener training in 2009, becoming aware of the native plant movement. The Thieblots came to embrace a plan for a garden to celebrate the native flora and fauna of their site, while highlighting—not erasing—its quarry history.
To visit
The Quarry Gardens at Schuyler offers free guided tours by reservation. A Visitors Center includes exhibits on the site’s ecology and the native plantings designed by the Center for Urban Habitats. It also teaches guests about Schuyler’s past as a world capital of soapstone quarrying. Just outside, a demonstration garden shows off the potential for beautiful blooms that home gardeners can achieve with native species—highlights are Quarry blue sedge, shrubby St. John’s wort and native goldenrod. See quarrygardensatschuyler.org for visitor info and a wealth of plant data.
McIntire Botanical Garden is still in the planning phase; organizers hope to break ground there in 2020, and it will be a free attraction. For now, it is simply part of McIntire Park, located at the corner of Melbourne Road and the John W. Warner Parkway. See mcintirebotanicalgarden.org.
Charlottesville-based firm Land Planning & Design Associates created a master plan for the 40 acres that the Thieblots identified as the public garden site, laying out roads, a parking area and two acres of walking trails. Meanwhile, Bernice was trying to wrap her head around the wealth of knowledge that would be necessary to create a thoughtful, detailed garden design. “I was buying books, but it was overwhelming,” she says. When she met Devin Floyd, the founder of the Center for Urban Habitats, it was “a godsend.”
With a background spanning archaeology, landscape design and natural history, Floyd is used to thinking in broad, interconnected terms. His firm “doesn’t garden with plants,” he says. “We garden with systems—communities of plants.” At what would eventually become Quarry Gardens, CUH started with a sweeping survey of the existing flora and fauna.
Courtesy Center for Urban Habitats
The survey identified nearly 400 plant species on the site, about 40 of those not previously reported in Nelson County. More than a simple catalog, it began to form a picture of the Quarry Gardens’ specific geological and biological characteristics—a portrait of where the landscape was then, and where it was headed.
“Every landscape has a natural trajectory,” explains Floyd. Bedrock, elevation, exposure, drainage and other factors add up to a recipe that favors some plants over others; left alone, any landscape will eventually host a specific plant community that is much more narrowly “local” than we tend to think when we use terms like “Virginia native plants.” “We like to use the phrase ‘local native,’” says Floyd. “Our definition has been honed thanks to ecologists.”
Something blue, something new?
Just outside the Visitors Center at Quarry Gardens, look for a low grass-like plant with a striking ice-blue color. This is Carex glaucodea, or blue sedge, available from commercial nurseries but perhaps not, thinks Devin Floyd with the Center for Urban Habitats, in exactly this form.
“There are several variants in Virginia of this blue sedge,” he says—“coastal, Piedmont, Blue Ridge.” During CUH’s surveys of the Quarry Gardens biota, Floyd noticed that the blue sedge on-site had a distinctive hue. “I’ve not seen it quite that blue,” he says. “It may have characteristics that are locally unique.”
He and others at Quarry Gardens have affectionately named this plant Quarry blue sedge. They hope to propagate it and make it available for sale. “It’s a mascot for the whole thing we’re doing here,” says Floyd. “It does well in harsh conditions.” And for the plant to have its own local name is an appropriate tribute to the local-native philosophy that has driven the design at Quarry Gardens.
At Quarry Gardens, Floyd and his team encountered an unusual challenge. “It’s a rare bedrock—soapstone—and a completely obliterated landscape,” he says. “There’s a heavy amount of post oak, blackjack oak and white ash, combined with other species like dwarf hackberry, redbud and a good bit of pine. This is not a standard oak-hickory forest. It’s so starkly different.” CUH classified much of the Quarry Gardens site as ultramafic, meaning that the soil has a low ratio of calcium to magnesium, and identified a number of niche habitats like vernal pools, hardpan wetlands and small patches of prairie.
