The University of Virginia Board of Visitors voted March 1 to rename the school’s main library. Now known as Edgar Shannon Library, the recently renovated building’s new name honors UVA’s fourth president and removes the name of its first president, Edwin Alderman.
The decision to rename the library comes after years of debate surrounding the legacy of Alderman, who was a proponent of the racist pseudoscience of eugenics.
“I’ve definitely heard that there’s a push because he was connected with the eugenics movement,” says Mary Grace, a UVA law student. “I definitely support renaming a building if someone is affiliated with that.”
When C-VILLE visited Shannon Library during the university’s spring break, a few students shared their thoughts on the renaming. While not everyone was aware of the controversy surrounding Alderman, all mentioned his ties to eugenics.
“It’s been a very contentious battle over the last several years to get it renamed,” says third-year Em Gunter. “The Board of Visitors tabled the motion back in December, leading many of us, including myself, to believe that they were tabling it indefinitely. … When I saw the news on Friday that they had voted to rename it, I was shocked.”
Students were generally enthusiastic about naming the building after Edgar Shannon, who instituted coeducation and racial integration during his tenure, though several mentioned their limited knowledge of the man who led UVA from 1959-1974.
“I don’t know much about [Shannon]. I assume they checked him on the obvious stuff like eugenics,” says fourth-year grad student Jack Warfield. “I think it’s good to keep the name in line with important figures in the university’s history.”
“I’ve heard some people grumbling that, oh, there’s a dorm named Shannon,” says Gunter. “It’s like, whatever, I don’t care. It’s someone that’s not shitty.”
The renaming of Shannon Library comes a few weeks ahead of the university’s grand reopening ceremony on April 4. Though the library opened its doors in January after years of construction, several areas remain cordoned off due to ongoing renovations and book relocations. A library representative did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Exposé
Carver Recreation Center was unwittingly host to a sexually explicit broadcast during a February 29 community forum on jailhouse renovations. The hybrid virtual and in-person meeting was interrupted by the moans of a naked Zoom participant who initially could not be seen by the in-house audience. But when Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail Superintendent Martin Kumer’s PowerPoint presentation was paused and minimized to address the disruptions, every guest was exposed to the moaning man, who appeared to be masturbating. The Zoom meeting was swiftly closed, which booted virtual attendees from the forum. A makeup meeting has not been announced.
Big win
The UVA women’s basketball team upset fifth-ranked Virginia Tech on March 3 with a 80-75 victory at the John Paul Jones Arena. In the final home game of the season, the Hoos broke multiple records, including attendance—11,975, the most to ever watch a women’s basketball game in Virginia—and scoring—a team-high 21 points from freshman guard Kymora Johnson. The Cavs’ next game is against Wake Forest at 6:30pm on March 6, in the first round of the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament.
Closed for crash
Orange County Public Schools closed both Locust Grove Primary and Locust Grove Elementary on March 4 after a two-vehicle crash shut down part of Constitution Highway. According to Virginia State Police, the crash occurred around 5:50am. A 23-year-old driver, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was thrown from his vehicle. He is being treated at UVA Medical Center for life-threatening injuries. Five others involved in the crash are being treated for minor injuries at Mary Washington Hospital.
Ruth De Jong got her start in the movie business as Jack Fisk’s assistant. Now, the Charlottesville friends are competing against each other for the Best Production Design Oscar.
Christina Gandolfo / Universal Pictures.
Longtime Albemarle County resident Jack Fisk ranks among movie-making’s greatest production designers. His current Academy Award nomination for Best Production Design for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is well-deserved. Another frontrunner in the category, Ruth De Jong, is nominated for her work on Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. De Jong’s cinematic path to designing acclaimed mega-productions also has roots here in Charlottesville—as Fisk’s protégé.
Growing up in Charlottesville, De Jong was friends with Fisk’s daughter, Schuyler. De Jong had no ambitions to enter the film industry, but a long conversation with Fisk led him to hire her as his assistant on There Will Be Blood. She’d studied painting and photography at Texas Christian University and movie production design nicely encompassed all aspects of her artistic training. This is Fisk’s third Oscar nomination and De Jong’s first.
