Chris Roddick & Naomi Brooks - Nursery Shopping

MHG Meetings

Sponsored By: Metro Hort Group

Buying high quality, well-grown plants is a critical element of establishing or renovating landscapes. Healthy, happy plants can drastically decrease long term costs and care. Yet we often find ourselves picking over less than perfect plants at nurseries or garden centers to find and delivery the plants we need. In this lecture, Naomi Brooks and Chris Roddick will share their professional experiences shopping for plants and detail how to inspect and select better trees, shrubs, annuals, and perennials from the nursery trade. They will cover what to look for and what to avoid, share resources for selecting pot size or B&B, and how to determine weight for transport and planting operations. This talk will also include some behind-the-scenes information on growing and nursery practices as it relates to informing better purchasing habits and their takes on how best to cost out materials and what to charge your clients. This talk will include a 20 min. Q & A session moderated by Rebecca McMackin so bring your questions.

Christopher Roddick is an I.S.A. Certified Arborist and Foreman of Grounds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He has over 25 years of experience that have included far too many nursery trips, not finding what he was looking for: high quality, well grown plants. Christopher also consults with landscape architects, designers, and private clients on mature tree preservation, tree risk assessments, and plant selection. He is the author of the “Tree Care Primer” an age-appropriate guide to care for young, mature, and veteran trees. When he’s not working in Brooklyn, he is often on an expedition, traveling to the Neo-Tropical forests conducting canopy research as a climber and occasional camp cook.

Naomi Brooks has certificates in Horticulture and Landscape Design from the New York Botanical Garden. She worked in the New York office of Oehme, van Sweden and Associates; at a large wholesale nursery in Westchester County; and then started her own wholesale nursery, specializing in hard-to-find New American Garden perennials, ferns, and grasses. She currently owns Verdant Landscapes, a design/maintenance firm in the Hudson Valley of New York that also offers consulting services to landscape architects on plant selection, procurement, and installation of large projects.