A chapter of Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes
Habitat Gardening in Central New York (HGCNY) is a local chapter of the national organization Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes, a non-profit education and advocacy organization.
You can learn more about our organization, find out about our meetings and events, and access free resources about habitat gardening below.
Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes promotes environmentally sound landscaping practices to preserve biodiversity through the preservation, restoration and establishment of native plant communities.
Our monthly programs are free and open to the public. We also have an annual field trip as well as Show Me, Help Me tours in the summer.
Our annual plant sales help get native plants planted out there in CNY and, equally important, support the emerging local native plant nurseries, helping make native plants easier to obtain and the common sense default choice for home landscapes.
To support our Wild Ones mission, we encourage you to become an official member of Wild Ones. And when you’re a member of Wild Ones, you’re automatically a member of HGCNY!
It’s easy to join or to renew your membership. Just go to Wild Ones.org.
And when you become a Wild Ones member, you receive the national publication Wild Ones Journal.
We have monthly programs from September through April, except for December. They usually take place the last Sunday in the month at 2:00 pm at Liverpool Public Library.
Some programs (due to room conflicts or holidays) must be rescheduled, so please confirm the date of programs you’re planning to attend.
Here is our schedule for the 2017 – 2018 program year.
To get the latest information on our meetings and events as well as a variety of habitat tips, sign up for our free e-newsletter.
The newsletter is generally published twice a month.
Our free newsletter gives details about our programs and events and habitat tips, too.
We also plan a field trip for May or June. We’ve visited many special places over the years.
We organize Show Me Help Me yard tours during the summer.
Our plant sale is in September, but we often have a special plant sale in the spring, too.
We’re invited to participate in local events.
For many years, HGCNY has participated in an annual garlic mustard pull at Baltimore Woods Nature Center. We’re pleased to see that as the past garlic mustard seedbank is exhausted, “our” area has fewer and fewer garlic mustard plants — and therefore, more and more of the native beauties, such as trillium, that Baltimore Woods is famous for.
Rather than having a general business meeting, our officers and other interested Wild Ones members attend Planning Meetings in March, June, and September. Contact us if you’d like to be included.
HGCNY participates in various native plant projects, working toward our Wild Ones mission to preserve biodiversity.
Wild Ones is a partner in the Monarch Joint Venture and as part of the effort to conserve monarch butterflies has developed a Wild for Monarchs program.
HGCNY enthusiastically participates in this program.
Inspired by the North Carolina Audubon’s Bird-friendly Native Plants of the Year program, we’re working with the local Onondaga Audubon chapter to create a similar program here in CNY.
We started our first year’s list of “Birdy Dozen” plants in 2017 and also developed lists for 2018 and 2019 (to give nurseries time to propagate plants). After that, we’ll add one Birdy Dozen list each year, three years in advance. Here are our lists.
Learning about native plants and their benefits is what we’re all about.
Except for the Wild Ones Journal (a national publication available only to members), all of our material is free to download.
HGCNY offers additional resources:
We have factsheets on various topics.
And we highly recommend these books to learn more.