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Plant-O-Rama 2025: 7 Big (And Small) Ideas to Steal From Metro Hort’s Annual Gathering of Garden Pros

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Plant-O-Rama 2025: 7 Big (And Small) Ideas to Steal From Metro Hort’s Annual Gathering of Garden Pros

February 4, 2025

Last Tuesday morning, hundreds of horticultural professionals gathered at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the 29th annual Plant-O-Rama, a symposium, trade show, and career fair hosted by Metro Hort Group. A member-based organization of horticulture professionals in the tri-state area, the group plans meet-ups, lectures, and field trips, but Plant-O-Rama is their biggest event by far. This year’s symposium included keynote speeches by landscape designer Edwina Von Gal, the founder of Perfect Earth Project, (also a founding board member of Metro Hort Group) and Ethan Kauffman, director at Stoneleigh, a naturalistic public garden in Villanova, Pennsylvania, and panel discussions on managing naturalistic landscapes and encouraging collaborations between artists and horticulturists. 

Here are 7 ideas to steal from this inspiring event:

N.B: Above photograph of section on Governors Island, post-solarization, by Sarma Ozols for The Trust for Governors Island.

Artful Hay Stacks

Haystacks at Marshouse, Edwina von Gal’s house and garden in Springs, NY. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.
Above: Haystacks at Marshouse, Edwina von Gal’s house and garden in Springs, NY. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.

The morning keynote from von Gal was tailored to an audience of plant pros and how they might best communicate ideas to their clients. It also showcased the landscape designer’s latest experiments on her own property. In addition to creating habitat (and keeping biomass on site) through log pile walls and bug snugs, von Gal has added an artful hay stack to her property to keep the biomass from meadow mowing on site. (She jokingly referred to it as her homage to Monet.) Von Gal suggested strategically placing such a pile in a place where you have an invasive plant you’d like to smother. 

Bee Beaches

Von Gal&#8\2\17;s artful bee beach designed by friend Maya Lin. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.
Above: Von Gal’s artful bee beach designed by friend Maya Lin. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.

Von Gal offered another fresh idea to support wildlife, which she called a “bee beach,” a shallow place for bees and other insects to drink fresh water. In her own garden this takes the form of a concrete trough placed beneath a spigot with stones inside to make landing spots for the insects to access the water. In summer, von Gal leaves the tap set to ever so slowly drip water into the trough ensuring a constant supply of fresh water. In your garden the “bee beach” might just be a few rocks within a bird bath.

Wildlife Hedges

The “wildlife hedge” at Stoneleigh is shorn to 8 feet tall. Photograph by Samantha Nestory.
Above: The “wildlife hedge” at Stoneleigh is shorn to 8 feet tall. Photograph by Samantha Nestory.

Perhaps our favorite idea to steal from the Plant-O-Rama lecturers was the “wildlife hedge” shared by Kauffman. Wishing to replace a hedge that had been lost to time to create a sense of discovery in the garden, Kauffman didn’t plant the usual monoculture of a single shrub: Instead he and his team of gardeners planted a mixed double hedgerow of 65 taxa. The diverse plant species support wildlife and are more resilient (not to mention more interesting too look at!) than a single species hedge. Since planting they have sheared the hedge twice at 8 feet to create it in check. 

Tree Sculptures

This plane tree at Stoneleigh has been pruned back to resemble sculpture. Photograph by Benjamin Szmidt.
Above: This plane tree at Stoneleigh has been pruned back to resemble sculpture. Photograph by Benjamin Szmidt.

In the past, we’ve written about our enthusiasm for snags (aka dead trees intentionally left standing), but Kauffman dislikes the term and proposes instead that we call them “tree sculptures.” When a tree in a prominent location reached the end of its life, he had an arborist trim its branches back and planted vines at its base, which will eventually climb the decaying trunk. Von Gal also shared an artistic treatment of snags, in which holes are drilled in patterns to create cavities for insects (the work of U.K. gardener John Little).

Solarization

 Above: An overhead view of solarization in process on Governors Island. Photograph by Logan Fisher for The Trust for Governors Island.
Above: An overhead view of solarization in process on Governors Island. Photograph by Logan Fisher for The Trust for Governors Island.

In the “Managing Naturalistic Gardens & Landscapes” panel, two gardeners who oversee maintenance at public gardens shared their experience with solarization as a replacement for herbicides. To kill weeds via solarization, a layer of clear plastic is laid down in the hottest months and pinned into place to create intense heat beneath the plastic (hopefully killing everything beneath). Sarma Ozols, the horticulture supervisor at Governors Island, has been successfully beating back mugwort with this technique and Jessica Kaplan, director of horticulture at Riverside Park Conservancy, used it as part of a multi-pronged attack on a stand of knotweed.

Non-native Pollinator-Friendly Plants

Above: Native plants that take little and give much in von Gal’s garden include Viburnum trilobum (red berries) and Lobelia syphilitica (blue flower), both of which would benefit pollinators and other wildlife even when planted outside of their native range. Photograph courtesy of Perfect Earth Project.

Von Gal has long championed planting native plants to support wildlife, but she told the audience at Plant-O-Rama that a recent trip to the U.K., where there is less of a focus on native plants, has her rethinking the way she talks about what to plant. Von Gal’s not giving up on natives (and even mentioned an ambitious desire to grow all her woody plants from seed!), but she thinks we might shift our emphasis to plants “that ask little and give a lot.” For example, the many climate-adapted American plants she observed in the walled garden at Knepp (in West Sussex, England) aren’t native. but they were supporting pollinators and needed no irrigation or inputs.

Creative Poison-Free Pest Control

Pests were a topic that came up more than once during the event. Von Gal shared how she has built habitat specifically to welcome snakes to her yard, noting that pests problems like voles are actually often a predator problem–in that there are no predators. While the hibernaculum she shared was an intriguing idea, it was perhaps impractical for the assembled New York City garden professionals. Then in an only-in-New-York moment, at the end of the “Managing Naturalistic Gardens & Landscapes panel,” an audience member asked the panelists if they had any advice for dealing with rat tunnels in city gardens. When the panelists had little to offer in response, another audience member leapt to their feet to share the solution they’d pioneered in Battery Park: Putting dry ice into the tunnel entrances. This will apparently kill the rats and leave them safely buried deep in their own nests to decompose. Worth a try!

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