On Friday, Aug. 11, from 9:30-11 a.m., take a guided walk through the forested land at Hidden Valley Nature Center in Jefferson, a beautiful piece of woodland with a variety of interesting native plants. On this Summer Native Plant Walk, participants will learn about some of the wildflowers, ferns, shrubs and trees native to Maine. Leader Heather McCargo will talk about which species are adaptable to gardens and developed landscapes, and the threats to their survival, as well as their unusual reproductive strategies, and edible and medicinal properties. Learning to recognize the native species in our midst is the first step to advocating for their preservation.

McCargo, the founder and director of the Wild Seed Project, is an educator with 30 years of expertise in plant propagation, landscape design and conservation. She was the head plant propagator at New England Wildflower Society’s Garden in the Woods in the ’90s, worked at several landscape architecture/planning firms specializing in ecological design, has been contributor to several research projects with USAID, National Gardening Association, and with MOFGA. Locally, she designed the master plan for the medicinal gardens at Avena Botanicals in Rockland, and was the creator and lead teacher for the Bay School’s Agricultural Arts program.

Wild Seed Project is a Maine-based non-profit that works to increase the use of native plants in all landscape settings in order to conserve biodiversity, encourage plant adaptation in the face of climate change, and to create pollination and migration corridors for insects, birds and other wildlife.

For more information on the walk, or to register, go to https://www.midcoastconservancy.org/events/native-plant-walk/, or call Midcoast Conservancy at (207) 389-5150.