Displaying items by tag: dogwood arts festival

Annual Bazillion Blooms campaign focused on planting a Dogwood in every yard across East Tennessee

It’s planting time in Tennessee! Dogwood Arts is on a mission to Keep Knoxville Blooming by selling dogwood trees through their annual Bazillion Blooms program. Bare-root trees (2-4ft tall) are on sale now for $25 each (or $20 each when five or more are purchased). The trees are disease-resistant, April-blooming, and available in either white or pink flowering varieties. Orders can be placed year-round, but trees are distributed in the fall to coincide with optimal planting time for successful growing.

Trees ordered through Nov 16 will be available for pick-up at the Dogwood Arts office (123 W Jackson Avenue) on Friday, Dec. 8 from 10AM-4PM and Saturday, Dec 9 from 9AM-12PM. Tree orders can be placed online at https://www.dogwoodarts.com/bazillionblooms or by calling Dogwood Arts at (865) 637-4561. Since 2009, over 14,500 dogwood trees have been added to East Tennessee’s landscape through the Bazillion Blooms program.

This photo of the Southern Appalachians was taken from 30,000 feet. “Notice how the clouds are parallel with the ridges below them. Wind near the surface blowing up the western slopes forms waves in the atmosphere. At the crest of the wave, over the ridge tops, the air has cooled sufficiently to condense into clouds. As this air descends toward the wave trough, it becomes slightly warmer and drier, inhibiting condensation.”  Seth Adams via NASA

Earth Day activities have cooled in Knoxville over the decades. The planet has not.

KNOXVILLE — It’s been 52 years since the modern environmental movement was born on what is now known around the world as Earth Day.

Now reckoned to be the world’s largest secular observance, Earth Day is the climax of Earth Week (April 16 to 22), which brings together an estimated billion people around the globe working to change human behavior and push for pro-environment economic and legislative action. This year’s theme is “Invest in the planet.”

Events marking Earth Day in Knoxville tend to vary in size and tone from year-to-year, with 2023 providing environmentally minded residents with a number of ways to celebrate Mother Earth. 

Perhaps the most memorable of those years was the very first one, when one of the most important voices in the burgeoning environmental movement spoke on the University of Tennessee campus.

Jane Jacobs, who is now recognized as “the godmother of the New Urbanism movement,” gave a lecture to a crowd of nearly 200 people on the topic of “Man and His Environment” at the Alumni Memorial Hall, according to Jack Neely, who heads the Knoxville History Project.