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...