After COVID forced the cancellation of WVNLA’s annual conference in 2021, we are coming back with a bang, with an explosive Winter Symposium on January 26, 2022. As usual, we have two speaker tracks, Design and Profit, in order to meet the diverse interests of the green industry in West Virginia.
Marty Grunder, Rick Darke and Carol Reese will lead the 2022 symposium at Charleston’s Four Points at Sheraton. Marty is a leading voice on green industry leadership, sales, and company culture. He will lead profit-track participants throughout the day. Rick is a broadly knowledgeable field botanist, horticulturist, and photographer. He will present the morning session of the design track. In the afternoon, Carol Reese of the University of Tennessee, will present a thought-provoking session on “Native Plants: Facts and Fallacies,” as well as a fascinating talk on “Ordinary Plants with Extraordinary Stories.” Find out how the plants you see every day may have influenced our very history.
Through the years, various WVNLA members have heard Marty speak and suggested that we bring him to the Winter Symposium. He was scheduled to join us this year but rescheduled to 2022 when COVID made indoor gatherings dicey.
Marty, who is based in Dayton, Ohio, is president and CEO of Grunder Landscaping Company and of The Grow Group, a leading green industry consultancy. He discovered his entrepreneurial spirit when he was just a teenager pushing a used lawn mower. He was looking for a way to put himself through college. Through determination and hard work, he grew his initial $25 investment into Grunder Landscaping Company (GLC), one of the most successful operations of its kind in the Midwest. GLC has earned more than 40 local and national design awards and is a two-time winner of the Better Business Bureau’s Eclipse Integrity Award. Marty has been named entrepreneur of the year by both Ernst & Young and the US Small Business Administration.
The author of The 9 Super Simple Steps to Entrepreneurial Success, he has coached thousands of landscaping professionals and companies across the US and Canada. He has delivered more than 550 talks, motivating audiences of all sizes, from small gatherings of 20 to a stadium of 9,000, to achieve success.
When Marty speaks, landscape pros listen because they know they’ll get the unvarnished truth from someone who’s faced many of the same challenges they’re facing and found a way to consistently come out on top.
Marty’s presentations include
- The Four Pillars of a Successful Business
- I Can See Clearly Now: Articulating Your Company’s Vision
- Keep the Front Door Open and the Back Door Closed: Recruiting and Retaining
- There’s a System for That: Processes and Systems for Success
- Show Me the Money: Profit
Rick Darke is an independent consultant, author, and photographer based in northeastern Pennsylvania. His work is grounded in an observational ethic that blends ecology, horticulture, and cultural geography in the design and stewardship of living landscapes. His collaborative projects include parks, botanic gardens, postindustrial sites, transportation corridors, conservation developments, and residential landscapes. Recent public projects include the Iron Garden at Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark, located near Pittsburgh, and the Moss Gibbs Woodland Garden at the Parklands of Floyds Fork in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rick began as a mechanical engineering major at the University of Delaware. He also took classes in art, cultural geography, and anthropology before graduating with a degree in plant science, with a dual focus on field botany and horticulture. Rick launched his independent practice in 1997, following 20 years on the staff of Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens. As curator of plants at Longwood, he played a major role in developing the gardens’ indoor and outdoor displays and in international plant exploration.
Rick’s many books include The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest; The Encyclopedia of Grasses for Livable Landscapes; The Wild Garden: Expanded Edition; The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden, co-authored with Doug Tallamy; and Gardens of the High Line: Elevating the Nature of Modern Landscapes, co-authored with Piet Oudolf. He also teaches and lectures internationally on sustainable landscape design, planning, and conservation, and the ethical underpinnings of all of these. On the broad topic of livable landscapes, Rick has addressed audiences in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Japan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.
Rick has been studying and photographing West Virginia’s wild habitats and community places for nearly 50 years. He uses insights from this work to inform and inspire his creative projects in public and private landscapes and gardens. Rick’s own garden, created with his wife and cohorticulturist Melinda Zoehrer, comprises 1.5 acres of rolling, piedmont terraine adjacent to the White Clay Creek Preserve. It features locally native and adapted plants. The garden has served as their living laboratory for more than a quarter century. For further information, visit rickdarke.com.
In his segment on drawing inspiration from West Virginia’s wild and wonderful places, Rick will feature many photographs of West Virginia flora. After a break, he will deliver a design lecture on the gardens he and his wife nurture. A tech-savvy speaker, Rick can access anything from his own archives and online during his presentation to address audience members’ specific questions.
Carol Reese is an Extension Horticulture Specialist housed at the University of Tennessee’s West Tennessee AgResearch and Education Center in Jackson. She is a nationally-known speaker, blending equal parts gardening knowledge, natural lore, and quirky humor.
Carol is the gardening and nature columnist for several newspapers, as well as a contributor to several gardening magazines. She was the Q&A columnist for Horticulture Magazine for several years.
Her B.S. and M.S. in Horticulture are from Mississippi State University, and she could also add her Ph.D. if she “had ever written that damn dissertation!” While there, she taught classes in Plant Materials, and co-taught Landscape Design for non-LA majors alongside a “real” landscape architect.
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 hard pan”. Carol’s very personal appreciation of natural lore is at least partially a result of her near daily rambles through the wild areas near her home with her motley collection of mutts, also known as the strong-willed breed of “Amalgamations.”
Registration for the Winter Symposium will open in November. The fee for WVNLA members is $50. Non-member fee is $100.
