Meagan and Mitchell Turner helped restore the Cloverdale Garden
at NASA. Photo courtesy Andrea Turner Native plants are as much
a part of history as centuries-old brick-and-mortar buildings.
Just ask the Turner family of York County. For a year, Andrea
Turner and her children, Meagan and Mitchell, have worked to
restore the historical Cloverdale Garden at NASA Langley
Research Center. The garden goes back about 277 years ago, when
Augustine Moore purchased 50 acres of land from James Tomer, the
grandson of Thomas Wythe I, according to a recent article in The
Researcher News, a NASA publication. That land, which now
occupies portions of the western area of NASA's Langley Research
Center, was known as the Moorefield Plantation. It was home for
the Moore family for roughly 35 years until they moved to the
Moore House in Yorktown, where a treaty ended the American
Revolution. "The garden encourages people to plant natives that
require less water, fertilizer and pesticides, thus adding fewer
chemicals to the lands