LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Written by: ELA Newsletter Editor-in-chief, Leslie Duthie
The Ecological Landscape Alliance is growing, just like the field of ecological landscaping. Last month we introduced you to our new management team and over the next months, we will introduce you to members of the board as well. We are all working together to keep this organization vibrant, active, and on the cutting edge of new technology and solutions for today’s landscape challenges. As the new chair of the publications committee, I will help to steer our newsletter for the coming year. Today, I am inviting all of you to share your thoughts and ideas with us. Do you have a great project that has just finished? Or one that you had some problems with? Share your experiences with the Committee and we can share some with our readership.
We expect to bring you the provocative articles that you have become used to. New techniques, new ideas, and new challenges that face all of us in landscaping will still be the focus of our newsletter. As our byline says – ‘Because Land Doesn’t Come with a Manual’ – our newsletter is designed to offer food for thought as well as topics for discussion.
We are looking forward to working with our new management team and expanding our reach across the country, across the world, and across different cultures. Urban landscapes present different challenges than rural ones. Community gardens are a great place to make friends and exchange ideas. Regional landscapes vary across the country and around the world. But we all share a love of putting our hands in the soil and encouraging our plants and our landscapes to thrive. We hope that this newsletter can continue to inspire you to try new things and see our landscape from a new perspective.
We have some great conferences coming up! It has been a challenging two years but we are moving forward, reaching out, and trying to share ideas. The Season’s End Summit is first on our calendar. This conference will be held as a hybrid event on Thursday, October 27, 2022. We welcome people to join us at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill for our in-person event. This location offers the ability to get together and share ideas. The theme for this conference is ‘Are we Getting it Right?’ We have several design professionals talking about their projects as well as speakers from the field sharing their ideas on plants and pollinators. If you can’t join us in person, sign up for the online event and still have access to all the information we hope to share.
Next will be Regenerative Solutions for the Resilient Landscapes which will be our in-person mid-Atlantic Conference to be held on Thursday, November 10, 2022, at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. Thanks go out to Longwood who is partnering with ELA to allow us to bring back our in-person programming. Watch for more details about this conference and on our website.
Finally, the Ecological Plant Conference will be held on Friday, December 2, 2022, which will wrap up our conferences for this year. We look forward to having more information on this conference soon.
