Our highly popular Native Plants Series is available in a new course format. View the prerecorded lectures at your own pace prior to joining Mt. Cuba staff for scheduled onsite garden tours. Please note – attendance to garden tours and exam are required if you are working towards the Ecological Gardening Certificate. As Earth awakens from its winter slumber, experience the colors, fragrances, and rapid progression of spring-flowering native plants. Through lectures and outdoor labs, learn to identify 60 beautiful and ecologically valuable trees, shrubs, and herbaceous perennials. Examine the identifying characteristics of each plant and its preferred growing conditions, overall size, and environmental significance. With this knowledge, make informed plant selections for your spring garden. This program takes place online with separate in-person tours of Mt. Cuba Center’s gardens. Six prerecorded online lectures will be available starting Monday April 1. Three garden tours Saturdays take place April 13, 27, May 11. Optional Exam: Saturday May 18. About the Instructors: Liz Allen is an Educator at Mt. Cuba Center and a Delaware Master Naturalist with the University of Delaware. She provides gardening consultations to local homeowners and schools who are looking to diversify and improve their landscape value with native plants. Liz is also the grounds manager for a school, and has converted the entire property to native plants for children to study and enjoy. She also leads groups in invasive removal efforts, as well as creating public plantings. Liz is passionate about restoring nature’s balance by actively influencing plant communities. Jay Kratz is a Mt Cuba Center educator. Before coming to Mt Cuba, he spent twenty years as a college instructor, and working with his wife at her family business, Hill House Herb Gardens in Providence, RI. In addition to being the luckiest boy in the world to spend his days with guests marveling at Mt Cuba’s gardens, he shares his enthusiasm for native plants outside Mt Cuba’s gates as the co-horticulturist and Rancocas chapter leader for the Native Plant Society of NJ, and as a native plant garden designer and landscaper.