PlantFest is our annual fall celebration of plants and people, held at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City. This year’s Speaker Event, Fall Color and Winter Wonders: Designing, Planting and Pruning a Four Season Garden, features three 15-minute presentations exploring ways to create gardens with beauty, structure, and resilience for the seasons ahead.
The day features inspiring guest speakers, a curated plant sale, food trucks, and door prizes, bringing gardeners together to learn, connect, and head home with something special—maybe more than one!
PHOTO CREDIT: STAFF
PHOTO CREDIT: STAFF
Event Details
Saturday, September 26th,
10:00AM – 2:30PM
(Doors open for speaker event at 9:30AM)
Clackamas Community College, Gregory Forum,
19600 Molalla Ave, Oregon City, OR 97045
Plant sale opens at 11:30AM and is free and open to the public.
Food and drink carts Blazing Taco and Where’s Coffee Girl will be there to keep you fueled while you shop.
Scroll down to read about our amazing PlantFest speakers and vendors!
PlantFest 2026 Speakers:
Bob Hyland
Plant-Festive Containers for Fall and Winter
Slide into fall and winter with containers that add color, texture, and pizzazz to outdoor garden spaces. Celebrate and relieve Oregon’s four months of short days, gloom, and moisture with pots of small trees, shrubs, and perennial companions that really zing. Containers are moveable gardens and help to bring the garden closer to warm, cozy inside living areas in anticipation of next spring and a new garden year.
Bio:
Bob Hyland is a longtime container guru, garden designer, and plantsman (and a former vice president of HPSO). His shop Contained Exuberance in southeast Portland closed in 2023, but in his semi-retirement Bob continues to design gardens and containers for a few residential and restaurant clients. He is an advocate for public gardens, parks, and open spaces and is the current board president of Leach Botanical Garden.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BOB HYLAND
PHOTO COURTESY OF BRETT ROUSSEAU
Brett Rousseau
Structure pruning young trees: Why, how, when, and where — The importance of proactively pruning young trees to encourage good structure and longevity
Much of the pruning that arborists perform in the field is a reaction – however, structure pruning offers a proactive pruning approach to set up a young tree for success and minimize the likelihood of future failures. Brett will share basic principles on how, when, and where to structure prune, along with highlighting some major red flags that occur when trees don’t receive their first prune until many years after planting.
Bio:
Brett Rousseau is an ISA certified arborist, artist, and a native plant enthusiast. She works at Hoyt Arboretum raising the next generation of young trees in the collection. She is a freelance arborist, pruning trees in the Portland area, and a landscape designer with a passion to increase the amount of tree canopy and native plant habitat in our yards.
Mulysa Melco
Native Plants and the Fall and Winter Garden
Colorful bark, berries, conifers and evergreen structure are highlights of the native fall and winter garden. We’ll talk about design principles and practices for year round beauty as well as creating high habitat value for overwinter birds and wildlife. And we’ll consider a few native species in the context of their ecological communities, culture and history.
Bio:
Mulysa Melco M. Ag. (she/they) is an ecological landscape designer, horticulturist, and artist with a lifelong passion for plants and ecology. Her business, Resilience Design, offers land stewardship planning for urban and rural spaces that foster reconnection with our watersheds and seasonal cycles through collaborations that engage, inspire, and honor the land. Mulysa teaches botany, ecology and design courses with Clackamas Community College and Rewild Portland.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MULYSA MELCO
2026 VENDOR LINEUP
PlantFest 2026 Vendors
NURSERIES, GARDEN GOODS & GROWING COMMUNITY
Alpine Gardens | A Plethora of Primula | Arbutus Garden Arts | Bearly Farms | Black Dog Garden & Nursery | Clackamas Community College Student Growers & Artists | Green Seed Gardens | Illahe Rare Plants | Kindred Sprouts Nursery | Kiona Native Plants | Lux Perennials Nursery | Matsu Gardens | N&M Nursery | One Green World | Oregon Daffodil Society | Out In The Garden Nursery | Rancho Cacto Nursery + Design | Rarity Gardens Peonies | Van Hevelingen Herb Nursery | Wild Wisdom Wool Pellet Co.
Come Hungry!
Food and drink carts Where's Coffee Girl and Blazing Taco will be there to keep you fueled while you shop. Where's Coffee Girl offers specialty coffee drinks and baked goods and Blazing Taco offers tacos, burritos, and more.