Portland is the largest urban area in Maine and many of the region’s native plants and the fauna that depend on them have been replaced with buildings, paving, and exotic plant species. Creating a vision for restoring native habitat was the goal of the Portland Pollinator Vision Plan, a joint project between Wild Seed Project...
Green infrastructure, pollinator gardens, food gardens are increasingly integrated in PK-12 learning environments. This session will describe how the built environment and natural settings can facilitate deeper learning, an approach to education that not only seeks to achieve traditional academic standards, but also seeks to foster innovation in problem solving, collaborative work, effective communication, inquiry,...
Strategic conservation in farmed and urban landscapes can disproportionately increase biodiversity. Nick Haddad has worked for three decades to understand how to conserve landscapes to benefit pollinators and other species. He has created large experiments to test the role of targeted conservation efforts. For example, landscape corridors through urban and farmed landscapes can created superhighways...
A book about planting for monarchs (and for motivated readers and gardeners) is not quite as wondrous as monarchs and their individual life cycles, their host relationship with milkweeds, or their annual migrations in North America, but it is something of a miracle. Only a few decades ago, the concept of creating native-plant gardens was...
MARCH 29 -- ECOLOGICAL LAND CARE Ecological Land Care sounds easy, but as we learn, actually integrating horticulture with ecology takes time and patience. This session will help us understand how we, as gardeners, can meld horticulture and ecology practices to positively impact gardens and ecosystems. We will also explore why traditional garden practices (ie,...
JULY 12 -- PLANT LAYERING OPTIONS FOR MORE COLOR, DIVERSITY & HABITAT Learn how to enhance the landscape you already have. Identify your yard and garden's (boring) gaps and explore...
AUGUST 17, 2023 -- ORGANIC TURF CARE: A PRACTICAL APPROACH This practical webinar will share a step-by-step development to implementation of Organic Turf Care programs. We will look at a...
AUGUST 23, 2023 -- FERNS - THE GREEN WONDERS OF NATURE Often times by the dog days of summer, some plants in the garden are looking weary. These plants may...
AUGUST 30, 2023 -- OAKS, FIRE & CLIMATE CHANGE Natural landscapes in the US and Canada have been drastically altered by human activities such as infrastructure development, logging, overgrazing, introduction...
September 12, 2023 -- DESIGNING YOUR POLLINATOR GARDEN: HOW TO CREATE A 'BUZZ' IN YOUR GARDEN In this presentation Asia Scudder discusses how to design a garden with native...
September 19, 2023 -- NATIVE PLANT COMMUNITIES FOR (MIDWEST) URBAN GARDENS Native plants can help us turn our gardens into beautiful, ecologically functioning plant communities; for Midwestern city gardeners, this...
October 12, 2023 -- NATURALISTIC PLANTING DESIGN There have been some significant developments in recent years towards a more naturalistic approach to planting design that borrows concepts from both ornamental...
