Molly Hendry on the Bergamo Landscape Festival (#47)
In this month's episode of The Plantastic Podcast, Molly Hendry returns to share lessons and inspiration from attending the Bergamo Landscape Festival in Italy, a gathering that unites some of the world’s most creative ecological designers. She reflects on how experts like Henrik Sjöman are redefining tree selection, succession, and long-term landscape care. Molly discusses Sarah Price’s artful Piazza Vecchia garden, Tom Stuart-Smith and Katie Barrington’s designer–gardener collaboration, James Hitchmough’s call to integrate management into design thinking, and more! We further discuss plant trials, adaptive maintenance, and how design is a process and not a product. Molly distills ideas from the conference that reshape how we approach gardens here at home, and she shares recent projects like her designs with the Charleston Park Conservancy and her new podcast Garden Gab. Enjoy the show!
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Show Notes
Discount link for Botanic Bootcamp.
MOLLY HENDRY BIO
Molly toggles the worlds of design and plants as both a trained horticulturist and landscape architect. She has stepped out to create her own garden design studio, Roots and Ramblings, where she does design work for folks in the Birmingham, Alabama area and beyond. With this studio, Molly is most interested in the intersection between people and places. She loves designing gardens for "hands in the dirt" gardeners, focusing on how design is not just a masterplan on a piece of paper, but an ongoing dialogue between a person and a place... often with a spade in hand!
Up through July 2023, she was the Associate Director of Gardens Support for the Friends of Birmingham Botanical Gardens for 5 and a half years. There she was actively involved in the horticultural and design development of the 26 unique gardens that make up Birmingham Botanical Gardens. One of her top honors is that she spent 10 months living in the UK, sinking her hands into the soil at some of the top gardens across the country as the Garden Club of America's 2016–2017 Royal Horticultural Society's Interchange Fellow. You can learn more about Molly by visiting her website Roots and Ramblings and by following her on Instagram @mollshendry.
THE PLANTASTIC PODCAST
The Plantastic Podcast is a monthly podcast created by Dr. Jared Barnes. He's been gardening since he was five years old and now is an award-winning professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. To say hi and find the show notes, visit theplantasticpodcast.com.
You can learn more about how Dr. Jared cultivates plants, minds, and life at meristemhorticulture.com. He also shares thoughts and cutting-edge plant research each week in his newsletter plant•ed, and you can sign up at meristemhorticulture.com/subscribe. Until next time, #keepgrowing!