Join award-winning author, landscape designer, and educator Rick Darke for What Is Wild and Why It Matters, a free national webinar on native plant gardening, ecological landscape design, and biodiversity.
Taking place on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, this virtual event explores how welcoming authentic wildness into your home landscape can create resilient, beautiful spaces that support pollinators, wildlife, and local ecosystems.
Event Details
Live Webinar: What Is Wild and Why It Matters presented by Rick Darke with Q&A
Date: Tuesday, April 28th, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM ET | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM CT | 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM MT | 8:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT
Location: Virtual. Link provided with registration.
Can’t make it live? A recording will be available through May 28, 2026.
Cost: Free – $25 (pay what you can). This webinar supports the shared missions of Wild Ones and Homegrown National Park.
About the Webinar
A thriving home landscape is full of life, human and otherwise, offering daily opportunities to connect with nature.
In this webinar, Rick Darke explores wildness as a renewable resource and a practical design strategy for residential landscapes. Rather than maintaining rigid planting schemes, wild gardens embrace dynamic, self-sustaining plant communities that evolve over time.
Through real-world examples of landscapes he has designed and co-designed, Rick demonstrates how ecological gardening can be both visually compelling and highly functional for homeowners.
This session connects directly to growing interest in:
- biodiversity restoration in residential spaces
- native plant gardening
- pollinator habitat design
- sustainable landscaping practices
- climate-resilient home landscapes
This webinar is designed for anyone interested in rethinking their landscape, from homeowners looking to move beyond traditional lawns to landscape designers, conservation-minded individuals, and those seeking to support pollinators and wildlife.
About the Presenter
Rick Darke is an award-winning landscape designer, author, photographer, and educator known for shaping how we think about wildness in managed landscapes. His work bridges ecology, cultural geography and aesthetics, showing that residential landscapes can be biologically rich and visually compelling at the same time.
Rick has collaborated with leading ecological thinkers, including Douglas Tallamy, and co-authored influential books such as The Living Landscape, The Wild Garden: Expanded Edition and Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes. His now-classic book, The American Woodland Garden, was among the first to employ firsthand studies of wild habitats to provide landscape design and management strategies grounded in living processes.
Through decades of design, writing, and teaching, Rick has advanced the idea that wilderness need not be something separate from our daily lives, but is instead essential to connecting us with the extraordinarily interwoven web of life we call Nature.