Join Us for Our 2026 Plant Select Annual Conference | Thursday, June 11
March 9th, 2026
NEW FOR 2026: Get an in-person OR livestream ticket
Every year we host a one-day conference for western plant enthusiasts. Please join us on Thursday, June 11 for an inspiring day of talks from exceptional speakers—like Lauren Springer, Bryan Fischer, Kenton Seth, Pat Hayward, and Dave Leatherman—and a short celebration of our annual award winners. Be part of one of our favorite days of the year!
Tickets go on sale soon: Sign up for our e-newsletter to be notified
Event overview
Date: Thursday, June 11, 2026
Tentative schedule: 8:30 am – 4 pm MT
New: Choose from in-person or livestream tickets
Join our conference livestream via Zoom if you’re unable to attend in person. While we’d love to see everyone in person, we’re pleased to offer online access, so you can be part of the experience, no matter where you are.
In-person location: Denver Botanic Gardens York Street (ticket required)
Tickets go on sale soon: Sign up for our e-newsletter to be notified
Get ready to be inspired with speakers and talks like:
- Lauren Springer | Designing immersive plantings: A garden maker’s perspectives
- Bryan Fischer | A fresh look at native plants
- Kenton Seth | Trees for the apocalypse
- Pat Hayward | Hummer havens: Where plants, people and hummingbirds connect
- Dave Leatherman | How and why bird diets change during the year: And how our gardens play a role
- Plant Select annual awards | A brief celebration of the people who go above and beyond for Plant Select
Scroll down for full descriptions of the talks and speakers.
All are welcome!
This event is ideal for plant enthusiasts including:
Landscape professionals, master gardeners, home gardeners, municipalities, garden center teams, botanic garden teams, and others from across the Intermountain West.
Book signing at lunch
If you choose an in-person ticket, Lauren Springer and Bryan Fischer will be signing their new book at lunch.
It’s called: “The Rocky Mountain Native Plant Primer.”
We’ll share details on how to get this book soon, if you’d like to add it to your collection.
A closer look at our 2026 presentations:
Designing Immersive Plantings: A Garden-Maker’s Perspectives
Lauren Springer
One of the most vexing subjects to tackle authoritatively is garden design. Lauren has long been skeptical of doing so, believing there isn’t any single way to design and that even the most popular tenets often don’t hold. Instead, she finds ways of seeing and thinking that awaken originality and flow, ultimately leading to a creation with atmosphere and a sense of place.
Rather than state hard and fast rules, she’ll share perspectives she finds especially helpful, with examples from diverse sites where she incorporates many Rocky Mountain, Great Plains, Great Basin, and Southwestern natives and well-adapted plants, including both from Plant Select.
About our speaker: Lauren Springer is the recipient of the 2025 American Horticultural Society Landscape Design award. Her work has been featured regularly by the national and international press, in books, and on television. Of her own six books, the newest is coauthored with Bryan Fischer: The Rocky Mountain Native Plant Primer.
Lauren’s many plant introductions include this year’s Plant Select Epilobium canum UNFORGETTABLETM hummingbird trumpet and next year’s Muhlenbergia rigens Sure ThingTM. She has designed public garden spaces at Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms, Santa Fe Botanical Garden, and at the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, Colo. where she is on staff.
A Fresh Look at Native Plants
Bryan Fischer
Native plants have enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence in the last decade thanks in large part to the public’s desire to make positive change in their own backyards through ecologically informed gardening practices and plant choices. Still, information on many aspects of gardening with native plants has lagged behind, especially when it comes to expanding the palette beyond a relatively modest number of widely-sold species.
Bryan will touch on often overlooked context surrounding gardening with native plants in the Rocky Mountain and High Plains regions and will introduce a “best of” list that includes plants already in the Plant Select® program, those with promise for regional horticulture, and a few that have just plain been overlooked.
About our speaker: Bryan Fischer is the Curator of Plant Collections for the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, Colo. There, he acts as counsel to the horticulture staff, advises on plant collections management, leads plant record tracking, and cares for the half-acre Rock Garden as well as a half-acre Prairie Garden of his own design. Bryan selects and breeds native and adapted plants to improve their garden qualities while retaining wildlife benefits, and with Lauren Springer, is coauthor of The Rocky Mountain Native Plant Primer.
Bryan received the Plant Select® Individual Partner Award in 2025 for his work forwarding sustainable gardening in the region and his contributions through his active role work on the Plant Select® Propagation and Marketing Committees.
Trees for the Apocolypse
Kenton Seth
Many communities are facing diminishing resources and harsher conditions for their trees, from limited water, saltier water, to more serious weather, new pests, or decreased funding and manpower. How will tree planters face a changing and unknown future?
Kenton will showcase forgotten successes and proven strategies, especially sustainable tree selection, which is at the heart of the Plant Select mission. Let’s make sure we still have trees should the worst happen—or if not, that we enjoy great trees with the least risk and maintenance burden for our rapidly changing climate.
About our speaker: Kenton Seth is a horticulturist specializing in western landscapes, garden design, and realistic, sustainable practices. Based in Western Colorado but working anywhere, he co-authored a book on The Crevice Garden in 2022.
At home, he’s dedicated himself to native plant work in his water-scarce region by making unirrigated native gardens and meadows as paintbrushgardens.com. An unrestrained plant addict, he hunts seed from his home desert steppe to that of Turkey, growing them in his own small nursery to supply his projects.
How and Why Bird Diets Change During The Year
Dave Leatherman
Birds can be all-year residents, seasonal visitors or migrants, and their diets often change, whether from necessity or opportunity. These changes can sometimes be dramatic—within days or even hours.
Learn why it happens, when it happens, and how plants play an important part in this phenomenon in our western region.
About our speaker: Dave Leatherman is a lifelong birder and naturalist. For the last 16 years, he has written the quarterly column “The Hungry Bird” in Colorado Birds magazine on the food habits of birds. Dave has a special interest in documenting the Loggerhead Shrike’s habit of impaling prey on barbed wire and plants, and he wrote on this topic in the July 2025 issue of Birding magazine.
Dave is a photographer and frequent speaker to plant and animal groups. He served as a forest entomologist for the Colorado State Forest Service from 1974-2005. He has a degree in biology from Marietta College and a Master of Forestry from Duke University.
Hummer Havens: Where Plants, People and Hummingbirds Connect
Pat Hayward
Gardens are personal places, where rules don’t apply and where we go to immerse ourselves in a world of beauty, joy, and solace. But gardens are also entertaining and dynamic, especially when the activities and attitudes of hummingbirds are integrated into the experience. Plants invite the birds in, and like an all-you-can-eat buffet, the greater the diversity of menu items, the busier the garden will be.
Pat will share her experiences with Plant Select plants and hummingbirds’ interactions in her own dryland gardens. Learn which plants she’s found most beneficial, gather useful tips, and discover how to make your garden a hummer haven, as well.
About our speaker: Pat Hayward has been professionally involved in the horticulture world for almost 50 years (growing, sales, marketing), was a publications contributor and columnist (including Birder’s World, now Birdwatching magazine), and an environmental planner for the City of Fort Collins.
Twice awarded the CNGA Nursery Person of the Year, she most recently served as Executive Director of Plant Select®. Now retired, Pat and her husband Joel enjoy splitting time between their home and gardens in Masonville, Colorado and Capitan, New Mexico.
Plant Select Annual Awards
Our annual conference includes a brief celebration honoring the people and organizations that exemplify and advance the Plant Select program.
