WVU Core Arboretum

04/24/2026

Spring Flower Festival at WVU Core Arboretum was featured on the TV news! Thanks to Sean Lowdermilk at WBOY for the coverage.

The arboretum has officially been around since 1948 and is considered an old-growth forest, which means it has developed for hundreds of years without disturbance.

04/23/2026

The City Nature Challenge is this weekend! Do you want to explore nature where you live and make a difference for the planet? Join people all over the world in documenting living things. Challenge yourself and others to see how many different kinds of WILD flowers, trees, birds, snails, lizards, or even weeds you can spot living in your neighborhood. Participating is free and easy!

When: Friday April 24th - Monday, April 27th
Where: The Morgantown Region City Nature Challenge includes Monongalia, Marion, and Preston counties
How: Take photos of wild organisms and upload them to iNaturalist!

For more information contact Kevin Barry at [email protected], or message kjbarry through iNaturalist.

See the WVU Events calendar for information about iNaturalist webinars held on April 23rd, 24th, and 28th.

04/18/2026

Tomorrow!

04/18/2026

Spring Flower Festival is tomorrow, Saturday, April 18, 2-6 pm at WVU Core Arboretum! We will have food trucks, live music, a flower tour, and more. It is free and open to all in the Arboretum Lawn Area. Park at the Coliseum Parking Lot. We hope to see you there!

04/04/2026

The spring ephemeral wildflowers at the Arboretum are amazing right now! The warm weather has everything well ahead of the “typical”schedule. All pictures are from today! Sign up for a tour this Sunday or next or visit on your own. If you visit on your own, be sure to pick up a map to the spring ephemeral hotspot (where these pictures were taken) from the kiosk. The link to tour signups is posted below in a comment. Do not miss the beauty of the Arboretum in spring—these flowers will not stay bloomed for very long!!

03/25/2026

Please help us make the Arboretum Amphitheater area more accessible today on WVU Day of Giving. Gifts of any size will help us reach our goal!

Use the link in the comments to give (please select "WVU Lawn Area Accessibility Fund" in the what to support? drop down menu), and read more below:

Please help WVU Core Arboretum on Day of Giving this year as we raise money for the Arboretum Lawn Area and Amphitheater Accessibility Fund. It has long been our goal to make the Amphitheater and Lawn Area accessible to more people so that events such as Nature Connection Series, WV Pawpaw Festival, and Spring Flower Festival are more truly open to all. We have worked with WVU students in Vaike Haas’s Landscape Architecture classes to develop proof of concept, but now we need to make it a reality! We are in the surveying and planning phases of the project, and these steps are already expensive.

Thank you for any help!

03/06/2026

Harbinger of spring!!

The spring ephemeral wildflowers have begun to bloom at WVU Core Arboretum! Most of the show is still weeks away, but the earliest of the native spring ephemeral wildflowers have started to emerge from dormancy.

Harbinger of spring (Erigenia bulbosa), a member of the carrot family (Apiaceae) and one of our first native flowers of spring, is just starting to bloom! There were only a few in bloom today, but many more are not far behind!

Don’t forget to register for a free flower tour in April, details are on our website! We are excited to share our urban old-growth forest with the public again this spring! It is hard to believe the change that will happen here over the next two months!

02/28/2026

Spring is almost here, and we are excited to share our spectacular old-growth forest and its spring ephemeral wildflowers and birds with the public again this year! We have several free events scheduled that anyone is welcome to join. More information for each event is available on our website and social media, and we will promote the events individually on here as they approach.

02/19/2026

Owldo, the Arboretum's resident barred owl (Strix varia) was sitting on the edge of his nest cavity the last two afternoons! A pair of these owls has raised young in this tree cavity for the last several years, and, to be correct, it is not possible to tell if this is the male or the female. In most years the young will be visible here, too, at some point in time. This photo was taken with a phone camera from the bridge along lower Rumsey Trail near the powerline right of way. Owldo was named after Aldo Leopold.

09/19/2025

We are excited for WV Pawpaw Festival tomorrow! There will be native perennials and trees as well as pawpaw seedlings available in addition to the fruit and fruit tasting. Come get some plants to plant now for next year. Plant joke: You won’t have plants if you haven’t bought any.