“I am sooo bored.”
How many times have you heard your kid say that?
Heck, how many times did you say that when you were a kid?
Jim Amrine, the retired entomologist and WVU’s renowned “bug guy,” used to love launching into his Elevator Pitch for the Great Outdoors whenever he’d hear such expressions from a youngster.
“How can you be bored,” he’d reply, “when there are hundreds of insects under your feet that haven’t been named yet?”
The upcoming Summer Nature Camp series for kids at the West Virginia Botanic Garden is all about bugs, and everything else, at the expanse just past Morgantown on Tyrone Road.
Sessions begin in June and run through July. They’re open to youngsters in the kindergarten age range to those entering eighth grade. Visit https://www.wvbg.org/ for all the details on how to register.
For all the details on how nature can work when it isn’t encroached upon, visit the West Virginia Botanic Garden before that.
Occupying 82 acres at the site of the former Tibbs Run Reservoir — the operation supplied water to the city of Morgantown until 1969 — the garden grew out of the mindset of another WVU educator with his eye toward Appalachia’s natural climes.
George Longenecker, who was one of the first professors hired for the university’s then-new landscape architecture program in 1966, hatched the idea 14 years later in 1980, after the reservoir had been drained.
He and a group of like-minded, eco-kindred spirits banded together to reclaim the land — so nature, in turn, could do some reclaiming of its own.
Today, the West Virginia Botanic Garden is home to towering oaks and hemlocks, with the calligraphy-like reach of their branches going ever upward.
It features walking paths, seminar-styled learning workshops, the aforementioned kid-friendly nature camps, concerts — and one particular touch of whimsy owing a debt to Longenecker, who died last year at the age of 85.
Those hammocks interspersed among the trees for those who like a little snoozing with their communing are a Longenecker signature.
Same for the machine-trappings of the garden’s Tibbs Run past that can still be spied along its trails and the leftover water from the reservoir, that — at Longenecker’s direction — was allowed to evolve into natural wetlands over the years.
One of its primary missions are those aforementioned nature camps for kids, which, as said, go beyond bugs.
Amrine, again: “Look at insects like that, and soon you’ll be looking at big things like that. There’s a big world out there. Don’t lose your sense of wonder.”
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