Santa Fe Botanical Garden presents ‘First Things First: Getting Ready to Plant’ Workshop

Event Description

Workshop leader: Tracy Neal

Landscaping in the Santa Fe area is challenging; the coming climate changes will make it even more challenging.  Learn how to increase your chances of creating a beautiful, healthy garden that will continue to thrive in the future. We will discuss the basic factors of our climate plus the site specific variables that impact landscape choices and how you can best work with those, including how to make the most of water on your site. You will also learn how to choose the best plants in the nursery, how to create soils that will support the plants you want to grow, and how to avoid the most common landscaping mistakes.

Tracy Neal has worked as a professional horticulturist in New Mexico since 1974.  He moved to Santa Fe in 1986 to manage the nursery at Santa Fe Greenhouses.  There, he introduced many new and under-utilized plants to the Santa Fe market.  During that time he also taught classes at Santa Fe Community College. In 1995 he began working with a local landscape company, where his landscape work included everything from small gardens in town to large country estates.  He now works as a private consultant and landscape designer. Tracy has been a Certified Arborist since 2000, with a special fondness for pruning fruit trees.

As a founding member of the Santa Fe chapter of the National Xeriscape Council, Tracy helped write the first Xeriscape Plant List for Santa Fe. In 2001, he created the Recommended Woody Plant List for the City of Santa Fe, and later helped produce the Transition Zone Plant List for Santa Fe County and the Low Water Use Plant List for the Office of the State Engineer. Tracy is consulting with the Santa Fe Botanical Garden on plant selection for the new garden at Museum Hill.

Workshop comes with a discount coupon for shopping at SFBG’s May Plant Sale.