Topsfield's Sustainability Advisory Committee and Topsfield Town Library are proud to co-sponsor a Speaker Series focused on creating a greener, more sustainable Topsfield.

Learn about the monarch butterfly – its natural history, migration, the reasons for its decline and the many conservation efforts that are currently underway along its migration pathway. Then experience an entire season of blooms that you can plant in your own yard to help monarchs and other pollinators.

Biography: Katie Hone has been gardening for her entire adult life. She is known for the riot of native flowers she planted at her Ipswich, MA property along the Ipswich River.In 2009 Katie left her dream job working with animals at the New England Aquarium to become a fulltime mom. She worked gardening into her daughter’s lives as a way to occupy them as well as teach them about plants while getting them dirty. In 2012 she was the recipient of the US Fish and Wildlife Service's Slow the Flow Grant. This helped her transform her family's Ipswich River-front property from the traditional foundation plantings they inherited from the former owners into a haven for wildlife, while also minimizing storm runoff into the river. When she added native milkweeds to the gardens she found monarch butterfly eggs on it and began raising them with her young girls. This spawned her love of monarchs and pollinator host plants.

Now Katie brings her knowledge of monarch butterflies and pollinator gardens to schools, garden clubs and community groups and encourages landowners and municipalities to plant milkweed and native plants. When she is not educating she’s exploring the Ipswich area with her family as well as working her dream job: running a small native plant nursery growing over 100 species of native New England perennials and shrubs. From May through September she sells these plants from her nursery, The Monarch Gardener, at Nutter Farm in Topsfield, MA.