BIPOC Hort members are horticulturists from the African American, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, and African communities. We work independently and as garden staff in North America. Our members are garden directors, soil scientists, academic researchers, zone gardeners, and other professionals in horticulture and related plant fields.
Emmanuel Akintayo
Emmanuel Akintayo is Senior Horticulturist at a private estate in South Kent, Connecticut. He is from the Yoruba nation, born in Ibadan, Nigeria. Emmanuel has a BA in Agricultural Science from the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta (Nigeria) where he emerged as the best graduating student of his year. He is also a graduate of the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. Prior to moving to the USA for his tertiary studies in horticulture, Emmanuel was cooperative leader at a World Bank assisted project in collaboration with Lagos State Ministry of Agriculture where he supervised the installation and maintenance of AMIRAN Farmers Kits - greenhouses built specifically for tropical climates. In his work in Nigeria, Emmanuel also supervised open-field agricultural operations and collaborated with Israeli agricultural teams to eradicate bacteria wilt in large scale tomato plantations. Currently, Emmanuel is at work with the US Army National Guard and will return to his horticultural pursuits after his deployment. He is the proud new to his beautiful daughter Tirenioluwa. Emmanuel is one of our first members here at BIPOC Hort. He forms part of our bulwark.
Christopher Bivens
Christopher Bivens is a Gardener at Wave Hill Public Gardens. Christopher received a BFA in Painting and was a John Nally Intern at Wave Hill Public Gardens in 2017. Christopher currently lives in New York City, where he often daydreams of cactus, what’s for dinner, and world peace.
Makale Cullen
Makalé is a Gardener with the Trust for Governors Island, a 172-acre island in the New York Harbor where she tends the Island’s formal ornamental garden. Interested in plant-soil communication, Makalé was a recent fellow with the Urban Soils Institute. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she spent 20 years documenting the cultural stewards of landscapes and producers of regional foods and goods. She equally at-ease learning lessons from soil monoliths and fuerte avocados as she is learning from Cape Verdean cranberry bog harvesters in Cape Cod, Navajo Churro shepherds in Arizona and neon-light benders and Orthodox bra fitters in NYC. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia (MA) and George Mason University (BA) and a Certificate in Horticulture from the New York Botanical Garden. She is a contributing author to four books and several articles on material culture. Makalé maintains the soukouss fêtes and warm hospitality of her childhood from her home in New York City, where her husband and son keep her close to all that is fun and funny.
Terry Huang
Terry is your friendly neighborhood garden coach. From helpful tips to encouragement, he loves finding creative ways to make plant science and gardening knowledge fun and accessible. Like taking the concept of “pollination syndrome” and turning it into a one-man comedy show called Fifty Shades of Green, which he has performed at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and Filoli. By working in the intersection of botany, horticulture, education, and design, he hopes to inspire others to cherish and protect our natural world.
Terry holds a BS in Plant Biology from the University of Washington and a MSc in Biodiversity and Taxonomy of Plants from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He now lives in Los Angeles where he is the Assistant Director of UCLA’s Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden.
Abra Lee
Abra Lee is a national speaker, writer, and owner of Conquer the Soil a platform that combines history and current events to raise cultural awareness of horticulture. She has spent a whole lotta time in the dirt as an airport beautification manager, municipal arborist, extension agent, and more! Lee is a self-taught scholar of Black garden history, graduate of Auburn University College of Agriculture, and alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows, a global network of public horticulture professionals.
Tracy Qiu
Tracy’s interest in gardening started early with a “multi-sensorial” approach to learning about plants, which is a fancy way of saying she liked to put them in her mouth. After getting a “taste” of gardening, Tracy’s interest in horticulture and botany grew, despite never considering a career in the field. This changed during her horticultural apprenticeship at the Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, where she began observing who did and didn’t engage with botanical gardens. These questions about representation, access, and inclusion, started her on a whirlwind path of garden visits, internships, conference presentations, and applied research that culminated in her master’s thesis on racial diversity in public garden leadership at the University of Delaware, supported by Longwood Gardens and the Longwood Graduate Program.
Presently, Tracy is a PhD student in the INDI Graduate Program at Concordia: a doctoral program for interdisciplinary researches studying two or more fields. Her dissertation on botanical gardens combines the fields of sociology, environmental studies, critical museology, and postcolonial/decolonial debates. A recipient of the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, she aims to create critical and collaborative research with practical applications for the field of botanical gardens.
