Atlanta BeltLine’s Organic Land Care Symposium Spreads Its Roots

Students, educators, landscape architects, lawn care and garden professionals, purveyors of fine soils and compost teas, and more filled three classrooms at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens for the second annual Organic Land Care Symposium from the Atlanta BeltLine. Since the event’s inception last year, we had a 56 percent increase in attendance, which is an exciting development as the symposium puts down its roots and continues to grow and spread. We had landscape architects come from as far as Knoxville and Savannah and are sure we’ll expand even more next year!

We have made available three presentations from the day’s speakers:

Organic Land Care Symposium 2012 lunch
Symposium guests mingled and networked as they enjoyed lunch before the keynote speaker.

The most significant goal of the symposium is to advance the discussion of how we want to take care of our public and private spaces. This is not a quick change but rather something that will take years. All of our presenters take daily strides to make the places we live and play safer and more sustainable.

James Sottilo of Ecological Landscape Management in New York
James Sottilo of Ecological Landscape Management in New York created healthy, vibrant landscapes for the New York High Line, 9/11 Memorial, and Brooklyn Bridge Park (to name a few).
Afternoon discussion panel at the Organic Land Care Symposium
An afternoon panel discussion, led by Spence Rosenfeld, who founded Arborguard in 1981, presented techniques and solutions to sustain living soils.
Sponsors of the Organic Land Care Symposium 2012
Sponsors of the 2012 Organic Land Care Symposium had the opportunity to speak with guests.

You can view all of our photos from the event on the Atlanta BeltLine’s official flickr stream!

One consistent comment from guests was that they had a really hard time deciding which session to attend – a good “problem” to have! Below is more positive feedback from our attendees:

“Excellent information! I am now interested in growing my backyard compost into a larger operation!”

“Building block for all gardens!”

“Very informative. Need to keep getting the organic message out!”

“Perfect to see how the practices were applied to projects in the real world.”

“Entertaining and informative!”

 

For the complete list of sessions and topics covered, please see our previous blog post about the Organic Land Care Symposium. This special event is brought to you from the passionate and dedicated Kevin Burke (Senior Landscape Architect at the Atlanta BeltLine), Meghan Injaychock (Atlanta BeltLine Fellow) and volunteers Micah Lipscomb, Maxine Coleman (Perkins + Will) and Wesley Brown (HDR). We could not have made it happen without the support of our sponsors, Ed Castro Landscape, Atlanta Botanical Garden, Reeves Contracting Company, Georgia Organics, Arborguard Tree Specialists, Turner Foundation, Pond, and Perkins+Will.

Please stay tuned for next year’s third annual Symposium!

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