CHESTERTOWN, MD— Join University of Delaware Professor Doug Tallamy Thursday, February 12, for a talk on strengthening ecosystems by restoring native plants. The free lecture, Rebuilding Nature’s Relationships, will take place at 5:00 p.m. in Hynson Lounge, Hodson Hall, on the Washington College campus. 

Plants that have evolved in concert with local animals provide for their needs better than plants that evolved elsewhere, Tallamy explains on his website. He also addresses why it is important to restore life to our residential properties, and what we can do to make our landscapes living ecosystems once again. 

“If we humans are capable of turning hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest into depleted grasslands, and extirpating millions of buffalo from the plains, and billions of passenger pigeons from the skies and cod from the North Atlantic, we are also capable of returning natives to our gardens,” he says.


Doug Tallamy is a professor in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has taught Insect Taxonomy, Behavioral Ecology, Humans and Nature, Insect Ecology, and other courses for 33 years. He is the author of 80 research articles as well as the book Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens (awarded the 2008 Silver Medal by the Garden Writers’ Association) and The Living Landscape, co-authored with Rick Darke and published in 2014. His work has earned him the Garden Club of America Margaret Douglas Medal for Conservation and the Tom Dodd, Jr. Award of Excellence.   

The lecture is sponsored by The Center for Environment and Society. Some copies of Bringing Nature Home will be available for purchase at a book signing following the event.

– Catalina Righter ’17