Thursday, January 27, 2011, is the date for the Annual Meeting for the Friends of the Parks of Lakeway. The public is invited and dinner is free. We will be having Bar-B-Que from Buster’s with all the trimmings. The meeting will be held at The Lakeway Activity Center, 105 Cross Creek at 6:30 p.m. Please RSVP to Cindy Berdan at cpuglvr@sbcglobal.net or call 608-9244 and leave a message by January 24, 2011.

We will have an overview of all the projects we did in 2010, and what we are planning to do in 2011. If you are interested in joining Friends of the Parks　of Lakeway or are just interested in learning about the group, please come, have dinner and join us for a wonderful talk about the different plants of Texas, how they have been used in history and how we use them today. Go to the Friends of the Parks of Lakeway　website at: www.lakewayFOP.org

Our speaker, who will begin at 7:30 p.m., is Matt Warnock Turner, Ph.D. He is the author of

Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives (University of Texas Press 2009), which will be for sale at the meeting or you can order his book at:

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exturrem.html. He is a naturalist, teacher and a free lance writer who works at the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business. An active member of the Native Plant Society of Texas, he has published both scientific and popular articles on botanical topics. He has given presentations, as well as, nature walks at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. He recently appeared as a guest on PBS’s "Central Texas Gardener". He is a native of Austin, where he resides and is a Fifth-generation Texan!

The discussion will be from the book, Remarkable Plants of Texas. We will explore a selection of Texas plants, that will include the history, material, medicinal, culinary, archaeological, shelter, cultural and economic subsistence from sixty-five common native trees, shrubs, and flowers. We will also look at how plants have figured in Texas folklore. Remarkable Plants of Texas: Uncommon Accounts of Our Common Natives won the Native Plant Society of Texas’ 2009 Carroll Abbott Memorial Award for writings in the popular veinof Texas native plants. This will be a very interesting and informative talk. Please join us for dinner and great entertainment.