Winter Lecture Series 2025 Discount Bundle

Perennial plants and their benefits are primarily tied to the outdoors. However, their benefits can extend far beyond your gardens. Learn about how to employ native perennial plants and regenerative growing practices in your garden to increase habitat while also producing beautiful bouquets for your home.

A tiny forest is a dense, fast-growing native woodland the size of a tennis court. It is based on an established forest management method developing in the 1970s by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, Ph.D. The idea is for a tiny forest is to transform a small barren plot into one packed with dense vegetation, trees and complex ecosystems. Tiny forests brings the benefits of a forest— connecting people with nature, raising awareness of the environment, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change and supporting urban wildlife—right into the heart of our cities and suburban spaces. Discover how tiny forests are being built in Bucks County.

Not all of us have access to places of natural beauty. Even when we do it can be difficult to identify keystone flora and fauna or the intrinsic and instrumental value of certain landscapes. Infographic scientific illustrations help to share the many benefits of native habitats to a wide variety of viewers. These images can help viewers understand lifecycles, animal food sources, plant identification, the importance of biodiversity and much more! Learn about the research, process and practical application of scientific infographics and their utility in helping to preserve fragile ecosystems.

Join Basil Camu of Leaf & Limb as he examines how the systems of photosynthesis and soil formation work and how they affect water, carbon and all other life on land. Learn how our current management of the suburban and urban landscape is damaging these systems and about the practices we can implement that help heal them based on first-hand expertise developed at Leaf & Limb. We’ll begin with the easiest concepts, like planting saplings and saving mature trees. Then we’ll move to some more challenging, more impactful approaches, like planting pocket forests and replacing our lawns with Piedmont prairies. Finally, for those who want to help shift paradigms even more, we discuss how we can use the Project Pando model to work with our community to gather native seeds, raise them into trees and give them away for free.

Lower Makefield Townships innovative Native Plant Ordinance was adopted on April 4, 2007. A discussion will take place regarding how the ordinance came into being, its salient features and how it actually works in real practice. At its inception 18 years ago, it was considered cutting edge. Discover how it was accepted by developers, copied by other municipalities, how it has stood up to the test of time and its amazing results. Will a native plant ordinance work in your community? Let’s walk through the steps.

Humans are so deeply intertwined with natural cycles and the Earth’s balance that any disequilibrium impacts our inner well-being. When we lack a connection to our environment, it creates a void that cannot be filled with anything else. There are several ways to carry out ecosystem restoration, each region requiring different needs depending on the severity of the damage, what type of pollution or degradation has occurred and what resources are available. We’ll discuss our deep connection and methods to help restore the planet and ourselves.

The concept of converting lawns to meadows has existed for decades yet has enjoyed a recent surge of interest in the US. Meadow plant communities support far more biodiversity and ecosystem services than lawns while also serving as beautiful landscape features that can reduce property management costs. Unfortunately, there exists a great deal of well-meaning but often misleading information regarding meadow establishment. Too often discussions of lawn to meadow boil down to just planting native plants associated with meadows rather than information on how to create self-sustaining, functional ecosystems that provide orders of magnitude more environmental benefits. To that end, we will discuss the steps of creating and maintaining meadow plant communities in ways that achieve the most ecological and economic benefits for a given space.

What’s in a name? Knowing the name of a living thing can open a door into its world and deepen your connection with the nature world as a result. Modern tech has made that knowledge more easily accessible than ever once you know how to use it effectively. This program is an introduction to the best smart phone apps for helping you identify birds, plants and animals in the field. It is tailored for beginners as well as providing tips to improve ID accuracy for those who are already using apps but are not satisfied by the results they are getting. Learn how your observations may be used by scientific researchers and how you can contribute to citizen science project databases. Apps will include eBird, Merlin, iNaturalist, Seek and others.