Name: Friends of the Garden Annual Meeting
Start: 2025-03-14T17:30:00-04:00
End: 2025-03-14T20:00:00-04:00
Location: State Botanical Garden of Georgia at UGA

Join us for this year’s Friends of the Garden Annual Meeting featuring keynote speaker Carol Reese.
At 5:30 p.m., members of the Friends of the Garden are invited to the annual business meeting in the Gardenside Room.
At 6:15 p.m., there will be an old-fashioned barbeque dinner in the Visitor Center Great Room that is open to the public.
At 7 p.m., Carol Reese’s keynote address will begin.
This event is free and open to the public. Please join us and bring a guest! The registration deadline is Friday, March 7, at noon.
Carol Reese is a retired Extension Horticulture Specialist at the University of Tennessee’s West Tennessee Ag Research in Jackson, Tennessee. She is a nationally known speaker, blending equal parts gardening knowledge, natural lore and quirky humor. She attributes her love of horticulture to being raised on a farm by generations of plant nuts including a grandfather who dynamited his garden spot each spring to “break up his hardpan.” Her presentation topic will be “Native Plants: Facts, Fabrications and Foibles.”
Are native plants really more likely to succeed? Are they always the better choice for supporting insects? Carol’s presentation will separate fact from fiction and champion all well-behaved plants that provide exceptional sustenance for insects and other wildlife. She suggests that dismissing a plant on the basis of its origin rather than its ecological merits has the potential to result in more harm than good to our already damaged planet. This thought-provoking presentation will question the entire concept of “native” and whether trying to freeze the available plant selections to a particular moment in time is beneficial or even possible. Hold onto your hats while Carol humorously uses Frankenstein, Sitting Bull, mastodons, space travel and kitchen blenders to build her case on the importance of not limiting the plant palette and invites unification over the hugely important goal of providing for the “little things that run the world.”