Date: November 1, 2025
Time: 10am - 3pm
Location: Sellwood area. Exact location will be provided to enrolled students.

Tier A Pricing: $197 ($84k per year or above)
Tier B Pricing: $147 ($42k-$83k per year)
Tier C Pricing: $97 ($41k per year or below)
See our Pricing Policy for more information on tiered pricing.

Choose the price that feels good, fair, and right to you, given your level of resources. See our Pricing Policy for more help in choosing.

PUGS is about both learning and community. Register with a friend and get 25% off with the code YOUVEGOTAFRIEND

Space limited to 20 students.

In this one-day course, we explore how to become advocates for trees by learning to see them more wholly—as living beings that connect us to ecology, to each other, and to ourselves. Through practical instruction rooted in an animist perspective, we’ll cover everything from species selection to the ecological role of snags, offering a more relational approach to tree care.

As land stewardship planners and arborists, we encounter tree-related issues daily—many of them humanmade and easily preventable.

This course invites participants of all experience levels to deepen their understanding of our tree kin and to reimagine how and why we care for them.

Part 1 / Morning: Meeting Our Tree Neighbors

We begin with a short walk to meet the trees in our midst, practicing botanical identification and tree diagnostics. Using plant pattern language, we’ll learn to recognize common native and introduced species, while sharpening our observational skills around tree health.

Part 2 / Afternoon: Supporting Tree Communities

How can we actively care for and protect tree communities? In this session, we’ll explore species selection with climate adaptation in mind, along with practical approaches to planting, pruning, and understanding tree biology across the life cycle. We’ll learn about innovative tools and techniques ecological arborists are using to retain and revitalize older trees.

We’ll also dive into specific, actionable steps we can take—whether we're stewarding trees on private land or advocating for them in public spaces. After all, we are all part of one ecology.

Mulysa Melco (she/they) is a landscape designer and horticulturist, bringing over 30 years of experience to Resilience Design, her residential design and land stewardship planning company. Mulysa also teaches design and ecology courses at Clackamas Community College and through Rewild Portland. She grew up in a garden on the edge where tall grass prairie meets oak savannah, Mni Sóta, Twin Cities. Since moving to unceded Chinook territory in 2005, she makes yearly pilgrimages to cascade alpine meadows and is currently deepening her knowledge of graminoids, lichens, mosses and other slow movers.

Paola Smith (they/them) is the landcare lead and offers design support for Resilience Design and is an arborist for Prunus. Born in unceded Quinnipiac territory, so-called Connecticut Paola journeyed + farmed down the eastern seaboard to the midatlantic, across this giant landmass to California where they learned about slow food, kale, and meyer lemons, to present day Oregon where they have become enamoured with the wild west. They have worked in agriculture, food justice, print + design, landscaping and as an arborist. They are a dedicated learner that just cannot stop listening to the trees and talking about it.