Rethinking Horticulture with Real Ecology

Native plant gardeners, landscape designers, and land stewards often face a tension between ecological function and traditional horticultural aesthetics. In the Wild Ones National Webinar Rethinking Horticulture with Real Ecology, field botanist and science communicator Joey Santore, creator of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, examines how inherited design norms like straight lines, uniform spacing, tidy edges, and color-grouped plantings shape expectations for native landscapes. These conventions, rooted in European garden traditions and reinforced by modern lawn culture, continue to influence how native plant gardens are judged, managed, and defended, often at the expense of ecological function, especially in the disturbed and human-shaped landscapes where most people live.

About the Webinar

In this Wild Ones National Webinar, Joey Santore invites participants to step back and examine where those expectations came from and what they cost us ecologically. Much of this perspective is grounded in field observations from roadsides, rail corridors, vacant lots, and other disturbed places where plants are already adapting to human impact. Content note: This presentation contains strong language.

Drawing from decades of field experience and his work on the forthcoming book Concrete Botany: The Ecology of Plants in the Age of Human Disturbance, Joey explores what plant communities actually look like in real-world conditions, especially in landscapes shaped by disturbance. He unpacks how plants interact in space, how disturbance shapes vegetation, and why irregular, dense, and sometimes “messy” growth often signals ecological strength rather than neglect.

This conversation challenges some of the most common assumptions in native plant gardening and landscape advocacy. It asks why ecological landscapes are so often held to aesthetic standards that undermine their function, and how those standards influence public perception, policy, and long-term stewardship.

Participants will come away with a deeper understanding of:

• How inherited horticultural aesthetics shape expectations for native landscapes
• What plant communities look like in disturbed and human-shaped environments
• Why uniform spacing, symmetry, and “tidiness” can work against ecological function
• How embracing ecological form can strengthen advocacy and public acceptance
• How disturbance, soil conditions, and site history shape what can grow and thrive

This webinar is especially relevant for gardeners, land stewards, educators, designers, and advocates who are working to bridge the gap between ecological knowledge and cultural expectations in suburban and urban environments.