"From Botanical Garden to Backyard: Design Skills That Scale"

Speaker: Matt Ross

Visiting a botanical garden is an enriching and inspiring experience. Exploring the vast number of plant collections and the masterfully crafted display gardens planted at an unimaginable scale can, however, be a bit overwhelming. Matthew Ross will help guide you through a series of exercises to help bring the scale and grandeur of a large garden into a digestible design for your own home landscape.

Matthew Ross is the Executive Director of The Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park in Traverse City, Michigan. He oversees the 26-acre Botanical Garden which was founded by visionaries Kurt and Karen Schmidt and a team of volunteers. In April of 2022, Matthew became the garden’s first director and its first full-time employee. He is excited to bring his passion for horticulture to this organization which planted its first garden in 2008. Prior to coming home to Michigan, Matthew was the Director of Continuing Education at Longwood Gardens, a college instructor at Owens Community College, and Chief Horticulturist at Toledo Botanic Garden. He is an avid garden tourist and photographer having been to hundreds if not thousands of gardens across the US, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe.

"Virtual Wednesday Evenings" is a Members-Only Educational Series of Virtual Lectures. Registration is required for each session. These events will be recorded and available to watch for just 2 weeks following the lecture. 

Click here to register.

 The deadline to register is February 26. This event is free. Maximum number of attendees is 100.

Please make sure you have Zoom installed on your computer. Plan to join 5 minutes before the event. The lecture will be followed by a 15-minute Q&A. Questions can be submitted via chat box and will be read to speaker by the HPS/MAG moderator. Please note that all participants will be muted for the duration of the event.

Important Info regarding registration: Please make sure you hit the "submit" button after registering on-line. If you do not receive a confirmation e-mail, then the registration process was not completed.