Great Lakes, Great Plants, and Great Ideas

The Botanic Garden’s Third Annual Botany Symposium

Summer’s winding down, but for the green-thumbed, that just means it’s time to start plotting next year’s gardens. And at this year’s Great Lakes, Great Plants symposium, five horticulture experts are ready to load you up with ideas on the best—and perhaps most peculiar—combos to try next time around.

The three-day event begins Thursday, Sept. 25, at The Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park. Whether you’re clipping your very first perennials or you’re a landscape industry expert, the symposium will have something for every kind of plant lover.

“We really wanted to create an atmosphere where gardeners of all skills, landscapers of all skills, could come together and learn side by side,” says Matthew Ross, executive director of the Botanic Garden and one of this year’s keynote speakers.

A New Season, a New Perspective

Now in its third year, the symposium, which has always been held during July’s stickiest dog-days, moves to early fall when northern Michigan’s gardens are reveling in their last hurrah before the frost sets in.

It’s the perfect time for anyone who hasn’t been through The Botanic Garden in a while to check out its newest installments (like the fun-for-all-ages children’s sensory garden) and take in the campus during harvest season.

“We’ve got late-season pollinators coming through, flowers coming through,” Ross says. “It’ll be a nice time to showcase what we have in the gardens here in our community…late summer, early fall, it’s pretty beautiful here.”

It’ll also make the weekend’s activities, which find the 120 event-goers adventuring beyond The Botanic Garden, a bit less sweltering. Attendees will have the option to bid against each other at two different auctions for rare plants and trees (Thursday), set out for a regional garden and natural area tour that winds up the Leelanau Peninsula (Friday), and join keynote speakers for an evening of chit-chat and sailing on Grand Traverse Bay (Saturday).

Inside the Cathedral Barn

Before those festivities kick off though, botany experts from all over the country will spend Thursday sharing their knowledge and new ideas inside the 93-year-old Cathedral Barn, starting with “Art in the Garden” led by Arboretum San Antonio CEO Adriana Quiñones. This session will explore how to use sculptures and other art pieces within your garden designs.

“People are going to understand and appreciate the juxtaposition of art and the living landscape,” Ross explains. “You’re going to see beautiful large-scale sculptures and how they’re placed in certain areas to really provide maximum impact.”

Next, horticulture writer (and retired director of Iowa State University’s Reiman Gardens) Ed Lyon takes the mic with “Growing a Midwest Garden.” Known for debunking fears around our unpredictable climate, he’ll show gardeners how to rebel against the idea that we northern Michiganders are resigned to hostas and hydrangeas while sharing how to experiment with species usually reserved for warmer zones.

“[He] has spent his entire career growing unusual combos,” Ross says, “putting plants together that you wouldn’t normally think of being together in the Midwest.”

Afterward, Ross, who says he’s most excited to catch up with his peers and take a few cues from their latest designs, will join the podium with Traverse City’s Brian Zimmerman, owner of Four Season Nursery, for “Stars of the Green Screen.” Think of it as casting your garden—some plants get the spotlight, others are supporting actors.

“I think people are going to go home with a laundry list of plants they want to purchase afterwards,” Ross says. “I always enjoy doing plant talks because you know you’re directly influencing the plants that people are taking home.”

A Wilder Way

The day’s final keynote belongs to Lincoln Park Zoo’s horticulture director, Katrina Quint. Her session, “Designing a Wild Garden,” flips the script on neat rows and Edward Scissorhand-esque manicured hedges.

“She’s going to talk about how to do big, bold designs…and how people can create maximum impact in their garden and really show that wilder side. Letting yourself be free in the garden, explore and have some fun with big, huge, bold plant material,” says Ross.

For Quint, who’s incorporating wispy carex, the blue-flowered Bottle Gentian, and Hoary Skullcap into her recent designs, “wild” means designing around what she calls the bones—existing trees and shrubs—with a bit of curiosity about what a plant or seed might do over the seasons instead of getting too hung up on a finished product.

“It’s all about the form of the plant, so not necessarily having everything that fits in this nice little spot,” she explains.

Quint’s especially keen on using species that spread slowly or reseed themselves and plants that bounce back come spring. Used to the cruel squalls that kick up across Lake Michigan, Quint’s no stranger to designing around winter’s bleakest months. And doing so “still gives your landscape some color variation—different hues of browns and golds through the wintertime, as well as seed heads and sunflowers and other things that are still attached to the plants that give off a bit of aesthetic.”

Cultivating Connections

Hosting an event that celebrates and educates horticulture on The Historic Barns Park campus is a fitting homage to its first iteration as a therapeutic garden space (among other things) established by Dr. James Decker Munson in the late 1800s. Munson would invite his nearby patients at the Northern Michigan Asylum to work the gardens, believing that time spent in nature could serve as therapy.

Now, Ross, a 2008 horticultural science graduate of Michigan State University who has served as executive director for The Botanic Garden for the last three years, brings his own philosophies to the gardens, with the goal of creating inclusion both in biodiversity and community.

“That’s essentially the role of a garden,” says Ross.

But every rose has its thorn. And as Ross explains, gardens, like so many things that have transcended centuries, have not always been the bright and welcoming places they would seem.
At different points in history, they’ve been used as a barrier between the elite and working classes (royal gardens, for example) and to reinforce colonialism (Indigenous land and ecosystems were swept away by colonists for their own gardens).

“They separated us,” says Ross. “But we want to go back to the story of why they brought us together to begin with.”

Civilization, he explains, was cultivated by the ability to self-sustain through agriculture. Turning back to that with intention and celebrating biodiversity in both the environment and society can be a way to grow relationships.

“The same plants that put a wedge between us are now the tools that we use to bring us all back together,” says Ross. “And that’s why I love gardening. You know, it’s interesting, you get into gardening because you love plants, but you also find out you love the people just as much, if not more.”

Learn more about the symposium and purchase tickets ($182-$242) at thebotanicgarden.org/events.

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