This will be a virtual program.  

Despite growing up on more than two acres pretty close to the country in Fort Worth, Texas, Dana’s love of gardening didn’t really blossom until 2013 when she moved to Memphis where she bought her first home and where things were MUCH easier to grow. She moved to Memphis after she attended Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she worked with Baylor International Pediatrics AIDS Initiative, completed a concentration in Global Health, and earned a Certificate in Tropical Medicine. She came to Memphis for her residency in combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Tennessee. After residency, she spent a year at St. Jude doing a fellowship in HIV Care. She spent the last year and a half working in Midtown providing primary care and HIV care to high risk patients. Her time spent in her garden and love of plants has grown with each year. Starting with a few flowers and shrubs, then a small vegetable garden, and then larger projects ensued: replacing non-natives, invasives, non-pollinator plants, and yes, eventually swaths of lawn (GASP!). Once she found a few caterpillars on her fennel and milkweed though four years ago, gardening for butterflies has definitely become a focus. She grows many extra plants for family and friends (especially milkweed) and helps with gardens at both her mother’s Texas country home and her grandmother’s Florida intercostal home. In order to support pollinators and native plants in all three places, the practices seed saving and seed starting have become her ways to keep gardening during the fall and winter months. Her non-gardening hobbies include photography and travel, cooking all things international, fostering dogs with a local rescue, and spending time with her chatty rescue dog, Raza.

SEED SAVING TALK OUTLINE

• History of
• Importance of/Why?
• What is a seed?
• Anatomy
• How it is formed
• Pollination
• Annuals, Biennials, Perennials
• Selecting Parents
• Collecting
• Extracting/Drying
• Storage
• Testing Viability
• Seeds Swapping
• Seed Activism
• Questions