Fisk excels at recreating period settings with uncanny accuracy and naturalism, from World War II-era Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line to Oklahoma’s post-World War I Osage Territory in Killers of the Flower Moon. His regular collaborators include well-known filmmakers such as David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Taught by a master, De Jong went on to assist Fisk on Water for Elephants, Tree of Life, and The Master. Her first feature-length solo production design credit was for Charlottesvillian Derek Sieg’s Swedish Auto, a small indie filmed in town that opened the 2006 Virginia Film Festival, and her career continued ascending with major movies including Inherent Vice, Us, and Nope, and the TV series “Yellowstone.”
Of her relationship with Fisk and their mutual Oscar nominations, De Jong told AwardsWatch: “You can see where my affinity for natural sets was born. Jack and I have a deep connection. We’re very best friends today in life, and I think it’s a full-circle moment, of being in the company of my mentor. It’s almost like, ‘Is this happening?’”
De Jong’s biggest assignment to date, Oppenheimer, challenged her to create the backdrop of the “Destroyer of Worlds,” titular physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Challenges abounded: The period sets had to be filmable from 360 degrees in large-format IMAX 65mm and Panavision 65mm film for projection on towering IMAX screens.
In a YouTube interview with STIR, De Jong says that director Nolan also wanted his sets, including the Los Alamos scientific community, built from scratch without computer enhancements. Nolan told her they were “not making a documentary,” and she admitted that, after extensive research, they “took creative liberty,” partly for budgetary reasons.
Elsewhere in the Southwest, Fisk was painstakingly, meticulously creating 1920s Oklahoma for Killers of the Flower Moon. Unlike De Jong, Fisk had the benefit of using CGI to expand his locations and sets, which was justifiable considering the sweeping narrative he was bringing to life. Fisk’s documentary-like verisimilitude bears out his deep research and extraordinary eye for detail with each shot densely packed with vintage trappings.
At the Oscars, De Jong and Fisk are competing against the design teams of Barbie, Napoleon, and Poor Things. Who will win is anybody’s guess. (DeJong has already won an Art Directors Guild Award for Oppenheimer for Best Period Film.) But it’s a sure thing that De Jong has officially graduated with honors, and can now rank her teacher as a colleague.
Dark chamber cabaret group Please Don’t Tell will host The Spirit Ball with Charming Disaster, Nouveau Vintage, and DJ Cadybug on Saturday at the Southern. Photo by Tristan Williams.
Sea shanties seem to have had a moment. Could dark chamber cabaret be next?
If so, Charlottesville’s Please Don’t Tell will likely help lead the macabre movement. After all, the three-piece band kind of made the genre up.
“I think that because we come from varied … but classical backgrounds, chamber music and our kind of salty, quirky, offbeat cabaret elements just came together,” says Christina Fleming, Please Don’t Tell’s founding member. “We have a range of themes, from introspective and difficult things that have happened to us to tributes to women in history.”
Fleming, a haunting vocalist and playful pianist who’s been a longtime Charlottesville music scene fixture, started Please Don’t Tell as a duo, alongside Nicole Rimel on cello and backing vocals, in 2020. After violinist Anna Hennessy joined for a single live show on a dark night in 2021, the trio stayed together. On March 1, they released their daunting debut recording, a six-song eponymous EP.
Fleming and Rimel were music majors together at the University of Virginia, and the sound Please Don’t Tell produces today—essentially period show tunes with a focus on the frightening and subtly naughty while still being fun—“just kind of came out,” Fleming says.
That’s not to say Please Don’t Tell is without influence or precedent. But the dark cabaret lineage heard from Tom Waits, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Kurt Vile lacks the instrumentation, attitude, and commitment to recreating an 1800s aesthetic that Please Don’t Tell offers.
“There is sort of a sea shanty vibe to the storytelling. It’s slightly Brechtian,” Fleming says. “We’re always trying to come up with fun ways to make it more theatrical.”
When the band plays its Spirit Ball and record-release party on March 9 at the Southern Café and Music Hall, the trio will do so against the backdrop of a fictional ball that took place in the late 19th century. “On Saturday, March 9th, 1889, 200 attendees at the The Grand Benefit Ball believed themselves in for an evening of fancy dress and the latest music,” a press release from Please Don’t Tell reads. But they “instead reportedly disappeared without trace, orchestra and all.”
