Native Plant Guilds Workshop

Choosing native plants for your landscape should be fun and creative, not daunting or complicated! When you consider plants in simple groupings, or guilds, it becomes a lot easier to design a landscape with appealing texture, color, and wildlife value throughout the seasons. Native plant guilds draw on inspiration from natural plant communities in habitats like coastal plains, forests, wetlands, or mountain tops. This field-study and design workshop at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens will guide students through the process of selecting plants according to companionship, seasonal performance, and environmental considerations. Participants will see first-hand how native plants can be grouped together for both aesthetics and ecology.

Anna Fialkoff was most recently the Ecological Programs Manager at Wild Seed Project where she authored and managed the creation of the organization’s annual guide publication, worked with partner organizations on native demonstration designs and plantings, and taught educational programs on ecological gardening, native plant ecology and climate action. She was previously the Senior Horticulturist at Native Plant Trust’s botanical garden in Framingham, MA, called Garden in the Woods. Anna holds a BA in human ecology from College of the Atlantic and an MS in ecological design from The Conway School. She hopes to continue utilizing her passion for native plants and her skills in communication, horticulture and landscape design to connect people to the natural world and inspire them to start gardening for habitat.