About Us
About this site.
This is the website of Millie & Hubert Ling. This site was created in September 2021 by Millie Ling and is is dedicated to Native Plants mainly of New Jersey with a focus on the the 'Plant Profiles and Photos' pages which Millie creates. The goal here is to continue these.
Also we will be adding trip reports of our many hikes in NJ. Hubert is a regular writer for the Gardener News and we will be republishing some of his articles.
How the 'Plant Profile & Photos' pages got started
These 'Plant Profiles & Photos' pages started out being just photographs of beautiful flowers. Hubert created a prolific collection of native plants in our yard and it was the first source of my photos. After seeing these photos I would look for the plants in our yard at some later date. I was not successful in finding many of the plants. To my surprise, I was looking for flowers that were 3 inches wide in my photos while in real life they were only a quarter inch. At that time I realized that just photos were not enough.
I started doing some research about each plant and with the plants in the backyard I was able to go back and take close-ups of the features that I read about. It was impressed upon me that the beauty of the flowers was not for us. The purpose of the flowers was for the next plant generation and to attract pollinators to implement pollination so that seeds could be produced.
The more I photographed and the more I learned about their morphology, intricacies, reproductive strategies, life histories, and their connection to the rest of the natural world, the more interesting and memorable the plants became. There is such amazing diversity in plants. With Hubert’s expertise, we were able to include photo micrographs of some interesting plant features.
Consequently, many of the more recent pages are more detailed.
I originally created some of these pages for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey website (www.NPSNJ.org), however, they have been moved here in anticipation of the revamping of the NPSNJ website. Please note our URL - www.AwesomeNativePlants.info .
Pine Barren Gentian - Gentiana autumnalis Rarity: G3,S3. These were seen in a goverment restricted area in the Pine Barrens. . Click here to learn more about this rare plant..
About Hubert Ling:
He has been interested in plants from a very early age. As a kid, by passing a nature test , he won a month long camping experience at Alice Rich Northrop Memorial Camp which he attended for 3 summers. It was a nature camp which eventually guided his career into biology. He has a Ph.D. in Biology from Wayne State University, Michigan. From there he worked in industry and education. He is an avid native plant gardener.
Hubert has been active in the Native Plant Society of NJ almost from its inception. He is a charter member and has been horticulture chair /co-chair for about 30 years. He is/was president from March 2020 to March 2022.
About - Millie Ling
Millie is the webmaster and can be contacted at webmaster@awesomenativeplants.info
Millie became interested in the outdoors when her graduate school professor took his team hiking in the White Mountains in NH. It was a new world for her. She has a MS in Chemistry. She became interested in native plants after she met Hubert. Through her work, she learned programing and was exposed to working with websites. She has volunteered to be webmaster for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey for more than 15 years and has done web work for some other organizations. Millie enjoys the whole process of generating plant profile pages: hiking, photographing, researching, and posting.
Hubert and Millie enjoy hiking and photographing native plants together.