About Our Speakers

Kara Maynard, Owner

Kara Maynard started her life as a lover of the outdoors and wild spaces. All through her childhood, she felt a responsibility to be a good steward of the earth. This generally meant picking up trash and encouraging her family to recycle. During her time in the US Navy, Kara’s shipmates would tease her about the amount of recycling she would constantly be shuttling from the ship to the local recycling facility in her great-grandparents’ old station wagon. After college (where she majored in Classical Humanities), she found a love for gardening. It was around this time that Kara started thinking about sustainable gardening practices and found the book The Landscaping Revolution: Garden With Mother Nature, Not Against Her by Andy and Sally Wasowski at the local library. This set her on the course to start gardening with native plants and creating a habitat in her own backyard. For over 16 years, she has been utilizing native plants in her gardenscapes, bringing nature home, and sharing her passion for native plants with everyone she meets.

Kara is the owner of Deeply Rooted Landscapes, a native plant nursery and design firm focused solely on utilizing native plants for habitat creation. Deeply Rooted Landscapes was founded in 2019 as a one-woman operation and has grown to a team of 11 offering services such as consultations, garden design, installation, garden maintenance, invasive plants removal, educational workshops/talks, and a fully stocked native nursery center open by appointment only in Tipp City, Ohio.

Courtney Denning

Courtney Denning has been interested in nature and studying wildlife since childhood. She started bird watching at her local nature center in junior high and continued her college natural studies with a plant ecology major at Ohio University. She has worked as an environmental educator, social media manager, and library program manager. Before working at Deeply Rooted Landscapes, she worked at the Piqua Public Library, where she started the Piqua Seed Library. Since beginning work at DRL in June 2022, she has been creating garden designs, doing consultations, and managing the social media accounts and website. She has been creating native plant gardens at her home since 2016. She doesn’t have a lot of space, but in less than ¼ acre, she is growing 200 native Ohio plants.