The Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines is celebrating the second annual Palustris Festival with three free events and a fun and entertaining Sunday brunch and poetry reading requiring tickets:

n A series of free 45-minute docent-led tours of the historic 1920s home and grounds of -novelist James Boyd, at 555 E. Connecticut Ave., where important writers and artists of the 1920s and 1930s regularly socialized with Boyd and his wife, Katharine.

The property is now a nonprofit foundation dedicated to providing the public with quality arts and humanities programs and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Tours will be Friday, March 25, starting at 10 a.m.; Saturday and Sunday, March 26 and 27, at 1 p.m.

n A special poetry reading from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Friday, March 25, at the Weymouth Center will celebrate former Chatham County slave George Moses Horton's poetry and talent, which was hidden for years. Marjorie Hudson, an author, essayist and poet herself, will read from his work. Other local readers will also illustrate his life and work.

Children are welcome. Admission is free.

n A birthday party followed by birthday cake and -refreshments on Saturday, March 26, at 4 p.m., will -celebrate the 462nd year of the oldest known longleaf pine at Weymouth-Sandhills Nature Preserve on the state park grounds adjacent to the Boyd home, now Weymouth Center.

After a short walk to the tree from the house, Scott Hartley will host the festivities honoring the largest known surviving -vestige of the original longleaf pine forest that once covered the southeastern coastal plains of North Carolina.

The party is free and children are welcome.

n The final Weymouth event on Sunday, March 27, will be a short drive away to The Rooster's Wife, a popular entertainment venue at 114 Knight St., in Aberdeen.

A Bloody Brunch will kick off at 11:30 a.m., -followed by Martha Bassett's Murder and Mayhem Set, and then a Readers Theatre -presentation of "The Serial Killer's Daughter," a poem by Pat Riviere-Seel that won the 2009 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry.

Tickets are $15 in advance, $18 at the door and children under 12 are admitted free. Call Janet Kenworthy at (910) 944-7502 for ticket information.

For more information on these events, call the Weymouth Center at (910) 692-6261, weekdays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. , e-mail weymouthcenter@ pinehurst.net or visit the -palustris website at www.palustrisfestival.com.