Designing Stunning Spaces with Native Plants: From Species to Space

Take next steps with an exclusive opportunity to work alongside one of the landscape designers involved in Mt. Cuba’s Master Plan and Glade Entrance Garden. This immersive, hands-on workshop explores the craft of landscape design and how to create unforgettable outdoor spaces in collaboration with the plants you love. Through quick, creative exercises, you’ll learn to analyze inspiring garden spaces and understand how your emotional response connects to plant selection, spacing, and seasonality. You’ll practice reading a site—its physical qualities, its opportunities, and the aesthetic or habitat goals you want it to achieve—and then translate those insights into measured drawings that reflect your design intentions. Using Mt. Cuba’s gardens as your living classroom, you’ll experiment with designing directly in the field at a designated test site, applying principles of composition, scale, and plant-driven design. You’ll also gain experience drawing to scale and turning a conceptual sketch into a practical planting plan, complete with sizes and quantities. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how to shape meaningful, plant-centered landscapes and the confidence to bring your own design ideas to life. Lunch is included. Class is held rain or shine. This program takes place in-person at Mt. Cuba Center Saturday, May 2, 2026. 🥬 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) available About the Instructor: Chloe Hawkins (BA, Oberlin College 2003; MLA, University of Virginia 2010) is a visual artist and the Founder and Director of Cohort, a landscape architecture practice committed to deepening the intertwined relationships between people, plants and place. A Lecturer at UVA’s School of Architecture, she teaches graduate courses in technical design skills, plants, and landscape maintenance as a creative design tool. Formerly with NBWLA, Chloe was the lead designer of Mt. Cuba’s Glade Garden and co-led the master plan and first phase of implementation. She’s thrilled to return and engage the gardens as a living classroom. REGISTER NOW: General Public Individual+ & Dual+ Members Supporter, Advocate & Conservator Members