Western Landscape Symposium – 2025
I’m going to be speaking about my passion: growing year-round food at the Western Landscape Symposium at the end of the month. I’ll talk about growing in cold frames, using cover, the best cool weather veggies, and growing edible natives in your Colorado gardens.
Check it out:
Western Landscape Symposium
March 29, 2025 in Pueblo, Colorado
westernlandscape.org
The Western Landscape Symposium is an educational forum to promote the creation of appealing and sustainable gardens.
Sessions:
Keynote: Jennifer Jewell
What We Sow in Cultivating Our Places
This session will weave stories from Jewell’s podcast Cultivating Place, and her first two books, and includes thoughts from her third book, What We Sow, on the state of seed (literally and metaphorically) in our world. This talk will serve to energize and inspire gardeners/cultivators in their horticultural work and remember why it is so critically important in our world right now to value this kind of work as highly as anything we do in our lives.
Top Performing, Tough Plants from DBG Chatfield Farms
Presented by Grace Johnson
Looking for reliable plants that thrive despite Colorado’s harsh climate? Grace has compiled a list of top-performing plants from Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms. The required criteria to make the cut include being well-behaved, well-adapted, sustainable, drought tolerant, and/or benefiting pollinators. Choose from this series of plants to create beautiful, functional, pollinator-friendly planting designs and gardens. Tips on maintenance will be included.
From Large to Small, Soil Health is in it All
Presented by Michelle Nelson
From 1000-acre rangeland pastures and cultivated fields to 0.15-acre urban agriculture operations, soil health is applicable to all types of plant-soil systems. We will delve into what the 5 main principals of soil health are, and apply the most important sixth principal, Context, to them all for application in landscape systems.
Underused Native Plants
Presented by Irene Shonle
While native plants are becoming more popular, we see many of the same species being used. This talk will focus on plants that are underused – some being easier to find than others, We will have an emphasis on plants from Southern Colorado – this is not only appropriate for the location of the conference, but with climate change bringing hotter and drier weather to Colorado, it only makes sense to draw from plants that are already more adapted to these conditions.
Year-Round Gardening in Colorado – Grow more food!
Presented by Idelle Fisher
Year-Round Vegetable Gardening in Colorado is Possible with a Cold Frame or Hoop House. If you love gardening and growing food, you should definitely add cold weather growing options like a cold frame or hoop house in your backyard.
From Western Landscape Symposiums’s post on Facebook:
We are happy to announce Idelle Fisher who will talk to us about year round gardening
Idelle is an avid gardener and runs an organic community garden in Denver where she’s worked with the members to grow lots of organic food and create and maintain a pollinator garden featuring many native plants. Idelle also has a large organic landscape and garden at home and she and her husband have been replacing turf with vegetable garden beds and native plant beds over the past decade. She volunteers with PPAN and Front Range Wild Ones at native plant swaps and in Denver Parks to help take care of the city’s pollinator beds.
Idelle grew up in Thornton, Colorado and is a DU Alumni. In addition to gardening, she paints watercolors, sketches, and loves taking photos of gardens, homegrown veggies and pollinators. She runs her own full-time business offering Website Design and Graphic Design, and loves working with green clients that are helping to change the world for the better. Visit her website: picklewix.com.
You can also read my Colorado Cold Frames blog post which inspired my article on Year-Round Gardening article in the Colorado Gardener E-Magazine »
OTHER SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
Keynote Speaker: Jennifer Jewell
Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast “Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden”, and President/CEO of the non-profit Cultivating Place Foundation, whose mission is to expand and elevate the way we as a culture think and talk about gardening.
The author of “The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants” (Timber Press in 2020), and “Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast” (Timber Press, May 2021), and “What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds” (Timber Press, Sept 2023).
Jewell’s greatest passion the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together beautifully – for the better of all the lives on this generous planet.
Jewell regularly serves as a keynote speaker for horticultural organizations large and small across the country, including The Garden Conservancy, The American Public Gardens Association, The American Horticultural Society, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, The California Native Plant Society, The New York Botanical Garden, Miami University of Ohio, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden, among others. She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman, John Whittlesey.
We are thrilled to have Grace Johnson from Denver Botanic Gardens’ Chatfield Farms joining us this year! After graduating college with a degree in Environmental Science, Grace Johnson has worked in ornamental public horticulture for over 10 years. Prior to maintaining the prairie and Plant Select Demonstration gardens at Denver Botanic Gardens’ Chatfield Farms, Grace worked in the Whitmire Wildflower Garden at Missouri Botanical Garden’s Shaw Nature Reserve where she gardened exclusively with native plants and assisted with prairie restoration. In addition to native plant and water-wise horticulture, Grace has experience in traditional Victorian horticulture, aquatic gardening, seed collection, and propagation. Grace currently maintains the prairie gardens, Plant Select Demonstration Garden, unirrigated cactus collection, and historic iris collection at Chatfield Farms and serves as Assistant Manager to the Horticulture Team. Grace has a passion for ecological and sustainable gardening and plant conservation and hopes to continue creating landscapes that encourage plant diversity and conservation and provide habitat for pollinators.