What makes Please Don’t Tell so dastardly yet delightful? The lyrics focus on struggles both internal and historical, while the music lends an irreverent obscura to these trials and tribulations.
“I started writing some of these songs a long time ago, when I didn’t know how to cope with certain things,” Fleming says. “It was just me writing at a piano, and it helped to be able to laugh at the harder moments in my life. It makes us resilient as humans to be able to find the absurd in the difficult.”
Fleming didn’t think anyone would hear most of the tunes, so there was no real intention of making them public-ready. Then Rimel joined her college friend for private jam sessions—just two music nerds having fun with a piano and a cello.
Hennessy’s violin added the finishing touch to the troupe, which laid down its first professional recording at Fatback Sound in Nashville with Gabe Rabben, and local Sons of Bill alum Sam Wilson, on production. Noticeably absent a proper percussion section, the record skips and hops on piano rhythms with Wilson’s keen handling of Please Don’t Tell’s aesthetic.
“They recorded us like a true chamber group, all in the same room,” Fleming says. “We had a lot of fun; Sam and [Rabben] were wonderful to draw into what we wanted to do. Actually, trying to find the right fit and person took some time. We wanted someone who understood our flexible, organic, quirky nature, while also being narrative.”
Fleming says her and Rimel’s love of the morbid comes from being longtime “goth kids.” Fleming drew on the affinity in her locally renowned former band In Tenebris, an alt hard-rock outfit with an undead edge. But working with Please Don’t Tell is the first time she’s made her own, truly original music.
Hennessey brings yet another influence to the bawdy ballroom with a background in bluegrass. And all three of Please Don’t Tell’s musicians come from impressive musical training—Rimel and Fleming at the hands of UVA’s music department, Fleming now being a vocal instructor, while Hennessey is the orchestra teacher at St. Anne’s-Belfield.
The Spirit Ball will feature New York-based mystical folk duo Charming Disaster and synth pop two-piece Nouveau Vintage, in addition to Please Don’t Tell. For the dark chamber cabaret portion, showgoers can expect to hear the vignette-like tracks they’ll find on the band’s first EP, including the earwormy “Nearsighted,” ruefully lullabying “My Therapist,” and jaunty “Heave Ho.”
Will any of those tracks be the next viral hit a la Nathan Evans’ 2021 version of “Wellerman”? Perhaps, if the spirits wish it so.
Holy Temple Church of God, located on the corner of 12th Street and Rosser Avenue, was built by contractor Charles Hunter Brown, who also served as the church’s pastor. Supplied photo.
By Yasu Shinozaki
The neighborhood of Preston Heights is deeply linked to the legacy of one man: Charles Hunter Brown. Brown was one of the first Black contractors in the Charlottesville area and built many of the houses in the neighborhood located between Preston and Grady avenues. He also built Holy Temple Church of God, located on the corner of 12th Street and Rosser Avenue, where he served as pastor for decades.
The church has been an important fixture in the Preston Heights community since it opened its doors in 1947, providing a place of worship to countless parishioners, a community to Black UVA students, and meals to neighborhood families.
But in recent years, a lack of maintenance has caused parts of the building to fall into disrepair. Leaks have created substantial water damage in the basement and attic. The building needs a new roof and water remediation. Brown’s daughter, Angie Jefferson, is administrator of the church, and she’s started a GoFundMe page to raise money for the renovations, with a goal of $75,000.
To Jefferson, the preservation of the church is linked to the survival of the Preston Heights neighborhood amidst threats of gentrification and redevelopment.
She describes Preston Heights as the “last true African American neighborhood in Charlottesville,” saying it is one of the few places in town where many Black families have long ties, some going back three generations.
The neighborhood is still predominantly Black, but the majority of houses that were once owned by Black residents have been acquired by LLCs. Silk Purse Properties LLC owns every structure on one side of Rosser Avenue except for two houses and Holy Temple church, according to Charlottesville tax data.
C.H. Brown was born in 1907 in Proffit, Virginia. He was one of 13 children and received little formal education. He worked for a time in the kitchen of a downtown restaurant—but Brown wanted a different career, and started working in carpentry.
“We’re talking about a period when there wasn’t much in Charlottesville for Black men to do, except maybe sweep the floor or clean somebody’s house or something,” Jefferson says. “So for him to have those kinds of aspirations said a lot about who he was.”
C.H. Brown’s company built countless houses in Charlottesville, at least half a dozen churches in the surrounding counties, and numerous commercial buildings. Brown is credited with allowing many African Americans in Charlottesville to become homeowners.
Church Clerk Clinton Johnson says Holy Temple’s construction was remarkable for another reason: The ground beneath it is solid rock, and Brown had to use dynamite to excavate the foundation.
“I’ve heard that they didn’t believe that church would ever be built because Reverend Brown built that church on a boulder of some sort,” Johnson says. “So to me, it also had a Christian outlook that … on this rock he would build this church and the gates of hell would not prevail. So when other preachers and people were coming by and saying that there was no way he was going to bless that rock and build a church on it, he proved them wrong.”
C.H. Brown’s son, Ralph Brown, is the pastor at Holy Temple, and runs the C.H. Brown Christian Center, which is dedicated to continuing his father’s legacy through mission work and preservation. Ralph is also attempting to protect his dad’s work by law—in early 2021, he filed to make six houses built by his father and the Holy Temple church a historical preservation district. But he needs the consent of property owners, and the buildings keep changing hands.
Ralph Brown and Johnson stress the importance of C.H. Brown’s legacy as a pastor, as well as a contractor. Johnson says that when Brown was preaching, sometimes every parking spot would be taken on Rosser Avenue, as well as nearby sections of Grady and Preston.
The doors to the church were always left unlocked when her father was pastor there, Jefferson says. The building served as a place of solace for community members.
“Before my dad passed in 1996, he spent a lot of time in the church,” she says. “And so people knew they could always find him there. Women who had been abused, children who had run away from home, there were a myriad of situations where people came to the church.”
While its congregation has waned over the years, Holy Temple is still an important meeting place in the community. Ralph Brown serves free meals twice a month at the church.
But he is concerned that the purchase of nearby properties by outside firms makes the neighborhood vulnerable to redevelopment. He also fears lack of home ownership will lead to community members having less of a say in local politics.
“Unless you’re a property owner,” Ralph says, “you can’t move the needle a whole lot about what can and cannot be done.”
Bilal Koraz tries to keep up with his family back home in Gaza, as war rages on. To help get them out, he’s started a GoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/f/help-our-family-evacuate-from-gaza
Supplied photo
Ed. note—This story represents one area family’s perspective on the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Bilal Koraz, a Gazan-born father living in the dense forest of rural Louisa County, says his 11 family members—mostly women, children, and the elderly—have been sheltering in the family home in Gaza.
“Every day, all the time, I’m afraid to hear [the news],” Koraz says. “Just the other day, the house next to [their’s] was completely blown up.”
He pulls up pictures on his phone, scrolling through them like a reverse timeline. There are recent photos of his daughter, and pictures from 2019, when he married his wife Jessica, a Louisa County resident. There are some from Istanbul, when the couple traveled halfway across the world to meet in person for the first time. One picture is of him in Gaza with four other well-dressed, college-age men.
“These are my good friends,” he says. It looked like they were at a wedding.
His face lit up a bit as he talked about his home, but only briefly. He wore his feelings on his brow, furrowed like he had to break bad news to himself. He sighed and went quiet, but his wife elaborated.
“They were like brothers to him,” Jessica says.
She paused, hesitant to get to the end of the story.
“Were,” she says. “They’re gone now. All of them.”
The Koraz family originally came from just outside Jerusalem.
“That was before,” he says, meaning before the partition. “They came and took [our home], with everything in it. Even the pictures. We couldn’t have the pictures of our family members.”
Afterward, his family settled in the Deir Al-Balah neighborhood in Gaza. “My father was [a] colonel with the Palestinian Authority before Hamas,” Koraz says. “He was like a policeman.”
The Palestinian Authority was the governing body established in the mid-1990s by Fatah, a major political party in Palestine. According to Al Jazeera, “its creation was supposed to pave the way to an independent Palestinian state.”
In 2006, however, the party’s power dissolved with the rise of Hamas, as did Koraz’s father’s job. For both this reason and ideological differences, the Koraz family are about as far from Hamas supporters as the Israelis, voting against them in that year’s election. Regardless, the Korazes are treated the same as any other Arab family in Palestine.
Jessica met Koraz in 2018 on social media through his work and advocacy with a local children’s center in Gaza. The two struck up a conversation and they fell in love. Despite their distance, they decided to pursue the relationship, and arranged to meet in Istanbul. He moved to Jessica’s hometown in the U.S., where the couple now live with their three children.
Through a crackling, fuzzy reception, Koraz calls his brother in Gaza. He asks him how he’s doing, and if he wants to talk for a moment. It’s not a good time to talk, and after a few exchanges in Levantine Arabic, they trade goodbyes and hang up.
“They have to cut wood to cook or heat water,” Jessica says, after the phone call. “And they have to find fresh water, because it’s been shut off. Just like the power. And the phones. And the internet.”
She shows me a photo: two men chopping wood in the middle of a sandy street, flanked on all sides by damaged buildings and signs of combat.
“That’s honestly the only way they sleep at night,” she says. “Exhaustion. Otherwise the bombs and gunfire would keep them awake.”
Following this interview, the Koraz family home in Gaza was damaged when a neighboring house was shot by a Merkava tank, and they had to flee. They went to the refugee camps, which were supposed to be safe, but as of mid-February, the Israel Defense Forces had begun attacking those as well, citing terrorist activity and potential hostages being held in the area.
“He feels guilty,” Jessica says. “Because he got out and they didn’t. If he didn’t have kids, he’d go back to be with them. So would I.”
At press time, about 30,000 have been killed in Gaza in just under five months of fighting. For comparison, the U.S. lost just over 7,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It’s like the cartoons, where they tie up people and leave them on the railroad tracks,” Jessica says. “His family is tied up on the railroad tracks, and the train is headed their way. But the train has brakes. We can stop the train. It’s not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be like this, but no one is listening.”
Devin Floyd has made his knowledge of, and love for, the Piedmont into a personal vocation by working to restore it in all its ecological diversity.
Floyd is the executive director of the Center for Urban Habitats, an environmental education, research, and consulting group that he created in 2012. But its mission really began decades ago, with a young boy raised in the Blue Ridge.
When Floyd was about 6, the family moved to the mountains of northwest North Carolina, eventually settling in southwest Virginia, in a log cabin in the Mt. Rogers area. “We lived in the woods,” Floyd recalls. “My parents made a living making crafts and working with plants, and my grandmother encouraged me to engage with nature. I spent every day outside, and absorbed so much about the animals and plants.”
Floyd earned a baseball scholarship to James Madison University and a degree in prehistoric archaeology (with minors in geology and art). He got a job as an archaeologist at James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange, and then at Oatlands in Leesburg, where he also did work as a freelance technical illustrator. Archaeology, Floyd says, requires a skill at reading landscape, which came naturally to him, given his upbringing. In addition, concentrating in this one region of Virginia was deepening his knowledge of the flora, fauna, geology, and ecological niches of this area.
His environmental interests led Floyd into a collaboration with nature-lovers, hikers, educators, and scientists in the Mount Rogers area. The result was the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, near Marion, Virginia. The nonprofit, which Floyd co-founded in 2008, has a mission to combine environmental research, education, conservation, and stewardship in a multi-faceted approach to learning about and living with the natural world.
By this time, Floyd and his wife had settled in Charlottesville. Floyd was working at Monticello on a major project, a plantation survey of Tufton, one of Thomas Jefferson’s farm holdings bordering Monticello. But Floyd’s interests were evolving.
“I became increasingly aware that people saw [the landscape] as here to manipulate,” Floyd says. “But I was reading it as plants responding to the geology, the soils, all the inputs of their environment.” He began looking for the areas that were still free of modern human degradation—and he saw a whole new world.
The Piedmont, a geological area that stretches from Alabama to the Hudson River Valley, is the most populous ecosystem in North America, Floyd points out, and has been through centuries of human habitation and activity. “But even here, all over are little pieces of ground that are undisturbed, like finding a little time capsule.” He calls these pockets “remnants,” areas that have never been developed, never been sprayed or treated with herbicides, never even been plowed.
With this personal epiphany, says Floyd, “everything changed.” He started using his environmental and botanical knowledge to create landscapes using plants specific to that particular microhabitat. His first project was designing the plantings for a homeowner’s patio; instead of the usual Virginia native or rock garden plants, he selected species that fit the site’s particular geology and microhabitat—in this case, a Piedmont mafic barren (mafic referring to the underlying rock types and barren meaning that natural plant growth is sparse).
To meet the needs of clients who wanted more detailed ecological assessments of the habitats, plants, and animals across their properties, Floyd began finding and collaborating with others in the Charlottesville area who were equally devoted and knowledgeable about this area’s ecology.
In 2014, he left his Monticello job to concentrate full-time on the Center for Urban Habitats, a group of like-minded environmentalists and educators (including his wife Rachel), with specialties from plants, birds, and insects to landscape restoration, publications, and web design. The organization’s mix of environmental research, conservation, and education was like that which spurred the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, but instead of the wilder area of southwest Virginia, CUH’s focus was the more domesticated landscape of Charlottesville and its surrounding counties. If he was going to educate folks about their natural world, Floyd thought, “Let’s go to their backyard.”
Many of CUH’s first projects were as much educational as environmental. The Wildlife Garden at Clark Elementary School was designed as a hands-on way for children to learn ecological basics, using native plants specifically adapted to the site and exceptionally supportive for wildlife. Jackson-Via Elementary School’s Owl Magnet, which students helped build and now study as it evolves, created a habitat with the right mix of plants, insects, and animals to make a perfect hunting habitat for owls. A native pollinator sanctuary in Friendship Court (now Kindlewood) was part of a community garden project led by the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville and other community organizations. Most recently, CUH helped design and build an outdoor living classroom for science and art at Nelson County Middle School.
These and other projects—including a native plants garden in Court Square, pollinator plantings on the curb extensions along Hinton Avenue, and a path and meadows project still under construction at Ix Art Park—were created in cooperation with community partners and funded by local and state agencies, donations, and grants.
Armand and Bernice Thieblot turned to Devin Floyd to transform the derelict soapstone quarry on their Schuyler property into The Quarry Gardens, which now includes 14 ecozones, seven conservation areas, an education center, and walking trails. Photo by Tom Daly.
Floyd was increasingly sought out by private landowners seeking to return their property to its more native state. One of CUH’s best-known and most ambitious projects grew out of a 2014 presentation Floyd did about the Ix Art Park project for a master gardeners group, which included Bernice Thieblot who, with her husband Armand, owned a large ridgetop tract near Schuyler that included a derelict soapstone quarry. Inspired by a visit to British Columbia’s Butchart Gardens, extensive formal gardens created a century ago in a former limestone quarry, the Thieblots wanted to build an exhibition garden of native plants, and Bernice saw Floyd as “just the right person.”
“Our site is unusual,” Thieblot explains. “It’s right on the edge of both the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge [ecoregions], and the soapstone bedrock means our soil is very pH basic, which is unusual in this area. It’s also hilly, with lots of wet and dry areas. Devin came out to take a look, and was intrigued.”
Over the next year, the CUH team came out every few weeks to survey the site and its existing biota, design a plan to restore the microhabitats there, and develop a comprehensive plant list. Site work and planting began in the spring of 2016, and The Quarry Gardens opened in the spring of 2017. It now includes 14 ecozones and seven conservation areas, as well as an education center that offers exhibits on both the local ecology and the history of the soapstone industry, general and specialist tours, two miles of walking trails, and speakers on topics from native plants to geology, spiders, fungus, and moths. And because the work is never done in a garden, the CUH team leads volunteer work days every Friday morning.
The 40-acre Quarry Gardens was a massive challenge, but Floyd and CUH were willing to take on smaller, backyard projects. In 2018, a recent retiree from northern Virginia bought an Albemarle County house with a backyard that was “a disaster—the former owner had used it for doggie day care.”
Over the years, the new owner became more and more interested in native plants, and Floyd became well known in native plant circles. She invited him to take a look at her yard, and “he came out in the freezing cold, and got all excited. He told me I had the kind of soil that Jefferson and Madison had come here to farm,” she says.
