Celebrating City Nature: Insights from NYC Greenspaces

A virtual panel discussion

Margaret Roach, celebrated New York Times garden columnist and “A Way to Garden” podcast host, will guide a dynamic panel of NYC’s green space visionaries. Together, they’ll explore leading-edge strategies for cultivating urban parks as thriving ecosystems, and reveal how to ignite public passion for nature access and vital green infrastructure. Participants will include the High Line’s Senior Horticulture Manager, Yuki Kaneko; Rashid Poulson, Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Sara Evans, Director of Living Collections, Green-Wood Cemetery.

Margaret Roach is a longtime garden writer—previously for Martha Stewart Living (where she became the company’s EVP/Editorial Director), and now a garden columnist for The New York Times. She also creates a website, podcast, and weekly newsletter called “A Way to Garden,” the title of her 1998 book that was reissued in 2019 in an all-new edition. She has been honored for her contributions to horticulture with the George Robert White Medal of Honor from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and the Scott Medal from Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore, among other awards.

Celebrating City Nature: Insights from NYC Greenspaces is part of Engaging Nature: Dialogues on Urban Ecology, a four-part virtual public program series that will illuminate the practices and expertise driving the High Line’s contributions to the domains of ecological horticulture, urban biodiversity, and climate resilience.

Through the Engaging Nature: Dialogues on Urban Ecology series, attendees will learn about the often-overlooked connections between plants, humans, wildlife, and the many elements that make up the natural world around us within the built environment of New York City. From best practices for fostering a holistically healthy garden and recent learnings on the vital partnerships between native pollinators and plants that allow them both to thrive, to insights on horticultural resilience in the face of a changing climate and the care and keeping of some of New York City’s most vibrant greenspaces, the Engaging Nature dialogues reveal the role we play within the complex and unseen system of networks that undergirds the urban environment.