Pre-registration required.
Cost: $25 (25% off for BGA Members)
As the days grow shorter and darker, you can prepare for spring flowers. Now is the time for marking plants that emerge late, expanding flower beds the easy way, collecting/cleaning/storing native seeds, planting trees and shrubs, and building arbors for vines.
Instructors
Adrienne O'Brien is the current secretary of the Wild Ones WNC, where she coordinates the Native Seed Swap in the winter and a Native Plant plug sale in the fall. However, she grew up on a dairy farm in a small community in upstate New York. Her family (including six siblings) enjoyed exploring a couple hundred acres of pasture, woods, ponds and streams. Later, at the State University of NY (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, she majored in Zoology and minored in Entomology and Botany. Her education prepared her well for her 36 years as a horticulturist, growing ornamental plants, tending gardens and working with students and volunteers from all backgrounds at the University of Michigan's Matthaei Botanical Garden and Nichols Arboretum. During the last 10 years, that work was focused on removing woody invasive plants and restoring natural areas, especially by collecting and cleaning native plant seeds and propagating them for use on the properties. Since Adrienne and her husband moved to Weaverville in 2019, they have converted about 2500 square feet of their front yard into a meadow of about 75 species and too many asters.
Phyllis Stiles is founder and director emerita of Bee City USA®. The North American Pollinator Protection Campaign named Stiles “Pollinator Advocate of the Year for the United States” in 2015, the same year the sister program, Bee Campus USA, launched. To date, more than 400 cities and campuses in 47 states have joined the Bee City and Bee Campus USA networks, which became initiatives of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in 2018. Stiles has made well over a hundred presentations and published countless newspaper and magazine articles about pollinator conservation across the nation. She spent her career at universities and non-profit organizations serving communities from West Africa to the Mississippi Delta, in fields ranging from natural resource and farmland protection to fundraising. Today, Stiles is as excited to inspire individuals and communities to create climate-resilient, connected pollinator habitat as she was when she launched Bee City USA in 2012.
Photo of echinacea seed heads by Cathy DeWitt, CC BY 4.0