Oct 16, 2025
Friendly Meeting House, Olympia WA
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Speakers
Dr. Gail Langellotto
Professor and Researcher at Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences
Dr. Gail Langellotto a Professor of Horticulture at Oregon State University, where she also directs the BioResource Research Program. Together with her students, she studies the plants and practices that promote biodiversity in garden spaces, via her work in OSU’s Garden Ecology Lab. The lab has a strong commitment to outreach and science communication, so that research-backed management practices are shared with gardeners, native plant professionals, landscapers, and urban agriculture professionals.
Don Norman
Owner, Go Natives! Nursery
Don is an environmental toxicologist and ecologist. He wanted birds in his backyard after working at Fort Lewis, so he ended up starting Go Natives! Nursery in 2004 after he realized that there were no retail outlets for native plants. According to Don, “After 20 years, there is still no competition, so I keep having fun selling plants.” He has great staff support on procurement (Chelsie) and an online inventory linked to a Point-Of-Sale system (Sandy), allowing Go Natives! to run a casual operation with a high-tech back end.
Cammie Donaldson
Executive Director, Florida Association of Native Nurseries
For almost 30 years, Cammie has been working in Florida’s native plant movement to help educate the public about the benefits of native plants, to improve native plant production, access and use; and make native plant businesses stronger and more successful. She serves as the Executive Director of FANN, the Florida Association of Native Nurseries, a statewide network of growers, retail nurseries, restoration firms and landscape professionals specializing in native plant production and use. FANN also founded the Native Plant Horticulture Foundation, a public charity that works to strengthen the native plant industry by assisting existing and future growers and associations like FANN.
Jeff DeBell
Forest Geneticist, Washington State Department of Natural Resources
Jeff manages the Forest Genetics Program for Washington DNR. This includes both genetic field tests and seed orchards across the state. He works closely with other large forest landowners, both public and private, as well as university cooperatives, to share the information and costs of operating the program. In his free time, he volunteers with Wind River Trust, a non-profit that is working to develop a native plant center and nursery on the site of a former US Forest Service nursery in the Columbia River Gorge.
Dylan Levy-Boyd
General Manager, Fourth Corner Nursery
Dylan is the General Manager at Fourth Corner Nurseries in Bellingham, WA, where he has spent the past 15 years engaged in native plant propagation and bare root nursery production. Before joining the nursery world, he worked with some of the world’s largest oil companies, advocating for the use of native plants in restoration projects across the Shrub Steppe ecosystems of Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. Dylan is passionate about demonstrating that a native plant nursery can thrive as a viable small business. He feels fortunate to work alongside a talented team, supporting customers as they tackle both inspiring and complex ecological projects. He holds a B.A. in Biology from Reed College and an M.A. in Conservation Biology from Prescott College.
Matt Gravel
Bloomsday Natives
Matt is an enrolled member of the Métis nation from treaty 6 territory in Alberta, Canada. He has operated urban micro nurseries for the last 10 years both in Victoria, BC and Portland, OR. His business Bloomsday Natives focuses on urban restoration, ecological consulting and propagation of less commercially available native plants, with prioritization to urban genetics for climate resilience. The urban restoration work we do partners with community based land projects and private home owners with a focus on habitat connectivity, restoring water quality, cooling urban heat island effects, while tying in traditional ecological knowledge and working in reciprocity with the land.
Emily Wittkop
Forest Geneticist, Washington State Department of Natural Resources
Emily Wittkop is a trained botanist from the Pacific Northwest, with a degree in Natural Resource Management and a minor in Forest Management from Oregon State University. She has spent the last ten years working as a native seed collector for a variety of agencies including a non-profit where she specialized in threatened and endangered species augmentation and prairie oak restoration. In 2021 she became the owner of Jonny Native Seed and shifted her focus to providing high quality native seed on a larger scale to private and public landowners, non-profits, and nursery producers. Her passion for species diversity and the conservation of rare plants plays a key part in influencing her approach to seed collection. Emily strives to make native plant materials more readily available to all consumers.
Randy Lawrence
Clean Water Services
Randy Lawrence is a program manager in the Natural Systems and Ecological Stewardship Department at Clean Water Services in Washington County, Oregon. After earning a degree in Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he migrated west, beginning a career in ecological restoration as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Eugene, Oregon. Over the past 20 years, Randy has worked in the non-profit and public sector in Oregon, Washington, and Virginia and has been involved in riparian restoration, community outreach and engagement, and native plant nursery production. In his current role, Randy manages a program for long-term ecological stewardship of riparian restoration projects and a native plant material program where over 800,000 plants are procured annually for planting in the Tualatin Basin. Topics of interest to Randy include the impacts of climate change, Emerald Ash Borer, and plant disease pathogens to riparian and wetland plant communities in the Tualatin Basin and how to create functional resilience in the face of these threats.
Justine Mischka
Volunteer Coordinator and Seed Specialist, The Center for Natural Lands Management
Justine Mischka is the Volunteer Coordinator and Seed Specialist for the Center for Natural Lands Management’s Violet Prairie Seed Farm. Justine joined CNLM in 2022 and grows native prairie wildflowers for prairie restoration alongside four other amazing seed farmers. In her current role, she manages outreach for both CNLM’s farm and restoration programs, leads communications with public and volunteers, and provides environmental education to school groups and hobby organizations. Alongside these tasks, she is a full time seed farmer throughout the year, from sowing seeds through seed harvesting. The Violet Prairie Seed Farm produces around 1,000 pounds of native prairie wildflower seeds each year for the South Sound Prairies!
Jo “Cirque” Stormer
Owner, Nobody Nursery
Jo “Cirque” Stormer (they/them) is a local native plant horticulturalist whose obsession with our region’s flora began as a forager with a particular focus on backcountry survival sustenance. Today, Cirque runs Nobody Nursery in Des Moines, promoting biodiversity by specializing in Washington natives that are otherwise commercially-unavailable.
Lea Dyga
Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center
Lea Dyga (they/them) is a horticulturist, environmental educator, and community organizer originally from West Michigan. They hold a Bachelor of Environmental Plant Biology from Michigan State University. Lea moved to Seattle in 2022, joining Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center in 2024. Lea’s passion for plants, restoration, and community education has led them to pursue a career in PNW native plant propagation where their work aims to expand the understanding of seed propagation techniques and empower the native plant movement.
Mara Friddle
Farm and Operations Manager. Plant Materials Program at the Institute for Applied Ecology
Mara maintains farm field and raised-bed production of over 40 different Pacific Northwest native plant species for seed production. This encompasses all aspects from field planting and maintenance to, harvest, seed cleaning and seed storage. She has over 20 years of professional experience in horticulture including oilseed crop and ornamental plant breeding research. Mara came to IAE most recently from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Corvallis Plant Materials Center as a Horticulturist. In that position she took part in the propagation, field production, seed collection and cleaning of a multitude of Pacific Northwest native species. Mara has experience cultivating many threatened and endangered species including Bradshaw’s Lomatium, Kincaid’s Lupine, thin leaved peavine and Howell’s spectacular Thelypody. Mara has a B.S. in horticulture with a concentration on nursery and landscape management from Colorado State University.