Registration opens this Friday at 7am for the Nashville Native Plant Symposium. Last year, the event sold out fast, so set a reminder to register as early as possible!
“Join leading experts and a passionate local community for an inspiring day of learning, connection, and practical action.”
The event is August 22-23, and the theme is “Rewilding Our Urban and Suburban Landscape.”
It’s at a larger Metro venue this time: Southeast Community Center. Open to all, and there’s a student discount.
For the whole schedule, visit https://www.nashvillenativeplantsymposium.org/
Volunteer opportunities will be posted soon.
All the presentations are going to be so good, starting with a keynote by “Preacher of the Prairie” Dwayne Estes (Southeastern Grasslands Institute), and we’ve built in more networking time so we can get to know each other better.
I’ll be there with “Five Minutes with Frostweed,” a short presentation to highlight Verbesina virginica as one of the stars on our new symposium logo (as designed by Jenna Atman and Jessa Tremblay):
And, I am thrilled to report that I’ll be working with the amazing Joy Boven, owner of Wonder Gift & Garden and Simple Joy Nursery to present a real-life, interactive Native Plant Education Station.
This means a Show-and-Tell table full of host plants and hosted creatures!
Symposium Field Excursions: when registering for the symposium, you can also pick an excursion.
I plan to be at the Portland Park tour (near Hillsboro Village), where volunteers from Second Sunday Gardeners will show their Pollinator patch,
Food Forest,
“Soft Landings” oak,
and the in-progress tribute garden to fallen trees from ice storm Fern.
Second Sunday Gardeners is a symposium sponsor and a local gardening club (open to all). Our founder Maureen May is giving a presentation called “Big Habitats in a Small Park.”
Last year’s symposium
In 2025, as keynote speaker, I got to talk about larval host plants and read part of the butterfly chapter of my in-progress book, “Hackberry Appreciation Society:”
The entire 2025 symposium was recorded and is viewable on Warner Park Nature Center’s YouTube channel,
here: https://youtu.be/L8jRfz1_iZw?si=9MWwNNTUuysHId21&t=3F
The 2026 symposium will be recorded, too, so if you can’t join us, you can watch later. But do try to join us. This is going to be fun.
RESOURCES, LINKS
–Nashville Native Plant Symposium, link
–Nashville Native Plant Symposium Instagram and Facebook (please share)
–Wonder Gift & Garden, website
–Simple Joy Nursery, Instagram
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Bio:
Joanna Brichetto is a naturalist and writer in Nashville. Her book, This is How a Robin Drinks: Essays on Urban Nature, is an almanac of 52 true stories about the world “under our feet, over our heads, and beside us; the very places we need to know first.” Called “Nashville’s Sidewalk Naturalist,” Jo hopes to meet all her plant and animal neighbors, and to help human neighbors add native habitat where we live, work, and play.
She’s at work on her second book, “Hackberry Appreciation Society,” and you can find her at SidewalkNature.com (“Everyday wonders in everyday habitat loss”) and on Instagram @Jo_Brichetto.
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