Great Garden Series

With Amy Wise, City of Durango

Transforming Perfection is Transforming Community: Big Picture Native Plant Gardening at the Santa Rita Water Reclamation Facility Demonstration Gardens

Having a tough time adapting to native plant gardening and practices? Or maybe you just want to dive in a little deeper? While exploring the SRWRF Demo Gardens, we will talk about our ideas of perfection in the landscape, and explore changing some of our gardening habits and concepts that could have a more positive, broader impact on our ecosystem and our community.

Amy is from Indiana and moved to the area in 1992 to attend Fort Lewis College where she received her degree in Anthropology, emphasizing Archaeology. Wanting to be an archaeologist since she was 6 years old, she applied her degree to working as one for 18 years staring at Mesa Verde National Park, then the BLM/USFS out of Durango, the San Juan Mountains Association and running a couple of her on archaeological consulting companies. In 2013 she began running her own wildfire mitigation business, reducing the potential impacts from catastrophic wildfires around people’s homes here in Southwest Colorado. Amy retired from this important work in 2023 and began working at the Santa Rita Water Reclamation Facility in April of 2024 where she enjoys applying her many years of outdoor experience and public education to taking care of these newly planted Demonstration Gardens and the surrounding grounds of the Santa Rita Water Reclamation Facility.

Great Garden events happen every fourth Wednesday of the month, April-September, presented by the Durango Botanic Gardens, CSU Extension Office, & Durango Public Library. For more details visit www.durangobotanicgardens.org/events.

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