Jenna Bachman

Jenna Bachman is a horticulturist and landscape designer who specializes in ecological gardening with native woody and herbaceous plants. She is currently the Gardens & Grounds Manager at Awbury Arboretum in Philadelphia, where she stewards and develops the tree collection and overall landscape. Jenna has a background in environmental science and is a graduate of Longwood Garden’s Professional Horticulture Program. Before Awbury Arboretum, she spent time as a horticulturist and designer at Andalusia Gardens & Arboretum, Terrain, and Montrose Garden. Jenna enjoys sharing her knowledge and experience through teaching and hands-on community engagement.

Jenna Bachman will be presenting in Gardener’s Voices: Collecting a Canopy’s Story: Awbury Arboretum’s Tree Assessment.

Melissa Finley

Melissa Finley is the Thain Senior Curator of Woody Plants and Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden Curator at the New York Botanical Garden. Her work focuses on development of the Garden’s woody collections, tree risk management, and plant science communication. She holds a master’s degree in plant pathology from The Pennsylvania State University, where she researched the ability of Erwinia amylovora, the causal agent of fire blight, to parasitize apple fruit tissues. She is an International Society of Arboriculture certified arborist and a qualified tree risk assessor. She is a passionate student of all things tree physiology, biomechanics, and pathology. 

Melissa Finely will be presenting  Managing Decay Fungi in Mature Trees.

Eliza Greenman

Eliza Greenman works at the intersection of agriculture, forestry, and cultural history, with a focus on perennial tree crops and land use systems in the United States. Her work explores how historically important  species have shaped food systems and rural landscapes, and how those relationships have been altered or lost through time.

At the Savanna Institute, Eliza focuses on commercialization and applied research that supports farmers, land managers, and communities working to integrate trees and perennial crops into working landscapes. She works closely with the Tree Crop Improvement Program to assemble foundational germplasm that supports breeding goals and the long term viability of emerging tree crops. Her work centers on commercializing valuable species for agroforestry while also upholding and telling the deeper histories of these plants and the people who have long stewarded them.

Eliza Greenman will be presenting Forgotten Fruits and Fencerows: How the American Persimmon and Osage Orange Shaped and Slipped from History.

Patrick McGinty

Patrick McGinty is a landscape designer and the Garden Manager at Stoneleigh: a natural garden in Villanova, the 42-acre public garden of the conservation nonprofit Natural Lands. Patrick leads Stoneleigh’s horticulture team in the continued transformation of a former private estate into an innovative landscape highlighting the beauty and diversity of native plants. Patrick previously owned and operated Leo Garden Design, an ecological landscape design and management firm in Philadelphia, from 2020 to 2024. Prior to that, he managed Denis Lucey Garden Design and served as a gardener for a season at Wave Hill in New York. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and has completed coursework at Longwood Gardens and New York Botanical Garden. He serves on the Natural Lands Culture Team and on the landscape committee of Stenton, a member site of Historic Germantown.

Patrick McGinty will be presenting Gardener’s Voices: Cultivating Resilience: Stoneleigh’s Plants and Strategies for a Changing Climate.

Kevin Parris

Kevin Parris, Ph.D., is an Instructor of Horticulture, and the Arboretum Director at Spartanburg Community College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In 2008, as a non-traditional graduate student at Clemson University, Kevin jumped into breeding magnolias under the direction of Dr. Tom Ranney at North Carolina State University, and later studied the morphological and genetic variation of new interspecific hybrids under the direction of Dr. Donglin Zhang at the University of Georgia. Kevin serves on the board of the Magnolia Society International,  IPPS-Southern Region, and The Noble Tree Foundation. When he’s not teaching or tinkering with magnolias, Kevin can usually be found on a pickleball court. 

Kevin Parris will be presenting Math, Magnolias, and Magic.

Kevin Philip Williams

Kevin Philip Williams is a naturalistic gardener whose work merges living and nonliving materials to create dynamic worlds. Drawing on bioregional plant palettes, a hardcore punk ethos, and post-human aesthetics, he creates wild, immersive landscapes that challenge conventional ideas of beauty, order, and permanence. He is the Manager of Horticulture at Denver Botanic Gardens, where he stewards the Steppe Garden, Conservation Garden, Lilac Collection, Dwarf Conifer Collection, the Josephine Streetscape, and the Willow Glade in Celebration of Brandon Mandelbaum.

His work with Denver Botanic Gardens has also shaped notable public landscapes across Denver, including SummerHome Garden, the Denver Art Museum Sensory Garden, and Alien Dream Worlds at Meow Wolf Convergence Station. Previously, Kevin was a gardener on the High Line in Manhattan and a horticulture intern at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He holds an MS in Public Horticulture from the Longwood Graduate Program at the University of Delaware and a BA in the History and Philosophy of Science from Bard College. He is the coauthor of Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands (Filbert Press).

Kevin Philip Williams will be presenting The Danse Macabre: Gardening with Death, Decay, and What Remains.

Call for Presentations

The Woody Plant Conference Committee invites expert speakers to present at the 2027 Woody Plant Conference on Friday, July 16, 2027.

We are seeking dynamic, experienced, and diverse speakers to deliver engaging and informative presentations on topics related to woody plants that thrive in the Mid-Atlantic region.