Thursday, April 23, 2009

The NC Arboretum Launches New Web Site

Welcome to one of the most beautiful places on earth! You’ve entered the Web and social media portal of The North Carolina Arboretum, located in the Bent Creek Experimental Forest of the Pisgah National Forest. We’re pleased you’re here.

Whether you are a prospective visitor to our mountains, a student, a business person, regional resident, or member, you will find this avenue to Arboretum information designed to serve your curiosity, interests and needs. We hope that we can provide exemplary service to you, whether here or through a personal visit to the Arboretum.

As an affiliate of the 17-campus University of North Carolina system, the Arboretum offers an array of programs ranging from kid’s camps and formal education classes to major plant shows and 435 acres of exhibits, landscape features and natural areas. It’s a great place to simply reconnect with nature, spend time outdoors, and celebrate the views, water and majesty of our natural world in the Southern Appalachians.

We’re also focused on sustainable economic development pursuits that capitalize on our unique regional assets – extraordinary biodiversity and the national repository of weather data. The Arboretum is home to the Bent Creek Institute, a young organization that focuses on natural biotechnology and integrative medicine – bringing scientific validation to our mountain folk remedies and responding to a burgeoning market for high quality research in nutraseuticals and botanical medicines.

The Arboretum joins with many community and other partners in making Asheville a national center for climate change information and business development. Our interest, of course, at the Arboretum is the impact of climate change on our plants and ecology.

It’s all here – from enjoying nature to building business; from sunning to science. In a wide variety of ways, The North Carolina Arboretum is growing the future.

George Briggs

Executive Director