Apr 17 2025
April 22 Meeting: Co-creating Gardens for Habitat, Health and Healing
By Ruth Kyme
Our April speaker will be Chicago-based gardener Jeremy Ohmes. After acquiring a certificate in Horticultural Therapy from the Chicago Botanic Garden in 2018, Jeremy started Wild World Gardens to share his love of gardening with others and to help them transform their landscapes into beautiful and beneficial ecosystems filled with food, habitat, and connections to local wildlife. He has worked with patients at Schwab Rehabilitation Center and students at Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center to combine therapeutic horticulture with creating habitat for struggling species. And he is convinced that gardens can heal and support the whole community of life.
Jeremy believes gardens can be meaningful spaces for healing and connection. For many years, he stretched out his green thumb with vegetables and herbs and then he discovered the need for more backyard biodiversity. He replaced his front lawn with a pollinator garden and got lots of strange looks from his neighbors. But he also received a lot of interest from friends and curious passersby.
How do you feel when you dig in the dirt? What do you experience when you sit in a garden? There is little doubt that gardening has many therapeutic benefits and that caring for plants is wonderful for our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. But what happens when we extend that healing to other species, too? This presentation will show how our gardens can be wild and restorative sanctuaries for humans and nonhumans alike. In Jeremy’s presentation, Co-Creating Gardens for Habitat, Health and Healing, we’ll discuss and learn how you can create home gardens with native plants and how your landscape—no matter how big or small—can support your health and wellbeing as well as the local environment around you.
Meeting Location: St Andrew Lutheran Church (NE Corner of Prince Crossing & Geneva Road.)
Meeting Time:
- 6:45PM Arrive & Mingle
- 7:00PM Business Meeting
- 7:15PM Program
The talk around the Kruse Garden this past winter has been trees. A failing Douglas Fir, that may or may not have been originally planted by the Kruse family, met its demise with a scheduled removal on the very last day of winter. 
When the big day arrived Kerry Perry kindly snapped photos of the tree removal so we all could see the action. An additional tree was trimmed with a moon-landing-like lift. Finally, a damaged pear tree was assessed and predicted to fall with the next big wind storm -which happened to occur that night. Does anyone recall the weather on the first day of Spring with high winds and snow? See photos of the rotted and fallen pear tree. 
Our March speaker will be Amanda Thomsen. Amanda is a horticulturist, garden designer, author, and speaker. She is also owner of Aster Gardens, a small plant and garden shop in Lemont. Amanda has been working as a professional horticulturist, landscape designer and project manager for the last 20+ years. Her focus is bringing rule-breaking fun, a little kitsch and a lot of humor into an industry that is often thought of as stodgy and full of rules.
- Membership