Strategic Garden Design featuring Shari Edelson

Effective garden design is about more than just selecting the right plants and putting them in the right place. It’s also about making strategic decisions with an eye toward long-term impacts on the garden’s future. Drawing from her experiences with The Arboretum at Penn State, Shari will discuss principles of strategic garden design, including how the decisions we make today sculpt the garden we will have tomorrow.

Shari Edelson is Director of Horticulture and Curator at The Arboretum at Penn State, a new and expanding garden on the campus of Penn State University. Her passion for public landscapes has brought her from urban greening work in Baltimore, MD to numerous gardens and horticultural organizations in the mid-Atlantic region. At the national level, she serves as vice-chair of the editorial group for Public Garden magazine, the quarterly journal of the American Public Gardens Association. She holds an MS in Public Horticulture from the Longwood Graduate Program and a BA in Philosophy from Goucher College. An avid home gardener, she readily admits to ignoring her professional training when making decisions about her own backyard.