From this basis, CUH’s design phase aimed to enhance the natural recovery that had been happening on the site for several decades already—to help the land along its trajectory, thus supporting the greatest possible array of native wildlife. “Biological survey really informs the plant design,” he says. Another way to put it: “Landscape design doubles as conservation biology.”
Making connections
That way of thinking about a garden—as a system connected to larger systems—is a hallmark of contemporary design. Gregg Bleam, a landscape architect who’s contributed design work in the past to city parks in Charlottesville, says that botanical gardens are evolving away from the “tree collection” model of the past. “A botanic garden’s like a library on one level—people go there and learn,” he says. In the past, that meant seeing a single tree or plant as a specimen that represented its kind. “Now there’s more of an idea of associations and collections based on natural systems.”
On May 3, the day the MBG schematic design firms were announced, groups of interested people followed Cole Burrell along the mowed pathway that loops through the MBG site. Burrell, an author and garden designer who serves on the MBG board, pointed out the big tulip poplars and maples that will provide “structure” for the future garden, and answered questions from his audience. One man asked if trees and plants will be labeled when the garden opens to the public.
“There’s nothing worse than a landscape full of labels,” Burrell replied. He described, instead, high-tech “nodes” in the garden where people could use their smartphones to access information about plants and ecology.
If the old approach to education is changing, so is the cabinet-of-curiosities paradigm that one might experience at a place like Richmond’s Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens, where themed spaces—Asian Valley garden, rose garden, etc.—present a series of separate aesthetic visions. Instead, McIntire is likely to look more like an integrated whole. And while board president Seaman says that she’s heard many requests for a children’s garden in the future MBG, the children’s space may not be a segregated area either, but instead kids may be invited to play and climb in a multitude of spots throughout the site.
Reclamation
Quarry Gardens, which opened for guided tours in 2017, and McIntire Botanical Garden, which is slated for groundbreaking in 2020, present two new opportunities for locals to get outside, learn about plants and wildlife, and connect with nature. They represent different models; whereas McIntire is a public project, relying on a partnership with the city (which will contribute a parking lot and restrooms), Quarry Gardens has been funded out-of-pocket by the Thieblots. And, of course, McIntire is moving more slowly given that a public input process, phased design and the slog of multimillion-dollar fundraising are part of its process.
But the two projects share an aspect of cleanup and remediation that, Bleam says, is another contemporary touchstone. As in New York’s Freshkills Park and High Line, the notion of reclaiming an industrial site, or abused piece of land, is one that local governments and the public can easily support.
While the 8.5-acre MBG site doesn’t have a known industrial past, it’s typical of a disturbed, neglected urban landscape. Melbourne Road and the new parkway form two of its sides; a third is a railroad track atop a high embankment. Invasive autumn olive grows in thickets under the tall trees; native spicebush grows cheek-by-jowl with ailanthus and poison ivy. Miller Lite cans and old tires dot the ground, lending the spooky air of a place that’s mostly used by people committing some kind of transgression. And the creek that bisects the site flows between deeply eroded red clay banks.
“We’ll remediate the stream,” said Burrell while leading the May 3 tour, “and make sure it’s an asset.”
Water is an obvious focal point in any garden design, and at Quarry Gardens, the pools created by the soapstone industry are an aesthetic boon. Their near-vertical walls, marked by slight stairsteps, make a moody backdrop, angular and machined in some places and naturally textured in others. “Sites are not static; they have changed over time,” says Bleam. “The industrial past was not great for the environment, but incredibly beautiful in certain strange ways.”
The design at Quarry Gardens takes the rock mining of the past in stride. Huge chunks of discarded soapstone form the Giant’s Stairs, leading to a spot where CUH has planted trillium and bluebells among the rue anemone that was already growing. In another spot, a tumble of rock is designated a “waterside talus,” and prickly pear cacti are planted in the shallow veneer of soil atop the stone.
