COMING EVENTS:

Your Yard, Your Impact:

Landscaping as a Tool for Florida’s Ecological Recovery

Registration opens January 6, 2026

📅 Tuesday, January 27, 2025 | ⏰ 6:00 p.m.
📍 Casa Feliz Historic Home Museum
Attendance limited: Registration opens January 6

Event Description

Our January 27 Parlor Series explores how thoughtful landscaping can become a powerful tool for Florida’s ecological recovery. Titled Landscaping as a Tool for Florida’s Ecological Recovery – Your Yard, Your Impact, the evening brings together two leading voices in sustainable design. Christina “Chris” Hite, FASLA, LEED AP—founding partner of Dix.Hite + Partners—will set the stage by examining the environmental challenges facing Florida and how meaningful change can begin right in our own backyards, drawing on her nationally recognized work that celebrates native ecologies, regional character, and quality of life. She is joined by Stephen Pategas, Winter Park landscape architect, garden writer, and longtime civic leader, who will translate these ideas into practical, attainable solutions, sharing eco-friendly landscape strategies and projects created by his firm, Hortus Oasis. Together, Hite and Pategas offer an inspiring and actionable conversation about how individual choices can collectively shape a more resilient future for Florida’s landscapes.  

ABOUT OUR PRESENTERS:

Chris Hite
Christina (Chris) Hite, FASLA, LEED AP is a Founding Partner at Dix.Hite + Partners, bringing more than 35 years of extensive experience in a holistic landscape architecture practice for both public and private clients. As Chairman of the Board and consulting principal, Chris has helped define Dix.Hite as a firm with a national reputation for excellence. Chris received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Georgia in 1987, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Florida in 2012.  Chris has led and designed a wide range of projects, ranging from parks and multi-model transportation projects to the design of residential spaces, with an emphasis on placemaking for communities. She fosters the advance and influence of the landscape architecture profession through leadership in design, practice, academic, and community service, and is the current President of the OUTSIDE Collaborative, working to shift the landscape paradigm with research, policy, culture, and industry through collaboration to position landscapes as a vital solution to sustainability. She was recognized for her excellence in leadership and management by her peers nationally and elevated to Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Stephen Pategas
Stephen Pategas is a landscape architect, garden writer, garden photographer, and plant geek in Winter Park, FL. Stephen currently serves as a volunteer AIB judge and board member, on the City of Winter Park’s Keep Winter Park Beautiful & Sustainable Advisory Board and with it founded Winter Park Blooms. Winter Park has participated in the AIB National Awards Program since 2013. Previously he served on Winter Park advisory boards including the Tree Preservation Board, the Parks and Recreation Board, Environmental Review Board, and non-profit Casa Feliz Historic Home & Museum Board. His travels have taken him to hundreds of gardens in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Stephen’s favorite gardens to design are those that touch people’s lives.

Generously sponsored by: