Poetry at the Arboretum is a public poetry installation at the New Hanover County Arboretum, a collaboration between the New Hanover County Extension and my spring 2025 graduate workshop in ecopoetry. Students toured the New Hanover County Arboretum and attended a talk on native plants. Each then selected a plant native to coastal North Carolina, researched it, observed it, and made a poem with and for it. The poems are now installed at the arboretum on botanical signs, next to the plants they describe, along with an introductory sign offering a prompt to visitors for making their own poem. The installation was launched with a public reading and reception on May 2, and will be on view all summer. In addition, the students' poems and my introduction to the project are published in the spring edition of the online literary magazine storySouth.
This project was made possible by support from the New Hanover County Cooperative Extension and by a High Impact Practices Pedagogy Initiative Award from UNCW.
