2025 Speakers
No event on the Southern gardening calendar attracts a more extensive roster of recognized experts to historic settings quite like the Southern Garden Symposium.
BARBARA SULLIVAN
Barbara joins the Symposium from Wilmington, N.C. She is the author of two books: Garden Perennials for the Coastal South and Climate Change Gardening for the South.Barbara Sullivan is a lawyer, mediator, supporter and often leader of several Wilmington-area nonprofits and worthy causes. She may be best known, though, as an outstanding amateur gardener who for years had a regular segment on public radio station WHQR. Her backyard garden in downtown Wilmington's Historic District has been a point of pilgrimage for garden clubs and plant fanciers.
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MARGARET ZAINEY ROUX
For more than 20 years, Margaret has been bringing beauty to the pages of some of the country’s most notable luxury shelter and lifestyle publications including Traditional Home, Southern Home, Flower, and Luxe magazines. She brings readers from the gardens to the glossy pages of magzines!
As a contributing writer and stylist, she partners with editors, designers, and tastemakers to tell captivating stories and create picture-perfect photos that inspire and engage readers who share her passion for interior design and architecture, entertaining, art, fashion, and travel.
Although she is based in New Orleans, Margaret frequently travels the country to direct and produce photo shoots, select props, and create tablescapes and floral arrangements that complement the vision of the interior designers and editors who entrust her with their projects and her own Uptown home has been published in New Orleans Homes and Lifestyles and Southern Home magazines. Recently, Margaret launched “Prop Shop,” a series of pop-up sales offering antique, vintage, and contemporary art and décor sourced locally and abroad.
TAMMANY BAUMGARTEN
Baum Gardens
Tammany is heavily involved with horticultural and ecological organizations in Louisiana and continues to study landscape diversity and ecological function in order to apply those principles to her gardens. What started and continues today as a love of all plants in all of their diversity and beauty, became a love of cottage gardening and growing plants from seed, and then an appreciation for pollinators and butterfly gardening and then the overall and ultimate respect for the role that privately owned gardens play in the ecological health of place and planet. Tammany has a keen interest in creating habitat and is an intense native gardening advocate but applies these principles with a practicality suited to the needs of each client and space.
JESS COLE
Jess Cole owns Sweet Fern Native plants, a plant nursery + design and consultation company specializing in plants native to the south east. A Louisiana native, Jess grew up gardening by her grandmother's side and roaming the poplar/magnolia woods that her family calls home. Her connection to the natural world has been strong since her early years.
A naturalist and designer, she has 15 years of experience within the landscape industry. She is heavily influenced by her time at LSU in the horticulture department, as well as the fine arts department where she received a bachelor’s in ceramics. Jess is the contributing writer for the Country Roads Magazine column "Our Sustainable Garden". She is co-founder of The Louisiana Wild Society, a non profit initiative dedicated to education and empowering our community to delve into a deeper relationship with the natural world. She formerly served on the Parks and Parkways board for the city of Mandeville. She is constantly seeking new horticultural knowledge, as well as refining old horticultural practices and exploring new design approaches.
In her free time she enjoys tending to her personal gardens, cooking with seasonal veggies, fishing, romping through the woods and canoeing through the swamps with her son.
MARY COX BROWN
Marigold Designs- Birmingham, AL
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FELICIANA FLOWER FARMERS
A Little Wildflower Co.
Starhill Blooms
Wild and Blooming Farms