The Cleveland Pollinator and Native Plant Symposium educates and inspires homeowners, garden clubs, landscape architects and designers, horticulturists, botanists, naturalists, educators, conservationists and anyone eager to learn about creating pollinator and wildlife habitats using native plants and trees to promote biodiversity and ecological resilience.
The 6th Annual Symposium has been postponed to 2021. The site secured for the planned September 2020 date did not allow for social distancing, and was not going to open to the public until July, making it difficult to work through the process to manage events and the public in such a short time. Therefore, this exciting, educational event has been postponed for 2021 in the greater Cleveland area.
Join in the conversation in 2021 meeting with national and regional experts to increase your knowledge of pollinators, native plants and planting designs that are robust and form ecologically valuable alliances. Our focus is on shifting traditional horticultural practices to creating landscapes for beauty, biodiversity, and a sustainable ecosystem. The program encourages participants to connect, exchange ideas and share information with each other and the speakers.
Featured speakers for 2021 (dependent on continuing availability for 2021):
Ian Adams is an environmental photographer, writer and educator specializing in Ohio’s natural, rural and historical garden areas. Twenty-three books of his color photography have been published, including Ohio In Photographs: A Portrait of the Buckeye State, co-photographed with Randal Schieber and a foreward by Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Since 1989, Ian has conducted more than 200 seminars and workshops in digital photography and has produced photographs for Country Gardens, Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Living the Country Life and Organic Gardening magazines. Symposium topic: iPhone Landscape and Nature Photography David Burke is the Chief Program Officer of Science and Conservation at Holden Forests and Gardens. His primary research interest as an ecologist has been the interaction between plants and soil mircroorganisms. Of special interest are mycorrhizal fungi that form mutually beneficial relationships with plants that can enhance plant growth, diseases resistance, drought tolerance, and affect plant community composition. David believes a better understanding of how mycorrhizal fungi interact with plants will be necessary to develop sound management of ecosystems. Symposium topic: The Mysterious Mutualistic System of Mychorrizal Fungi and Why We Should Care
Laura Ekatsetya is the Director and Head Horticulturist at the renowned Lurie Garden in Millenium Park, an ecologically sensitive oasis in downtown Chicago designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol and renowned Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf. Laura has been responsible for guiding Lurie Garden as it matures—maintaining the vision of the designers while leading it into a new climate era. Even though the garden is ecologically responsible by design, Laura has shifted the organization’s mindset from one of pure maintenance to one of constant improvement— challenging the garden to maximize its usefulness to the urban wildlife and human community. She has pushed the boundaries of design, experimenting with new ideas to preserve habitat for wildlife. Ekatsetya is an evangelist of the naturalistic movement, speaking world-wide and participating in the global initiative to change the way we think about gardens. Symposium topic: Wild By Intention Nadia Malarkey is a garden and landscape design professional who incorporates environmentally friendly practices to produce landscapes that enhance biodiversity and biomass, address habitat fragmentation and climate change, while enriching our experience of the changing seasons. Many of Nadia’s gardens exemplify how regenerative design, while addressing habit fragmentation and climate change, can be elegant, uplifting and enlightening. Nadia’s work has been featured in magazines and news articles, and she speaks at regional Conferences. In 2015, Nadia’s project “Regenerating Suburbia” was selected as a finalist in The Society of Garden Designers (United Kingdom) annual SGD awards for Planting Design. Symposium topic: Creating Captivating Bio-Diverse Residential Gardens: One Practitioner’s Path Of Discovery
Joel Hunt is the program administrator of the Ohio Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Highway Beautification and Pollinator Habitat Program. Realizing the many benefits of roadside pollinator habitats, ODOT became a founding partner of the Ohio Pollinator Habitat Initiative (OPHI) in 2015. In late 2016, ODOT created a fully funded standalone Highway Beautification and Pollinator Habitat Program to capture the numerous opportunities available to establish new pollinator habitat on ODOT’s right of way. Symposium topic: Ohio’s Pollinator Highway Initiatives
Kass Urban-Mead
How might you enhance your pollinator habitat…with trees? Kass Urban- Mead’s research as an entomology PhD candidate at Cornell University explores the intersection of ecological forest management and sustainable crop pollination. Her “tree-climbing for bees” (sampling in canopies) explores forest habitats as sites not only for bee nesting, but also the possibilities they are collecting the vast amounts of pollen produced by flowering forest trees. Kass has written several extension articles for outreach and extension publications, given many community workshops and outreach events. Symposium topic: The Value of Forests for Insect Pollinators
Doug Tallamy’s work has been a catalyst for change at the grass-roots level, and has formed the principles that guide how we treat our landscapes for future generations. Doug says, “Biodiversity is not optional.” He is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology and the University of Delaware, where he has taught classes in insect taxonomy, behavioral ecology, humans and nature, and insect ecology. Doug’s book Bringing Nature Home was awarded the 2008 Silver Medal by the Garden Writers Association and The Living Landscape, co-authored with Rick Darke, was published in 2014. He has won the Garden Club of American Medal for Conservation, the 2018 American Horticultural Society Communication Award and the 2019 Cynthia Westcott Scientific Writing Award. Symposium topics: Nature’s Best Hope and Let It Be An Oak
Nadia Malarkey is a garden and landscape design professional who incorporates environmentally friendly practices to produce landscapes that enhance biodiversity and biomass, address habitat fragmentation and climate change, while enriching our experience of the changing seasons. Many of Nadia’s gardens exemplify how regenerative design, while addressing habit fragmentation and climate change, can be elegant, uplifting and enlightening. Nadia’s work has been featured in magazines and news articles, and she speaks at regional Conferences. In 2015, Nadia’s project “Regenerating Suburbia” was selected as a finalist in The Society of Garden Designers (United Kingdom) annual SGD awards for Planting Design. Symposium topic: Creating Captivating Bio-Diverse Residential Gardens: One Practitioner’s Path Of Discovery
The 2021 date will be announced on our website in February 2021. Learn more about the Sixth Annual Cleveland Pollinator and Native Plant Symposium HERE.