Kateri Savory
Kateri was born in Guyana immersed in multi cultures, religions, race, and environments. The collective diverse experience is the cornerstone for the person she is today. After moving to the US in 2008 and exploring different fields, Kateri found a way to reconnect with nature through Horticulture and has a certificate in Gardening from the New York Botanical Garden. She is a Project Manager of private and government contracts involving invasive species management, tree planting, urban forestry inventories, tree risk assessment, and tree planting. She is an ISA Certified Arborist and is ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified with over 10 years of management and leadership experience.
Kateri also spends time project managing for small business start ups in the BIPOC community and serving as the admin to Our Local Network, a networking group aimed at supporting startups. Her free time is spent with family and friends enjoying nature within and surrounding the city.
Harnek Singh
Harnek developed a passion for plants during his teenage years and started gardening as a hobby in his native India. It was after moving to New York City, when he learned that gardening could be a rewarding, fulfilling career and pursued a certification in Horticulture from NYBG. Harnek currently works as a Gardener at a Public Garden in New York City.
Harnek strives to improve his skills as a gardener everyday by taking on new garden projects. His love for learning from ohters and sharing his experiecnes has given him an opportunity to work as a guest gardener in multiple gardens in the US, England and Japan.
Harnek has taught in Public School and received a Masters in Arts and a Bachelor in Education from Punjabi University, Patiala. During his free time, he loves to travel, visit gardens, grow vegetables, and cook.
Toshi Yano
Meet Toshi Yano, the Managing Director of Earth Equity at The Perfect Earth Project, and co-founder of BIPOC Hort. Before earning a degree in Ornamental Horticulture from the City University of New York and embarking on his gardening career at Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring, NY, Toshi studied philosophy at The New School for Social Research and for two decades thereafter was a Dabbler in Many Things, working in various capacities in music, film, food, retail, and supply chain management.
Toshi is a Director at Large at the American Public Gardens Association and co-chair of their Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility Committee; the Landscape & Horticulture Advisor at Wethersfield Estate & Gardens in Amenia, NY; and a member of the Design Council at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
He enjoys spending his spare time searching the woods around his home for the smallest, most secret plants, and is the proud father of an 12-year old girl who helps him find the especially small, especially secret plants that elude his aging eyes. He is forever grateful to his grandmothers for the deeply etched memories of dappled light, dirt under foot, and the dizzying perfume of Rosaceae in the air.
Brittany “Carson” Carson
Carson became interested in horticulture by working in community gardens and fell in love with learning about herbal and medicinal plants as a child. During her masters studies at North Carolina State University and bachelors at an HBCU called North Carolina Central University she learned more about the art and science of horticulture and was inspired by how it aligned with her passions and quickly began to pursue this path professionally. She just finished two amazing internships at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kauai and Maui where she did biocultural conservation horticulture with native rare and endangered plants and at Chanticleer garden in Wayne, PA where she learned about naturalistic gardening in an ornamental pleasure garden. She hopes to continue to find creative ways to incorporate the intersectionalities of her various interests into the art and science of horticulture throughout her future work and career. She recently accepted the 2021 bibliography fellowship at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville, Virginia where she will do research exploring the roles that indigenous knowledge and sense of place theory play in horticulture. Outside of horticulture she loves to do ceramics and is currently into making vases.
Perla Sofía Curbelo-Santiago
Founder of Agrochic.com, a website in Spanish about gardening and wellness. Perla is a professional communicator with a long experience in radio, television, and newspapers in Puerto Rico. Currently, produces her weekly podcast La verdura de hoy. Majored in Psychology, from the University of Puerto Rico, and holds a master's degree, in Public Relations, from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, also in Puerto Rico. She´s Certified in Horticulture Therapy (2019) from the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Perla is a natural connector, educator, and speaker for corporate and general audiences. Is an active member of Garden Communicators International, the American Horticultural Therapy Association and the BIPOC Hort Group. Also, collaborates with the Spanish Association of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture (AEJHST).
Besides Spanish and English, she speaks fluent Italian. Love botanic gardens, The Secret Garden theme, reading, Netflix, baking, and the Fall season.
Sonya Harris
In 2017 Sonya established the nonprofit The Bullock Garden Project, Inc. The role of this nonprofit is to aid schools and community organizations serving large populations of children/youth who are at-risk, receiving special education services, and/or low-income and food insecurity with building and implementing gardens to not only teach across the curriculum but to also inspire careers as future green industry leaders. She has won several awards, including the most recent awards: South Jersey Magazine’s One to Watch, New Jersey Agricultural Society’s Learning Through Gardening Teacher of the Year, and Project Green Schools Outstanding Green Education Program Director.
Sonya has traveled throughout the United States presenting and sharing the many ways gardening can improve the academic, mental, and physical benefits for children.
