Speaker: Dr. Casey Sclar, Executive Director of American Public Gardens Association
Date: Monday, November 4
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: The Armory, 128 N.W. 11th Avenue, Portland
Tickets: $5-20 sliding scale; tickets at Eventbrite
Casey Sclar, Executive Director of the American Public Gardens Association, will explore the urgent and evolving role public gardens must play in knitting the social fabric of our communities and addressing global challenges.
Can our public gardens preserve threatened plant species as the climate changes? Can they be places of beauty and psychological health that are more inviting to communities our public gardens have not typically engaged? Can public gardens transition from traditional ornamental collections to becoming critical societal infrastructure?
"There is an urgent new role public gardens can play," says Sclar. "We must get it right."
Dr. Casey Sclar is the Executive Director of the American Public Gardens Association (APGA). APGA connects, protects, and champions over 600 public gardens and 9300 individual members throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and 24 other countries. These gardens reach over 121 million visitors per year, continually envisioning “a world where public gardens are indispensable.”
Casey’s work experience in horticulture and plant science spans three decades. He spent 15 years at Longwood Gardens (Kennett Square, PA) directing integrated pest management, soils and composting, land stewardship, and other sustainability programs. That work earned him APGA’s Professional Citation in 2011 for outstanding achievements in public horticulture. He is the Inaugural Chair of NICH - the National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture - which raises overall awareness of the $196B/yr. end-use horticulture industry, serves on the Board of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and sits on the Advisory Council for Seed Your Future to help more leaders pursue horticulture and the plant sciences as a career. He holds a B.S. degree in horticulture from Cal Poly State Univ., San Luis Obispo, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in entomology from Colorado State University.
