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It is UP!
Super Awesome!  I love it, thank you so much,
James

I received the email above last Thursday from James Gagliardi, River Farms Horticulturalist, to inform me that the André Bluemel Meadow web site launched.

River Farms, a 25 acre property in Alexandria, VA, once owned by George Washington, currently serves as the headquarters for the American Horticultural Society. The André Bluemel Meadow is a 4-acre sustainable meadow planted to replace a vast expanse of lawn.

As the River Farms Horticulturalist, James is primarily responsible for the care of the grounds, including the meadow. A few months ago James called and asked for my help developing an interactive web site for the meadow to promote it, involve the community, and garner support for an initiative to redevelop the entire AHS web site.

Since the current AHS hosting plan did not provide PHP support and there was no budget for the project, Five Star generously offered to host the site and allowed me to donate my time to the project. I built the site using WordPress as a content management system because it offers a solution the AHS can reuse and build upon when redeveloping their site.

To help James create the plant list for the Meadow Plants page more easily, I built a Plant Manager plugin (pictured below) which gives hima wizard to use. To add interactivity, we included a Flickr slideshow so that visitors may upload their own pictures to a Meadow Wildlife page where visitors may leave comments about the wildlife they spot in the meadow. Both interactive pages allow nature lovers to share their experience and help promote the meadows purpose, showing that a meadow can be a beautiful, sustainable alternative to traditional lawns, supporting it’s own ecosystem.

If you are in the Washington D.C. area I recommend visiting River Farms to enjoy a view of the Potomac and a nature walk in the meadow. When you get home make sure to share your photos and tell us what wildlife you saw!

Oh, and one more thing, if you have noticed this developer and James share a last name I’ll answer your question… yes we are related; he is my brother. Despite James’ penchant for procrastination and my disposition to work well ahead of deadlines we managed to successfully complete this project together. James and I would like to thank Five Star for the opportunity to work together and create something special for the AHS to help support their mission by relaying the educational message and beauty of the meadow to the 23,000 members of the AHS and the public as a whole.