Tuesday, November 10 at 9:30 am

Over time, the plantings in our urban and suburban gardens tend to become less like naturally occurring plant communities. Nina Shippen will share her insights on inviting wildness back into our gardens by designing landscapes that look and function more like they do in the wild: resilient, diverse, and visually harmonious. The underlying concepts in Nina’s presentation are drawn from the book Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West. This book is dedicated to the idea of a ‘new nature’  – a hybrid of both the wild and the cultivated – that can flourish in our cities and suburbs. It includes practical guidelines for how to incorporate and layer plants into plant communities to create an environment that is reflective of natural systems and thrives within our altered landscapes.

Nina Shippen practices residential landscape and garden design that focuses on coupling the principles of healing gardens with sound ecologic practices to create satisfying gardens for her clients. A graduate of the landscape design program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, she has lived and gardened in Transylvania County since 2005. She has taught several courses at NC Arboretum since 2009. Currently, she teaches the introductory classes for the Ecological Gardening certificate program, landscape design, slopes, and healing gardens.