Fall Harvest Festival Speaker Schedule and Bios

Adam Alexander spent 40 years as an award- winning film and television producer, but his true passion is collecting rare, endangered but, above all, delicious vegetables from around the world. He lectures widely on his work discovering and conserving rare, endangered garden crops and is valued for his inspiring and motivational talks with appearances at many prestigious events. His knowledge and expertise on growing vegetables for seed is highly valued by the Heritage Seed Library, for which he is a seed guardian. Adam shares seeds with other growers and gene banks in the U.S. and across Europe, as well as providing seeds for displaced people from Syria and the Ukraine as part of a program to reconnect them with the tastes of home. He has appeared on Gardeners’ World and the Great British Food Revival and CNN’s Going Green. He has written for National Geographic Magazine, The Sustainable Food Trust, Simple Things and The Cottage Garden Society. He is the author of The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables. Follow him on Bluesky: ‘theseeddetective.bsky.social, Twitter @vegoutwithadam and Instagram: @theseeddetective

Lucy and Kate are the dynamic duo behind She Grows Veg, an heirloom seed company in the U.K. bringing the joy of beautiful and unusual vegetable, fruit, and edible flower varieties to home gardeners. The company grew from Lucy’s Instagram account, where she shared her growing experiences with a huge and enthusiastic audience. Lucy also provided photography for our Whole Seed Catalog and trialed many Baker Creek varieties before striking out on her own. Kate brings a wealth of executive-level business and marketing experience to the table. Lucy and Kate will share their stories of what it takes to bring heirloom vegetable growing to new gardeners and audiences!

Join gardening expert John Kohler and long-time medical doctor Dr. Jeff Pierce for an enlightening talk on transforming your garden into a powerful medicine cabinet. Learn doctor-approved strategies for growing, preparing, and eating nutrient-dense plants to prevent and reverse disease. Discover how integrating these practices can significantly improve your health and wellness, reducing or even eliminating the need for conventional drugs.

Dr. Jeff Pierce is a board-certified family and lifestyle medicine physician and a volunteer master gardener. He teaches about the power of growing an edible garden to help prevent and treat chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. He and his family enjoy working in and eating from their urban food forest in Sonoma County.

John is the force behind Growing Your Greens, a popular YouTube gardening channel. Learn Organic Gardening at GrowingYourGreens - YouTube

Herbal enthusiasts Susan Belsinger and Tina Marie Wilcox met in 1996 when Susan went to present two herb programs at the Ozark Folk Center, where Tina Marie is herbalis and head gardener and coordinates all kinds of wonderful herbal events. Susan cooks, writes, takes photos, and teaches; her latest book the perfect bite: focus on flavor was published in 2022.

Having herbs, gardening, botanizing, foraging, good food and fun in common—Tina Marie and Susan hit it off—and that was the beginning of a long-distance friendship. Gardening from their respective homes, Susan in Maryland, and Tina Marie in Arkansas, they’ve exchanged a lot of seeds, plants, roots and ideas over the years. They have collaborated on presentations and workshops across the country, from the Smithsonian to Epcot and have done many programs for herbal organizations and businesses, conferences and botanic gardens. They co-authored the creative herbal home, which celebrates their living the herbal life and have written for national publications like Mother Earth Living, The Herb Companion, The Herbarist, Herbs for Health and GRIT, as well as the Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Regions Guides.

Tina and Susan are both members of the International Herb Association, Herb Society of America, American Botanical Council and United Plant Savers—and they both share a passion for all things herbal.

P. Allen Smith, often described as one of America’s most talented garden designers, is the product of five generations of southern nurserymen. His foundational childhood experiences in planting naturally led to an appreciation for horticulture, genetic diversity, plant pairing and for an orderly and holistic approach to work. Later, as a garden and landscape graduate student in England, his design processes were refined to embrace each site’s unique characteristics and the needs of each unique commissioning family.

Eschewing fashion, Mr. Smith identifies and sensitively accentuates the natural gifts of the landscape, imparting balance, harmony and beauty in the classic tradition of Palladio, Brown, and Repton. His designs are an expression of his client’s lifestyle and their legacy, melding site with living material and improvements to create environments that mature and improve with the seasons. And Mr. Smith’s many esoteric interests and insights allow for a myriad of inclusions such as ornamented aviaries, sheep pastures, walled gardens, fruit orchards, kitchen herb gardens, container gardens, stumperies, rare rose collections, wildflower and pollinator fields, apiaries, ponds, and architecturally appropriate built structures and follies.

The result for his clients is timeless gardens and landscapes.

To date, he is the author of six bestselling books, host and producer of one of PBS’s most

successful and award-winning television shows, he runs a media enterprise focused on garden design and health, he is a speaker at many of the country’s important architectural and historic homes (and opens his own home to the public each Spring and Fall).

Mr. Smith’s work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Architectural Digest, People, House Beautiful, Southern Living, and more than 100 other publications.

He is a trustee of Winterthur House, a former board member of the Royal Oak Society (of the British National Trust), is a certified fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, an honorary member of the Garden Club of America, the Honorary President of the Herb Society of America, and a life member of the Livestock Conservancy, Rare Breeds Trust (UK) and the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities. He is a TEDx speaker and the founder of the Heritage Poultry Conservancy.

Wren is a founder of Mountain Jewel Center for Earth Connection, a Missouri Ozarks-based project founded on the principles and ethics of permaculture. Their vision is “to build on the unique array of species and promote the cultivation of improved varieties of locally adapted plant stock.” Through an ongoing squash breeding project, Wren is developing a squash bug-resistant C. mochata and the Ozark C. mochata Grex.

For Los Angeles gardener Wendi Phan, plants are like an extension of her family. Through her Gardens of Wendiland, she provides organically grown herbs and low-maintenance living decors to homes and workspaces. Wendi also shares her knowledge and deep love for gardening – particularly exotics – on her YouTube channel.