Heather McCargo - Bio

Heather is an educator with 40 years of expertise in plant propagation, design, and conservation. She founded the nonprofit Wild Seed Project in 2014 and served as Executive Director from 2014 to 2021. Inspired by her decades of work with native plant propagation and gardening, and a belief that a wide range of people are needed to restore our environment, she set out to create with Wild Seed Project, a grassroots movement to connect people to the seeds and skills needed to grow our region’s native plants.

Heather was the head plant propagator at the Native Plant Trust’s Garden in the Woods during the 1990s, worked in landscape architecture/planning firms specializing in ecological design, and has contributed to research projects with USAID, the National Gardening Association, Maine DOT and Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. She has lectured nationally and is widely published in journals and magazines. She was featured in 2021 in the New York Times and in Downeast magazine in 2022. Heather has a B.A. in Plant Ecology from Hampshire College, and an M.A. from the Conway School of Landscape Design.

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During her time leading Wild Seed Project, Heather authored the original content for the WSP website and blog. She created the Maine Department of Transportation native plants handbook, and was lead author of the first WSP guide, Native Trees for Northeast Landscapes. She served as the founding editor of Wild Seed magazine and launched the annual guide series in 2021. To put more native seeds into the hands of gardeners, she established WSP's flagship program distributing hand-collected native seeds, which now includes over 100 species. She now focuses her work on expanding Wild Seed Project's Native Seed Center in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and serves on the board of Wild Seed Project.

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