She loves spending time gardening at home, sharing the joy of gardening with others, and fighting against food apartheid in marginalized communities. Sonya is a Rutgers Certified Master Gardener, Sustainable Jersey Green Team Leader in Glassboro, NJ (helping increase sustainability awareness and Green initiatives), serves as the Educational Director for nonprofit The Sacred Seeds, Inc., founding member of the Cooperative Garden Commission, Educational Director for Great Garden Web Share, is a contributing writer and editor for The Spruce (TheSpruce.com), and partners with many schools, organizations, green industry leaders, and companies across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Ghana, and South Africa, to bring garden education and the power of growing food into the hands of historically marginalized communities. She has also partnered with Regions 2 and 3 of the EPA and Rowan University to create opportunites to help eradicate food apartheid.
Wambui Ippolito
Wambui Ippolito is the founder of the BIPOC Hort Group . She was born in East Africa and is a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture.
After her tertiary education and international career, Wambui realized that her greatest lessons come from the indigenous knowledge learned in her matrilineal clan, where women work to help other women succeed. She formed BIPOC Hort to amplify the voices of people of color working in ornamental horticulture and encourages them to explore their indigenous memories and cultural traditions for insights on how to work harmoniously together and be conscious land stewards. It is Wambui’s view that many BIPOC arrive into dominant horticulture modalities fully formed but due to the historical and present-day non-inclusivity of these structures, BIPOC are forced to set aside their indigenous or cultural acumen in order to fit into these structures that don’t integrate their aboriginal knowledge. Using templates learned in her maternal clan, she structured BIPOC Hort to allow for synergistic exchange, a clear communal goal and the respect of members’ individual knowledge - be it cultural, tribal, ‘hood knowledge, street wit or Western canon.
Wambui is a horticulturist, designer, former Democracy consultant and international development strategist. A well-respected expert in her former career, Wambui has worked with world leaders, prisoners of war, refugee organizations and indiginous women’s groups around the world. She is a polymath who speaks 5 languages and 1 dialect. In addition to her work, Wambui supports widows and their children in the port city of Mombasa by paying for school fees, housing and food.
Merissa MacDonald
Merissa is grateful to her parents Greg and Donnette for nurturing her eclectic taste and ever-changing hobbies. From her Jamaican mother a love of fashion, fresh food cooked in traditional ways, and agriculture. From her father, a love of jazz, art, and a deep respect for horticulture. She relishes in the sensory overload of sounds, smells, tastes, textures and colors.
Raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, she attended Chestnut Hill College to study French and Russian, as well as Art and Politics. Not sure where these studies would take her she was drawn to studying art, art history, and the Great Gardens of France. But more than anything she fell in love with the food, obtaining a job at a highly-esteemed and local french restaurant that was known for uplifting the “locavore” movement. As time went on, appreciation of the food became an appreciation of the source. Studying on her own and taking herbalism courses, she decided that the garden is where she belonged.
Merissa currently works at Bartram’s Garden, America’s first Botanical Garden, developing the wilderness garden and maintaining the Bartrams’s Living Collection of plants collected from Canada down to Florida. She is also a student at The Barnes Arboretum to obtain a Certificate in Horticulture. She spends time volunteering as a TreeTender through the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society as well as smaller organizations that advocate for workers’ rights, environmental justice, and land and food sovereignty. Merissa believes the concept of mutual aid can and should be utilized in the world of horticulture. Edna Lewis, Anne Spencer, Milford Graves, and Zora Neale Hurston are only a few of her role models and inspiration.
She currently lives with her husband and children in the Harrowgate neighborhood of Philadelphia with hopes to rejuvenate some empty lots.
Georgia SILVERA SEAMANS
Georgia is an urban and community forester and has field experience in New Haven, Boston, Oakland, and NYC. Her passion is investigating plant-people relationships and has two articles about this topic in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening and Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. She also writes about urban birds—find her bylines at Audubon and Popular Science. Georgia is the founder of Local Nature Lab, and has directed its environmental initiative Washington Square Park Eco Projects since 2014.
Jenn Yang
Jenn Yang works at Wellesley College Botanic Gardens, a public educational garden with 22-acres of outdoor gardens plus greenhouses on a college campus. Starting in Aug 2021 she will take on a new role as associate director. Currently, Jenn supports teaching, research, and student programs at Wellesley, on a range of botanical topics, but her strongest connection with plants is through food. Jenn enjoys leading tours of the Edible Ecosystem Teaching Garden, a diverse food forest for foraging, gathering, and community building around plants.
Jenn enjoys plants which remind her of home in different ways, from the wintergreens and birch forests of New Hampshire, to wax apples and starfruit trees of Taiwan.
She is an alumna of Wellesley College, and has a plant biology degree from Penn State, where she has fond memories of working in the bountiful community gardens.