Dodgeville plant store supplies native species to Obama Presidential Center

Add Us On GoogleAdd as a preferred source on Google

MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) - Ten thousand plants from a Dodgeville plant store will be on display at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago starting this week.

“It’s just cool to be part of something so historic,” said Corrine Daniels, owner of Bombus.

Bombus Plant Nursery, whose mission is to serve the ecological restoration community, provided 25 different native woodland species to the museum for the first Black U.S. president.

“We did some trilliums, we did jack-in-the-pulpit, we did some false Solomon’s seal,” Daniels said.

The plants are all shade-loving or part-shade species.

“This one is the American wintergreen. It’s a shrub, for a native it gets large pink berries and pink flowers,” Daniels said.

Her team loaded up five trucks from Dodgeville and headed to Chicago.

“I didn’t know what the project was for. This client reached out. They were looking for some hard-to-find natives. Heard that Bombus was the one that specializes in that,” Daniels said. “We found them and then they said later, ‘hey, this is for the Obama Presidential Center’,” Daniels said.

“It gives your life a little life beyond the time that you’re on the planet, which is awesome and pay forward into the future and know that you’ve done something that makes a little bit of a difference,” Daniels said.

The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on Juneteenth. Daniels said she is taking her team to see the plants in Chicago in August.

Daniels said she has been a part of other historical projects including the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Center in North Dakota and the Chiwaukee Prairie Nature Conservancy in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.