Jeffers Lecture - Fantastic Voyages:
The Plants of 1607
Marion B. Lobstein,
Associate Professor of Biology, NVCC-Manassas
Adjunct Professor UVA’s Blandy Experimental Farm
Marion B. Lobstein is an associate professor of biology at the Manassas Campus of Northern Virginia Community College, where she has taught for thirty-three years and an adjunct professor at UVA’s Blandy Experimental Farm and the Virginia State Arboretum for the last fifteen years. She has been active in the Virginia Academy of Science for thirty years and is a Fellow of the Academy. She is actively involved in efforts to develop the modern Flora of Virginia, a resource to identify the native and naturalized species of plants in Virginia . Marion ’s involvement with this Flora of Virginia Project was featured in the May 2006 Mid-Atlantic edition of Southern Living.
One might describe Marion as having a passion for native plants! In the 2007 Jeffers Lecture, Marion will explore the vast variety of native plants our early settlers came in contact with at Jamestown in 1607. Many of the North American native plants were unknown to the early settlers. Imagine yourself in a “new world” with a large group of new and unknown plants surrounding you. You experience a “learning curve” as to which ones you can eat, which ones are poisonous, or which ones might be used to treat medical conditions. Although the native Indians were of some help, a language barrier existed. The first settlers almost starved to death that first winter, because they ran out of food and did not know which native plants they could eat! Local Indian tribes showed them how to live off the land and which plants & berries could be eaten. Some of these plants had unusual uses – the Indians dried, rolled, chopped up, and set fire to the leaves of one plant, and inhaled the smoke thru a pipe (tobacco)! Dried seeds from another plant when placed in a fire, exploded and expanded, and could be eaten… Moist seeds and their sheaths of the same plant could also be placed in hot coals, cooked, and eaten (ears of corn). When cooked in this manner they did not explode! Green balls the size of basketballs found growing on vines were harvested when they turned orange and cooked in hot coals and eaten (pumpkins).
There are other examples of the many native plants we grow, eat, and take for granted today were viewed as bizarre by early the settlers that Marion will talk about in her presentation! These plants as well as medicinal and horticultural species were quickly carried back to Mother England. This exchange, Marion refers to these events as “Fantastic Voyages” that went both directions, plants taken from the New to Old World and plants brought from the Old to New World. This rich exchange will be highlighted in this Jeffers Lecture.
Marion Lobstein Biography
Marion Blois Lobstein is an Associate Professor of biology at the Manassas Campus of NVCC and is in her thirty-third year of teaching at NVCC. Her academic degrees include a BSEd (Biology) from Western Carolina University , a MAT (with a concentration in botany) from UNC-Chapel Hill, and a MS in Biology from George Mason University . For the last twenty-three years she also has conducted tours and taught classes for the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program. She also teaches a summer field botany course and does plant identification workshops at Blandy Experimental Farm, a UVA facility and the location of Virginia 's State Arboretum.
Marion has been active in the Virginia Academy of Science for thirty years and is a Fellow of the Academy. She serves on the Board of Director of the Foundation of the Flora of Virginia Project and on the Board of Directors of the Foundation of the State Arboretum (at Blandy Experimental Farm) and a founding and still active member of the Virginia Native Plant Society. Her longtime interests in wildflowers, art and travel greatly enrich her life and that of her students.
Marion has also developed a 45-minute long video/DVD “Spring Wildflowers of the Mid-Atlantic Region” and has coauthored a book Finding Wildflowers in the Washington-Baltimore Area.
