Chapters in Tennessee

Come help us start growing native plants for our 2026 Native Plant Sale (May 2, Suttree's Landing Park, 10a-2p), and for donation to Knox County Parks (for Angora Frog Farm Kids/Dogs Pocket Park)! Volunteers throughout this process will go home with some FREE native plants at the Plant Sale!

We will be cutting, clearing tall invasive plants from our growing site.  We will also be filling plug trays and pots with growing medium, seeding into them, and labeling them.

We are actively collecting used plant pots smaller than 1 gallon (the smaller the better.) Bring your extra pots!

Other things that you may want to bring: gloves, clippers, hand trimmers, loppers. 

Please feel free to drop in whenever you are available during the timeframe, for as long as little as you're able. 

THANK YOU for donating your personal time to helping us get our resources GROWING! 

Thanks also go to Old City Gardens for giving the opportunity to grow in their space.

Join Tennessee Valley Chapter of Wild Ones for our 7-class series in Ecological Gardening, taught by local experts who are passionate personal and professional ecological gardeners. You can attend classes as a series, or as standalone classes. 

Our first class is to help us get to know the elements of ecological gardening. We read and heard about these in our 2025 studies of Dr. Doug Tallamy's work. Haley Hamblen with the City of Chattanooga's RainSmart program will provide an overview of ecological gardening that each of the following classes will build upon. 

For those who didn't read Dr. Tallamy or hear him speak at our Distinguished Lecture Series, October 2025, the following is a little bit of what ecological gardening is about from Doug Tallamy's perspective. 

Doug Tallamy, an entomologist and author known for promoting ecological gardening through the "Homegrown National Park" initiative, outlines four essential, functional roles that every residential landscape should fulfill to support biodiversity: supporting a diverse food web, managing watersheds, sequestering carbon, and preserving pollinators. 

The 4 Pillars of Ecological Landscaping 

Support a Functional Food Web: Plant native species that host insects, particularly caterpillars, which are essential food for birds and other wildlife.Manage Local Watersheds: Use plants and groundcovers to absorb rainwater, reduce erosion, and filter pollutants, rather than relying on high-runoff lawn.Sequester Carbon: Utilize trees and plants to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the soil.Support Pollinators: Plant a variety of native flowering plants that bloom throughout the season to provide habitat and food for native bees and butterflies. 

Key Actions for Implementation

Reduce Lawn Area: Shrink the amount of lawn to create more space for native, biodiversity-supporting plants.Use Native Plants: Replace non-native plants with native species, such as oak trees, which are considered "keystone" plants.Eliminate Pesticides/Mosquito Sprays: Avoid chemicals that kill beneficial insects and pollinators. 

Tallamy emphasizes that these actions transform, private properties into vital, interconnected wildlife corridors.

Speaker: Haley Hamblen, Water Quality Specialist - RainSmart Program Manager, City of Chattanooga, Public Works / Engineering

About this class: The goals of the class are to discuss plant cell and tissue types and major vegetative structures, explore reproduction, and sample some of the strategies and structures that plants use to continue life from generation to generation. 

Be on the lookout: Once you have registered, we will email you with pre-course work and any other materials needed for this class.

Materials to bring! Notebook, pencils, a 10X Magnifier, snacks, water, and a lunch. This class will be both in and out of doors, please wear weather-appropriate clothing and footwear.

Registration Policy: 

As with all CNP classes, class size is limited. To give everyone the best opportunity to participate, there is a non-refundable cancellation fee of $10, with the balance refunded if you cancel at least 7 calendar days before the class will be held. If the class is cancelled by the instructor or the CNP program, registrants will get a full refund.

If registration is full, you may email [email protected] and ask to be placed on a wait list. This is not a guarantee that a spot will open up. Please be gracious, we are all volunteers.

Join us for a discussion of Mary Reynolds' inspiring book The Garden Awakening. This book is based in the UK, and though plants mentioned in it are not native to our bioregion, the spirit of it's principles of healing the earth, its fascinating ideas for natural design and its encouragement for gardeners to foster a meaningful, reciprocal connection with the land will resonate with Wild Ones. 

From Mary Reynolds' website about The Garden Awakening--Designs to Nurture Our Lands and Ourselves,  (Also go to the website to watch an endorsement from the late Jane Goodall.):

After many years as an internationally acclaimed garden designer, Mary Reynolds finally realised that something was amiss in her gardens; they were failing on some level. Unwilling to remain as she had imagined and sculpted them, the gardens could not help following their true nature. They were not still life paintings. The land had dreams and intentions of its own…

Mary set out to discover what these intentions were, exploring how we might build a relationship with our gardens that encourages the truth of the land to be expressed alongside our own truth and creativity.

Inside The Garden Awakening is the forgotten bible of gardening. Mary divined and collected old ways of working with land from before we lost the connection with the earth beneath our feet. None of this information is new; it is all ancient, forgotten knowledge and wisdom, buried in the roots of our ancient cultures and within the depths of the earth itself.

Mary has spent a lifetime learning how to live gently with the land, weaving the knowledge out of her own stories, experiences and dreams and bringing it into the light in a way that rips away any mystery or separation from the worlds of energy and spirit around us, and the world of the earth beneath us.

The Garden Awakening is a blueprint for a ground-breaking garden, but it is not a solitary space. Instead it aims to be the foundation of a world wide web of ever expanding, living, interconnected ecosystems. Places where people and nature are one and creation and interrelation expands. You will never be able to look at your garden in the same way again…

Everything becomes simple if you immerse yourself in nature. Life’s complications melt away, leaving only the truth of the present moment, and the presence of what I call God. In this place we can see our soul reflected in every living thing, every gust of wind and splash of rain, and here we can find peace. This is our true home. Yet we are losing what little wild places we have left in nature, those corners where the spirits of the earth are flowing freely, where harmony, and balance still exists and we feel accepted for the truth of who we are. We have gone off course and need to find our way again. An old pathway, overgrown and forgotten, is waiting impatiently to lead us back home. Nature is willing us on.

Details coming soon,

We’ll continue our popular Freebie/Swap Table, so if you have any native plants, seeds, nature-related books, or other treasures you wish to re-home, please bring them along.

Everyone is welcome!

Zoom Link available soon.