Contributed
Jesse Wimberly began the February program for the Garden Club of Seven Lakes by holding up a thorny stem of Similax (Greenbrier), a native of the Sandhills.
Locals nicknamed it “wait a minute,” he explained, due to its ability to latch onto pants and impede your progress making a path.
This singular plant shaped the passageways of our region. N.C. 211 started as a route for Buffalo seeking water. Later it was used by Lumbee tribes and then for pitch and turpentine transport, before becoming a motorway.
Garden Club members were captivated from the start by this fourth generation landowner and historian’s knowledge of how our Sandhills natural history has shaped our existing culture.
He took us on a journey from the clay soil that begot the pottery trade to the sandy soil that welcomed peach farming, to the vast land that made us a golf capital.
Wimberly may be only 66 years old but he has 400 years of generational knowledge and memories passed down through family history. As the founder of the Prescribed Burn Association (PRB), his mission is to educate our residents about the importance of using controlled fire to fight wildfire and to ensure our natural ecology is preserved.
Due to our topography, the prevalence of lightning that stimulated fire helped create our ecosystem and will always be important in maintaining that same system.
At present, 90% of our forest land is privately owned. Wimberly assists those landowners in the process of prescribed burns.
In short, Wimberly gave garden club members a new appreciation of the natural beauty and fragility of the place that they call home.
