Events

 Learn. Design. Plant: A Beginner’s Guide to Native Landscaping

Kickstart 2026 by transforming your yard into a thriving habitat for nature, beauty, and balance.

with Haeley Giambalvo, Owner, Native Backyards Home - Native Backyards and Author of “A Beginner's Guide to Native Landscaping”.

Join Haeley for a sixty-minute discussion and high-level overview of a beginner's guide to ecological landscaping with native plants in Texas.

1. Learn:   Native Plant Database - How to find the right plants for your ecoregion of Texas.

2. Design: Native Backyard's Landscape Design - How to plan and design the right place for native plants in your garden.

3. Plant:    Native Plant Gardening for Beginners - A story of how you start, where you find plants, how you comlete a landscape with native plants. 

4. Q&A:     Questions and Answers from the audience.

In this special collaboration, Robin Wall Kimmerer, author, botanist, and founder of Plant Baby Plant, joins youth leader and Nurture Natives founder Esther Bonney for an intergenerational conversation about belonging, reciprocity, and native plant action. 

Together, they will explore questions such as:

How do we create opportunities for young people to have a voice and feel empowered, even when they are not homeowners or decision makers?What kinds of relationships and mentorships help people stay engaged in native plant work over decades?Why do stories, shared practices, and community invitations matter just as much as plant lists?

Robin and Esther will reflect on what invites people into this work, what keeps them here, and what elders and youth have to teach each other.

Our upcoming webinar with Basil Camu explores practical, evidence based ways to heal suburban and urban landscapes by working with trees, soil, and natural systems, drawing on real world practices from Leaf & Limb and community centered models for restoring life where we live, work, and play.!  

Join Joey Santore, creator of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, for a candid Wild Ones National Webinar examining how inherited garden aesthetics shape native plant landscapes. Drawing on field experience and real ecology, Joey challenges tidy design norms and explores why dense, irregular plant communities are often the most resilient and ecologically sound.

In 1980, Texas Woman's University was designated as the location for the annual celebration of Texas Wildflower Day, 

TWU adjunct instructor Carroll Abbott, who was also a wildflower preservationist and lobbyist and founder of the Native Plant Society of Texas, joined former TWU president Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey in lobbying the Texas legislature in the late 1970s to have the fourth Saturday in April designated as Texas Wildflower Day.

The Dr. Bettye Myers Butterfly Garden is the site of each year's celebration, as well as the Ann Stuart Science Center.

“The Texas Woman's University recognizes that the beauty of its native plants has enriched the history of our State and the lives of its people," Blagg Huey said in 1980. "Thus, it has a strong commitment to the conservation, dissemination and appreciation of our state's wildflowers. From this commitment, strong advocacy developed within the University community to support the statutory designation of a State Wildflower Day.”

Details about the events, exhibits, lectures, contests, guided tours of the Butterfly Garden, and workshops will be available in early April 2026.

Details coming soon! 

Details coming soon! 

Details coming soon!