Dan Segal
Native Plants in YOUR Landscape: Set it…and EDIT
Dan will explain a simple, practical and accessible strategy for managing native plant landscapes. He will connect the dots between understanding plant behavior in natural environments, and how to manage and monitor native plantings in the landscape environment–based on their real life behaviors.
This talk will also address two things we commonly hear: 1) from practitioners or native plant promoters–that native landscapes are lower maintenance than other kinds of landscapes; and 2) from gardeners/designers/clients–that people want zero maintenance or low maintenance landscapes. Are these claims and requests realistic?? The answer is yes…if you follow a few basic principles.
About Dan Segal
Dan has owned The Plantsmen Nursery for 18 years. For 5 years before that, he managed Pinelands Nursery in New Jersey, the region’s largest wholesale grower of native plants. Dan managed the growth and sale of millions of native plants each year for environmental projects all over the Eastern Seaboard. Before that, he worked in California for several years managing the nursery and field projects for Pacific OpenSpace/North Coast Native Nursery, which grew native plants for their own native plant projects all over the San Francisco Bay area and the North Bay.
Dan has worked in native horticulture and ecological landscape restoration for over 30 years, in management, production, propagation, installation and seed collection. He has worked on projects at all scales, ranging from the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Poplar Island in the Chesapeake Bay, to various small, local municipal native plantings--as well as hundreds of residential landscapes. He has presented his ecological approach to native plant nursery production and restoration-based native landscaping for groups including the US EPA, NJ ASLA, New Directions in the American Landscape Conference, Ithaca Native Landscape Symposium, Cleveland Pollinator Symposium, Metro Hort in NYC, Grow Native Massachusetts, and many other groups with an interest in how to use native plants ecologically, in our landscapes.
Dan founded the Ithaca Native Landscape Symposium in 2009 with Rick Manning, a local landscape architect. The goal is to help professionals and enthusiasts become more confident using native plants, and to help reverse trends in horticulture that are detrimental to our natural surroundings because they ignore the critical bases of native horticulture–ecology and localism.
