Wikimedia Commons/Smallbones
Pamela Copeland’s Pioneering Native Plant Conservation at Mt. Cuba
Pamela Copeland saw the future in wild plants when no one else did.
In 1935, she and her husband bought farmland near Wilmington, Delaware, and soon built their grand home. Yet by the 1940s, she had moved past manicured lawns to start a small wildflower garden.
While others still dug up native plants from forests in the 1960s, she grew them properly at her estate. Her vision grew too, first into a research center in 1983, then a nonprofit in 1989…