In her presentation, Jennifer Jewell will explore the philosophy of Cultivating Place, her national, award winning-public radio program and international podcast, based on the belief that gardens/gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for potentially positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and being.

She will walk audiences through how this power of gardens and gardeners is exemplified in not only her weekly program, but very specifically in her the subjects of her three books: the horticultural women in leadership roles in the award-wining The Earth in Her Hands (2020); the beautiful and innovative place-based gardens that celebrate western landscapes in?Under Western Skies; Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (2021) - with amazing photography by Caitlin Atkinson; and, finally in What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023).

All together, these stories, garden and gardener inspirations tending to a culture of care are blue-prints guiding us in ways we can all grow our world better: more beautiful and brave.

Who doesn’t love butterflies? Habitat cultivation is a vital component of creating ecologically healthy landscapes, particularly in urban settings. But traditional landscaping practices rarely take biodiversity into consideration, and there is a dearth of effective guidelines to inform this goal.

For ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin, biodiversity is central to landscape management. In her 10 years as Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Rebecca oversaw 85 acres of diverse, organic landscapes, all managed to support birds, butterflies, and soil microorganisms.

Join us to learn how to use ecological insight and experimentation to develop new management strategies – and why careful observation and documentation of the insects, birds, and other wildlife in your gardens is crucial to their success.

Between North Carolina’s coastal plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains lies the Piedmont: some 250 linear miles of rolling, long-settled lands covering almost half of the state. Geologically speaking, piedmont regions are found all over the world, but North Carolina's Piedmont is among the largest in the United States, sitting along an environmental crossroads where northern and southern flora and fauna overlap, offering an incredibly rich natural diversity. Inhabited continuously for thousands of years, the state's rural heartland is today home to an increasingly dense population. Yet most who reside in the region's cities, suburbs, and smaller towns still live within reach of red-clay farmland, oak and hickory forests watered by small creeks, and rocky river valleys. These places—as they have been and as they are now—remain essential to the character of life in the South.

The Native People, Native Plants Symposium is focused on celebrating cultural relationships between Native American people and native plants. Through workshops led by local Native American plant knowledge keepers, we will explore and celebrate cultural uses, traditions, and relationships among multiple Native plants and the people who have been tending to and using these plants since time immemorial. We aim to bring more visibility to and awareness of Indigenous uses of plants, not just those native to NC, and uplift historic relationships with plants and people. We also plan to exchange native plant seeds in a community seed swap - please bring seeds to share if you have them!

Join Highlands Biological Station executive director Dr. Jim Costa for an illustrated exploration of Darwin's impact on the world of botany, through the lens of beautiful botanical art.

Charles Darwin is best known for his work on the evolution of animals, but in fact a large part of his contribution to the natural sciences is focused on plants. His observations are crucial to our modern understanding of so much about plant biology, from the amazing pollination process of orchids to plant carnivory to the way that vines climb. Darwin scholar Jim Costa teamed up with botanical artist Bobbi Angell to explore Darwin's fascination with the plant world in their new book Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants.

A celebration of Darwin's often overlooked botanical interests, the book spotlights 45 fascinating plants studied by Darwin, each illustrated with beautiful botanical art selected from the Library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Join us for this talk and come away with a new appreciation of Darwin's creative botanical investigations, the plants he studied, and the ways in which he helped shape our understanding of the world around us.