Irene Shonle recently retired after 22 years working for Extension. She has worked extensively with native plants in her career, teaching for the Native Plant Master Program, writing fact sheets, teaching Master Gardeners, as a planning committee member of the annual Landscaping with Colorado Native Plants Conference, and with the Colorado Native Plant Society. She has an award-winning native plant landscape at her house in Southern Colorado and created a native plant demonstration garden in front of the El Paso Extension Office.
The WLS is thrilled to host Michelle Nelson for our 2025 symposium
Michelle grew up in Weld County on a large irrigated custom farming and cattle feeding operation. She attended Colorado State University and graduated with a degree in Soil and Crop Science with an emphasis in Environmental Soil Science. She now lives in southeast Colorado as part of a family-owned dryland farming operation that primarily produces dryland winter wheat and grain sorghum. She has been doing environmental agronomic consulting in southeast Colorado for the last 20+ years. In April of 2024, Michelle became the Southeast Soil Health Specialist for the Colorado Soil Health Program and has been working with the wide variety of agricultural operations in the southeast corner of our state. From wheat and range grass to urban agriculture operations, to Rocky Ford Melons and peppers, she enjoys interacting with producers and helping to incorporate soil health principles on their fields to meet their objectives.
Learn more about the symposium on their website and Facebook page:
westernlandscape.org
facebook.com/WesternLandscapeSymposium
2025 Western Landscape Symposium Schedule
8:30-9:00 a.m. Doors open
9:00-9:15 a.m. Greetings and opening remarks
9:15-10:30 a.m. Keynote by Jennifer Jewell
What We Sow in Cultivating Our Places
10:30-10:45 a.m. Break
10:45-11:45 a.m. Session one- choose one:
Grace Johnson– Top Performing, Tough Plants from DBG Chatfield Farms
Michelle Nelson– From Large to Small, Soil Health is in it All
11:45-1:30 p.m. Afternoon Break
Expo rooms open, visit vendor and demonstration tables, lunchroom open, film screening of Mirasol at 12:30 p.m.
1:30-2:30 p.m. Session two- choose one
Irene Shonle– Underused Native Plants
Idelle Fisher-Year-Round Gardening
2:30-2:45 p.m. Break
2:45-3:30 p.m. Closing by Jennifer Jewell
Door prize drawing
Expo and Demos during lunch break
During the lunch break, audience members will have the chance to visit a variety of information, demonstration, and vendor tables. Our speakers will be available during this time to participate in “Meet the Speakers”, an opportunity for attendees to ask questions and engage in discussion with them. Pueblo Master Gardeners will have displays on a variety of topics including micro greens, pollinator habitats, rain barrels, propagation, and more. Vendors will be selling cacti and seeds. “We will also be screening the film Mirasol, a film about water, land, and a way of life at 12:30 p.m.” and hyperlink “Mirasol” with https://mirasolfilm.com/
Session Descriptions
Keynote: Jennifer Jewell
What We Sow in Cultivating Our Places
This session will weave stories from Jewell’s podcast Cultivating Place, and her first two books, and includes thoughts from her third book, What We Sow, on the state of seed (literally and metaphorically) in our world. This talk will serve to energize and inspire gardeners/cultivators in their horticultural work and remember why it is so critically important in our world right now to value this kind of work as highly as anything we do in our lives.
Top Performing, Tough Plants from DBG Chatfield Farms
Presented by Grace Johnson
Looking for reliable plants that thrive despite Colorado’s harsh climate? Grace has compiled a list of top-performing plants from Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms. The required criteria to make the cut include being well-behaved, well-adapted, sustainable, drought tolerant, and/or benefiting pollinators. Choose from this series of plants to create beautiful, functional, pollinator-friendly planting designs and gardens. Tips on maintenance will be included.
From Large to Small, Soil Health is in it All
Presented by Michelle Nelson
From 1000-acre rangeland pastures and cultivated fields to 0.15-acre urban agriculture operations, soil health is applicable to all types of plant-soil systems. We will delve into what the 5 main principals of soil health are, and apply the most important sixth principal, Context, to them all for application in landscape systems.
Underused Native Plants
Presented by Irene Shonle
While native plants are becoming more popular, we see many of the same species being used. This talk will focus on plants that are underused – some being easier to find than others, We will have an emphasis on plants from Southern Colorado – this is not only appropriate for the location of the conference, but with climate change bringing hotter and drier weather to Colorado, it only makes sense to draw from plants that are already more adapted to these conditions.
Year-Round Gardening in Colorado – Grow more food!
Presented by Idelle Fisher
Year-Round Vegetable Gardening in Colorado is Possible with a Cold Frame or Hoop House. If you love gardening and growing food, you should definitely add cold weather growing options like a cold frame or hoop house in your backyard.