"North Carolina Museum of History" news and stories

Photo: N.C. Museum of History.

Thanks to an agricultural education collaborative that's planted the state's leading crops between the State Capitol and the North Carolina Legislative Building, North Carolina's halls of power are lined with cornstalks and tobacco leaves.

"It's been a great way to take the museum outdoors and let people reconnect with where their food comes from," says North Carolina Museum of History youth and family programs coordinator Emily Grant, who worked with the state's Department of Administration and Department of Agriculture to create a series of agricultural vignettes in decorative planters where maple trees and azaleas once grew.

"Our standard landscape planting was starting to die out from the drought," Grant says. "We thought we could pick out plants from North Carolina to talk about plant use and abuse."

The project this year took more than five planters of varying sizes. "We don't have a big lawn where we can just plow the back," Grant says of the urban museum, sowing seeds for a Three Sisters garden of beans, corn and squash; cotton; tobacco; sweet potatoes and peanuts.