Mark Richardson is the Director of Horticulture for the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston, Massachusetts. He leads a team of horticulture staff and oversees a living plant collection that spans sixteen distinct garden spaces, two conservatories, and over 100 acres of surrounding woodlands and wetlands. He has a passion for ecological horticulture and native plants, and he lectures on various topics including “How to Kill Your Lawn.” He is the co-author of the book Native Plants for New England Gardens (Globe Pequot, 2018).

Andrew Conboy
Andrew Conboy enjoys sharing his passion for trees and their many benefits with anyone who will listen. He is an ISA-certified arborist who most recently worked on the Urban Forestry team at the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia.

In 2020, he created Colonial Canopy Trees, a non-profit organization that leads ecological restoration efforts in the greater Philadelphia area. In his free time, Andrew creates videos about environmental topics and shares them on social media.

Through his work, he hopes to inspire people and change the way we view and value our natural lands, native plants, and wildlife. He studied Environmental Science at Chestnut Hill College and Evolutionary Biology in graduate school at Lehigh University.

Karen Kabnick

After retiring in 2020, Karen Kabnick wanted to do everything she could to help mitigate the damages of climate change and habitat destruction. Karen met Andrew at a volunteer event and was thrilled to learn he, too, loved to rescue and nurture seedlings of native trees. They shared that hobby. She learned all about the countless benefits of trees and how to plant them from Andrew, friends, courses and reading, and wanted to use her new-found knowledge to help Andrew with Colonial Canopy Trees to restore our local canopy and re-establish wildlife habitats.