CUH developed a four-zone garden plan, and preparing and planting the yard took a couple of years. At that time, the homeowner recalls, “native plants were hard to source, and expensive.” Getting a grant from a local government conservation program helped (see sidebar), but she’s still happily investing in her piece of ecological heaven. “You should see the difference. The wildflowers I have, and the birds I get here … I get hawks hunting in my yard. As they say, if you build it, they will come.”
While gardeners’ knowledge about and demand for native plants was increasing, Floyd found the ones on sale at nurseries weren’t always the same plants he was finding in unspoiled habitats. Many plants have developed specific genotypes adapted to their individual environmental microhabitats. To meet that need, CUH is creating a network of local genotype native plant growers, including Twinleaf Native Nursery, Little Bluestem Nursery, Hummingbird Hill Native Plant Nursery, and private landowners.
The challenge of restoring the environment that was here originally is not all about plants. Perhaps one of CUH’s most unusual projects is the salamander crossing under Route 29 at Polo Grounds and Rio Mills roads. In the 1990s, local nature-lovers Bess and Jim Murray had located one of the largest colonies of spotted salamanders in the state, and the amphibians needed to migrate every spring from their wooded upland habitat to their mating grounds on the floodplains across the busy highway. Working with Albemarle County, VDOT, the Virginia Safe Wildlife Corridor Collaborative, and Riverbend Development, CUH was able to get a wildlife tunnel and guide walls constructed to allow salamanders (and other creatures) to cross safely under Route 29 and fulfill their life cycle.
While the need for more research, education, restoration, and conservation are unending, Floyd is also taking on a whole new aspect of recovering ancient landscapes. Among the remnants of the prehistoric Piedmont that Floyd has been identifying are a habitat that has been ignored: grasslands. It’s a common assumption that pre-colonial Virginia was one huge expanse of forest. In fact, he says, “50 percent of the Piedmont was savanna.” CUH has already identified more than a thousand grassland remnants in central Virginia, and is beginning to identify patterns in their distinctive biota. Many of these plants are clonal (growing vegetatively, not by sexual reproduction), which makes them literally ancient. Floyd describes finding these old-growth habitats as “coming across an abandoned cabin in the woods.”
Savanna remnants may be tiny, but they aren’t rare. CUH has found at least 300 sites on roadsides throughout our area. “You could drive by one every day, within 10 miles of your house,” Floyd says. “There are some grassland areas at Preddy Creek Trail Park, along the paths in Hilltop Meadows. Look for green milkweed.”
Grassland remnants of a size large enough to support wildlife as well as plants are particularly rich and biodiverse. CUH has already gotten two grants from the Virginia Native Plant Society to study these savanna fragments, with a goal of conserving and protecting them for further research. In one of the study proposals, Floyd wrote, “Before we can make room [for] natural grasslands, or begin to inspire others to love and steward them, we must learn how to see them.”
Learning to see has been Devin Floyd’s life work.
When your yard needs a little green
Restoring a native plant community or creating a conservation-oriented landscape takes time—and money. The Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District has supported several CUH projects, including the Owl Magnet at Jackson-Via Elementary School and the above-mentioned backyard restoration.
Funding for the backyard restoration came through a grant from TJSWCD’s Virginia Conservation Assistance Program, a cost-share program for residential or other developed land uses. VCAP provides financial, technical, and educational assistance to property owners who adopt eligible “best management practices” in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Albemarle Conservation Assistance Program and Charlottesville Conservation Assistance Program are similar, with special funding from Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville.
Property owners and schools or places of worship at least a year old may be eligible for assistance to treat and control stormwater runoff, control erosion, conserve water within the landscape, improve riparian buffer areas, and promote native vegetation and wildlife habitats.
For more information, go to tjswcd.org/best-management-practices-homeowners.
Ed. note: This story has been updated to better clarify the details of Devin Floyd’s early life.
GWAR slammed Charlottesville on Monday, March 4, with a sold-out gross-out show at The Jefferson Theater. The outrageous “Scumdogs of the Universe” were founded in Richmond in the 1980s, in part by Virginia Commonwealth University students. But current lead singer Michael Bishop is a UVA alum—a recent UVA Today piece detailed how Bishop earned his doctorate in music, with a dissertation on “A Socioesthetics of Punk: Theorizing Personal Narrative, History and Place.”
