Presentation Topics
Interested in booking an event? Lorraine is a popular speaker on a broad range of topics related to gardening and growing: from native plants and the urban forest to pollinators and urban food production, all with a focus on equity and justice. Below is a selection of Lorraine’s presentation topics. Contact Lorraine for a full list of presentation topics or to book an event.
Climate Change and the Garden
How can we make our gardens resilient in an era of climate change, more frequent droughts, habitat loss and species decline? What are some of the connections between climate justice action and land-based practices such as gardening? In this action-oriented talk, Lorraine focuses on the many ways that our gardens can be places of ecological healing and beauty.
Native Plants for Beauty and Biodiversity
This illustrated talk explores the benefits and how-to’s of introducing native plants to the home landscape and community spaces, focusing on easy-to-grow species for conditions from shade to sun, dry to moist, and more. Highlights include how to incorporate native plants into existing gardens and gorgeous plant combinations.
Wild About Bees!
Celebrating the importance of pollinators to food security and ecosystem health, along with exploring the differences between honeybees and native bees, and the threats that pollinators face, this presentation offers plenty of practical information on creating pollinator gardens: how to get started, plant choices for beauty and low-maintenance in a broad range of conditions, and tips on maintaining your pollinator garden.
Edible City: Adventures in Urban Food Production
This inspirational talk explores diverse and innovative ways to grow food in urban environments. Covering everything from front yards and boulevards to rooftops and public spaces such as parks and community gardens, this talk will encourage you to look at urban agriculture as a productive adventure that helps cities and communities flourish.
Edible Native Plants
Focusing on the little-known plants that are both beautiful and edible, this talk explores the potential of native plant food production in our home gardens and community spaces, featuring unusual ornamental plants with the additional benefit of deliciousness.
Tending the Earth: Gardening for the Future
In an illustrated talk that explores gardening as an act of stewardship and earth-tending, Lorraine draws connections between our gardens and the wider world, with a focus on how our gardens can be places of ecological and social change. Using many examples of gardening projects that help communities grow and heal the earth, this talk will inspire you to dig in.
Birds, Bees, Butterflies and Beneficial Insects: Habitat Gardening for Wildlife
Our gardens come alive when visited by birds, bees, butterflies and beneficial insects. This illustrated talk provides practical information about how to create welcoming habitat that meets the full life-cycle needs of beneficial insects and other wildlife.
Shrinking the Lawn
Tired of all the maintenance your lawn requires? Interested in increasing the ecological value of your yard and community spaces for pollinators and other wildlife? This presentation explores the benefits of reducing lawn area, and instead planting low-maintenance alternative groundcovers to create beautiful landscapes that conserve water, build soil, clean the air and provide habitat.
Mix and Match: Beautiful Combinations of Native Plants
As individual specimens, native plants provide much beauty and many ecological benefits, but in luscious combinations, they can take your garden to new levels. This illustrated talk shows how you can mix and match tried-and-true performers that flourish together in natural plant communities.
What the Cluck? Keeping Backyard Hens
Sometimes considered out of place in urban backyards, hens are becoming more popular as pets with benefits. Not only do they offer delicious eggs, but they also do double-duty in pest and weed control and food-waste recycling. This illustrated talk explores the challenges and techniques of introducing hens to the home landscape.
Gardening and Wellness
For people who live in cities, gardens might be some of the only places where we connect with nature. The healing power of this connection extends to our physical bodies, and to our emotional and mental states. Beyond the personal benefits, though, is the well-being that gardens can nurture in terms of community health. In this presentation, Lorraine explores the bigger context of wellness that we can cultivate through gardens.
Rogue Gardens and the Weed Police
In this unconventional look at how and why we garden, Lorraine challenges us to consider the role of gardens in an era of ecological and social change, and how municipal grass and weeds bylaws can be reformed in order to support biodiversity. Highlighting examples of gardeners who push against neighbourhood norms—and who are often subject to bylaws and other forms of social sanction—this talk encourages us to celebrate landscape diversity and the gardeners who challenge deeply held notions of garden convention.
Small Acts with Huge Impact
There’s a lot in the news about the intersecting crises we’re facing. This presentation focuses on some of the small-scale-but-big-impact changes we can make in the landscapes we care for and in our gardening practices in order to support positive environmental and social change. This talk is about seeding joy and justice with readily do-able acts of cultivation.
This for That: Native Plant Alternatives for Beauty and Function
This illustrated talk presents native plant alternatives to the familiar flowers introduced from elsewhere that often fill our gardens. Using specific examples, Lorraine explores how we can achieve the same beauty in our landscapes but with enhanced ecological value by growing plants that provide habitat for pollinators and thrive without supplementary watering. Plant-by-plant native alternatives to introduced plants are featured.
Dig In: What Victory Gardens Can Teach Us
During World War I, the Depression and World War II, people planted food—and lots of it—in front yards, in parks, at hospital ground—everywhere! And governments promoted it for the public good. This illustrated talk explores what we can learn from this mass movement to turn our home places and community places into centres of food production so everyone benefits.
The Treasures of Carolinian Canada
Southwestern Ontario, from Lake Erie to Toronto, is home to species of plants and animals found nowhere else in Canada. It is also a highly urbanized region, its natural areas under threat. In this illustrated talk, Lorraine explores the unique features of Canada’s “Deep South,” and how you can help to preserve its special species and spaces in your home landscape and beyond.
Unsettling the Garden: A Non-Indigenous Gardener’s Reflections on Landscape, Reconciliation, and Relationship-Building
In this illustrated talk, Lorraine explores the garden in the context of reconciliation and land sovereignty, looking at the ways gardening traditions are tied to settler-colonialism, and the role of native plants and restorative land care in restitution and relationship-building.
Pocket Pollinator Patches
Creating connected patches to support pollinators is urgently needed—and easy to do!—on boulevards and other pocket places. In this illustrated talk, Lorraine explores the untapped places in our communities where we can create habitat connections and support biodiversity. Examples of inspiring projects, with details from grant writing to design, soil preparation, planting and maintenance. are featured.
3 Impossible Sites, 3 Gardens
Focusing on three public projects on “impossible” sites that present huge challenges, this presentation provides inspiration and practical tips on how to turn difficult places into flourishing habitat. You’ll come away from this presentation surprised by all that is possible when ingenuity meets opportunity, and neglect turns into care.
Gardening as Climate Action
Wondering what actions you can take to make a positive difference in the context of climate change? In this presentation, Lorraine focusses on the connections between biodiversity and the climate emergency, offering positive actions we can all take in the gardens we steward to enhance resiliency. Channel concern into action and plant for biodiversity!
Reconciling with Nature
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report emphasizes, "Reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians, from an Aboriginal perspective, also requires reconciliation with the natural world." This illustrated talk by author Lorraine Johnson explores many of the ways that native plant gardening and related practices help to restore our relationship with nature and encourage kinship with plants and wildlife.
More coming soon…
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More coming soon…
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More coming soon…
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