CUH’s Rachel Floyd, who designed these plant galleries in response to the biological surveying her husband and business partner, Devin, conducted, says that even with CUH’s rigorously native-focused methodology, beauty has to be a consideration. “There’s a bit of push and pull there,” she says, given that Quarry Gardens will depend on volunteers and visitors to fulfill its raison d’etre. If visitors are expecting something more like Lewis Ginter, they may be disappointed, but perhaps they can be reoriented toward a different kind of beauty.
“It’s easy to get seduced by the aesthetics as a designer, but aesthetics can’t be the primary factor for design; that has to be promoting biodiversity,” says Rachel Floyd. Still, she acknowledges, “We weight some things more heavily than others because they’re beautiful.” Certainly, interest has been keen in the Quarry Gardens: It welcomed 1,200 visitors in 2017, its first season.
Local native
While the McIntire Botanical Garden is likely to have a focus on native plants, it remains to be seen whether that will be defined as narrowly as it has been at Quarry Gardens. There, CUH has attempted to include only plants with a local genotype—meaning seeds are sourced from within a 15-mile radius whenever possible. Genetic differences, and relationships with fungi and other organisms, mean that members of the same species in two distant locations (say, Virginia and Pennsylvania) are not interchangeably native. So rather than simply ordering plants from wherever they’re sold, the Floyds and their team have gone into the field, collecting and propagating seed with as local a provenance as possible.
“It’s a level of perfection that can never be reached, but we can get closer,” says Devin Floyd.
Of course, removing invasives is part of the equation, too. Rachel Floyd leads teams of workers who pull out miscanthus, stiltgrass and other unwanted plants, before and after they put in natives. To date they’ve planted nearly 50,000 individual plants, as many as 1,000 a day. About 100 native species have been added to Quarry Gardens that weren’t present in CUH’s initial surveys.
There are always some casualties, of course, but Rachel is pleased to see that some areas planted just two years ago are already well-established. “It’s taking care of itself,” she says.
There’s no practical way to water a place like Quarry Gardens, and letting plants be fairly self-reliant is part of the appeal of a native garden. “If you plant the things that want to grow,” says Bernice Thieblot simply, “they’re likely to do well.”
It’s a mindset that could hardly be a starker contrast to the one represented by the heavy machinery that once cut into the earth here.
Thieblot likes to point out the tree-with-sardine-can as an emblem of Schuyler’s industrial past, and the Quarry Gardens Visitors Center functions partly as a mini museum on that topic. (There’s even a model railroad to recall the trains that once carried workers to the quarries.) Yet the Thieblots are still cleaning up after the past, too. After big rains, they take a boat out onto the quarry pools to snag trash that turns up in the water.
One thing is for certain—in Central Virginia, no matter the history of a site, something will grow there. And it may be more likely to be part of the native ecosystem than one would assume. “We were amazed at the number of the native species already here,” says Thieblot, “although that site had been brutally worked over until 1975. It’s a story of resilience.”
What is soapstone?
Take a look at your neighbor’s newly renovated kitchen, and there’s a good chance you’ll find the answer—soapstone has been used as a building material for decades and happens to be a hot trend in countertops right now. The dark gray, heat-resistant rock, which needs no sealing despite its softness, has been quarried in Schuyler since the late 1800s. That’s a bit of a claim to fame for the Nelson County village, as there are only a few spots in the world where soapstone is found.
The Alberene Soapstone Company changed hands—and fortunes—many times throughout the 20th century. The Quarry Gardens site alone (a fraction of the total area quarried) produced an estimated 800,000 tons of stone. At one time, 1,000 people worked in the Schuyler quarries, but after Hurricane Camille and some changes in the domestic market, the company became far less active. New investors and favorable trends have recently revived the business, though. In 2013, Stone World reported that Alberene was producing 80 to 90 tons of stone per week and employing 25 people—and the next year, Canadian-based industry giant Polycor became an ownership partner. Today, Alberene is the only remaining American supplier of soapstone.
