sAVE THE DATE: Saturday, March 8, 2025
2025 CMGA annual garden Symposium

9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
Where: Virtual

Gardening for Good: Freedom to design

 

9:00 AM - 9:30 Business meeting & Lifetime Membership Awards

 

9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Debra Prinzing
The Slow Flowers Year - A Seasonal and Local Ethos to Your Garden

During each month of the year, the garden has something wonderful to offer floral designers. Enhance your cut flower arrangements with ingredients harvested from your own backyard, with flowers grown and sold by farmer’s market vendors, and even the “weeds” gleaned from wild places. 

For Debra Prinzing, this philosophy began nearly 15 years ago when a modest project inspired by a simple idea led to the Slow Flowers Movement. She asked herself: What happens if I create one weekly floral arrangement for a full year, week in and week out, using only what I clip from my Seattle garden or procure from local and regional flower farms? The beautiful results became a book called Slow Flowers: Four Seasons of Locally Grown Bouquets from the Garden, Meadow and Farm.

Slow Flowers introduced a new concept of floral design inspired by each season -- from the showy, bodacious peak of summer borders to the quiet, twigs-and-conifer palette of winter. The book launched an entire movement with Debra as its spokesperson. The Slow Flowers Society now boasts 700+ member flower farmers and floral designers; consumers can find local flowers through slowflowers.com, the free online directory. Floral enthusiasts enjoy stories and voices of inspiring farmers and florists through the weekly Slow Flowers Podcast and the quarterly ezine Slow Flowers Journal. There have been many more books and advocacy campaigns, as even more flower lovers adopt and embrace the Slow Flowers ethos.

BIO: Debra Prinzing is a Seattle-based writer, speaker and leading advocate for domestic and locally-grown flowers. Through Slow Flowers Society's many channels and programs she has convened a national conversation that encourages consumers and professionals alike to make conscious choices about their floral purchases.

Debra is the producer of SlowFlowers.com, the weekly "Slow Flowers Podcast" and the American Flowers Week (June 28-July 4) campaign. She is author of more than 12 books, including The 50 Mile Bouquet and Slow Flowers. She is co-author of The Flower Farmers (Abrams, 2025).


 

10:45 AM -11:45 AM
Todd Bittner
Cultivating a Sustainable Future-Cornell Botanic Gardens Native Lawn

Traditional turfgrass lawns provide little benefit to native biodiversity, are significant sources of air and water pollution, and require huge investments of time to maintain. In a world grappling with the climate crisis, every action counts, and adopting a new lawn paradigm that champions native biodiversity in your own backyard is a powerful way to take control of your environmental impact. In this enlightening presentation, we will discuss a visionary lawn paradigm shift – one where lush, low-growing native grasses and forbs take center stage. As featured in the 2023 New York Times article by Margaret Roach, this talk will explore the journey behind Cornell Botanic Gardens’ native lawn, from its inception to the multitude of benefits it brings, and the invaluable lessons it has taught us. 

BIO: Director, Natural Areas, Cornell University's Botanical Gardens, Arboretum, and Natural Areas

Todd is a plant ecologist who, with his Cornell Botanic Gardens colleagues, began a quarter-acre research experiment known as the native lawn demonstration.

The garden’s natural areas program stewards 3,600 acres of biologically diverse nature preserves, representing nearly all the natural community types and rarest plant habitats in the central Finger Lakes region. These holdings include about 1/3 of campus and several beloved Cornell landscapes including Cascadilla and Fall Creek Gorges, Beebe Lake, Fall Creek Valley, and the Mundy Wildflower Garden, and off-campus jewels such as McLean Bogs, Ringwood Ponds, and Edwards Lake Cliffs. Todd leads the organization’s efforts to conserve native biodiversity and maintain the natural quality of these outdoor classrooms, to facilitate access and compatible recreational use, to support educational and research uses, and to preserve and steward these unique lands for future generations.

Todd also oversees the University's Deer Management Programs, chairs the Cornell Gorge Safety Committee, and sits on Cornell's Wellness Advisory Committee, the Ithaca Gorge Safety Taskforce, the Dryden Rail Trail Taskforce, and the Center for Plant Conservation.

 

12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Debra Kaye
Dahlias in the Northeast: Masters of Adaptation and Surprise

Dahlias are more than just pretty faces—they’re strategic, resilient, and full of secrets. In the Northeast, they don’t just bloom, they endure, thriving in a landscape of shifting seasons and unexpected challenges. These flowers are masters of adaptation, revealing their finest colors when the rest of the garden begins to fade. Let’s uncover the surprising science, smart shortcuts, and underground truths that set Northeast-grown dahlias apart. 

Debra is a renowned flower farmer in Stanfordville, New York whose Bear Creek Farm dahlias have been named Best Dahlias from New York Magazine, Best Wedding Floral Design from LuxLife Magazine and others. Bear Creek Farm primarily services designers and wholesalers in the city for weddings and celebrations, operates a CSA, educational workshops and busy internet business. Bear Creek Dahlias are sold at Union Square Market and wholesale markets throughout the tri-state region. Bear Creek is also a select grower for White Flower Farms dahlia offerings.

 

1:45 PM -2:45 PM
Closing speaker: Ethan Kauffman
Lessons From Stoneleigh: Traditional Landscapes Reimagined with Native Plants

With a 150-year history as a private estate, Stoneleigh: a natural garden became one of the newest public gardens in the Philadelphia region in 2018. Informed by the growing understanding of the connectedness of all living things, a vision arose during the transition: to reimagine a historical landscape as an ecologically vibrant wonderland of native plants. Relying on both tried-and-true gardening techniques and experimentation, the emerging garden is an exuberant exploration of cultivating native plants in the modern landscape.

Join Stoneleigh Director Ethan Kauffman as he reveals the unexpected plants, expressive design philosophy, and unconventional practices that are driving Stoneleigh’s exciting transformation.

BIO: As Natural Lands’ first director of Stoneleigh: a natural garden, a 42-acre former estate located in Villanova, PA that opened to the public in 2018, Ethan is introducing biodiversity to a formal garden, using sound design reasoning and creative native plants for formal hedges and knot gardens. Once a family home, now a public garden, he is always looking to fill a function and not just an expectation of what a plant should be.

Ethan developed his love of the natural world exploring the Susquehanna River hills in southeastern PA. He cultivated his horticultural perspective over two decades of gardening in the Deep South, including as director of Moore Farms Botanical Garden. There he led the transition from a private pleasure garden to a public botanical garden. 

  • Non Members $90

  • Members $60

  • Interns $40

  • Sponsored $40

  • Honorary $ 0