About

Carolyn Summers is an adjunct professor for continuing education at Westchester Community College and provides technical assistance to the Native Plant center there, and an affiliate of the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center.

She created and maintains two demonstration gardens that display indigenous plants, one at her family’s suburban home and the other at their three-hundered-acre Flying Trillium Arboretum.

She received her degree in landscape architecture from City College of New York and has more that fifteen years of experience in the environmental and landscape design field, working for nonprofit and government agencies, including the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP), the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Trust for Public Land.

Projects have ranged widely, from designing an urban wildlife refuge, to building a watershed forestry coalition, to producing a comprehensive report analyzing and critiquing the environmental programs of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan region.

Of particular relevance, while at NYCDEP, she researched and implemented a “plant indigenous only” policy, which continues in effect, for New York City’s environmental construction projects.