Symposium - It’s Green up North: Flood and drought-resilient horticulture and design in Yorkshire and beyond

Our presenters, who are generously giving their time free:

Zac Tudor is Associate Director with Arup - Service lead for Nature-Based Place Resilience

Understanding how nature can help our towns and cities become more resilient to climate change

Integrating nature-based solutions into our urban spaces can provide multiply benefits for us and nature, creating stable new urban habitats, healthy soils, adapted plant communities and sustainable maintenance strategies that provide function and beauty within the hostile challenging urban streetscapes, helping mitigate for a healthier urban climate, flood resilience, water quality benefits, biodiversity, promotes health and wellbeing. Image above: Grey to Green in Sheffield, which Zac was instrumental in setting up.

Owen Hayman - Horticulture Innovation Manager at The Green Estate CIC & Pictorial Meadows, in Sheffield.
Twenty years creating, planting and managing SuDS schemes.

An overview of The Green Estate CIC's history of creating, planting and managing SuDS schemes: Manor Fields Park, Sheffield Grey to Green, Mansfield Flood Resilience Scheme. The development of specialist SuDS soils and our green roof meadows, rooted in innovative research from the University of Sheffield Green Roof Centre.

Dean Charlton

Plants for the north of England.

Dean who trained and worked at Beth Chatto Nursery Great Dixter, and together with his father Glen, has recently opened a new perennial nursery - Hootons Walled Nursery, on the edge of Rotherham.

Elisa Olivares - Elisa Olivares is Lecturer in Planting Design at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield.

Plants for the Climate Chaos, Urban adaptation for the North of England

She is interested in designing climate-resilient plant communities for urban areas, her research has focused on testing under-used plant species that offer drought tolerance and low maintenance. She has worked in Mexico and the UK. She is currently working on the AHRC-funded project Meadows Magnified: 'Encouraging care for biodiversity through curated landscapes, community art, and citizen science. Contrary to current trends, she is also interested in developing planting mixes for higher fertility soils in public urban situations.