Harvesting Heritage: Third Annual Crab Crack

Born and raised in North Charleston, Amethyst Ganaway has been featured in the New York Times, Food & Wine, Garden & Gun and more. Specializing in Southern and African American foodways and the foodways of the African Diaspora, Ganaway also recently headlined the Charleston Wine + Food Festival. She uses her position as a chef and food writer to tell the stories of the region’s history, culture, art, cuisine, and environment. 

Michael P. Gibson is a topiary artist, educator, and creator of the Gibson Method, a contemporary approach to creative pruning that transforms plants into living sculpture. With more than 30 years of horticultural experience and over 700 living sculptures created across the United States, he is recognized as one of the nation's leading voices in contemporary topiary. Through lectures, workshops, demonstrations, and public art installations, Gibson explores the intersection of horticulture, art, storytelling, and wellness, inspiring audiences to see plants as a medium for creativity and connection. His work has been featured by The New York Times, Southern Living, HGTV, and NPR, and he is the recipient of the inaugural U.S. Botanic Garden and IDEA Center Sowing Excellence Award and the American Public Gardens Association Garden Scholar Award. Today, Gibson continues to advance the art of topiary by helping people see the creative potential of plants in new and unexpected ways.

He's also taken on the responsibility of preserving the topiaries in front of the Museum, work that was done by the legendary Pearl Fryar. 

Dr. Lisa O. Kershaw is an herbalist, farmer, educator, and small business owner with more than 30 years of experience in education and sustainable agriculture. A National Board-Certified Exceptional Needs Specialist, she has served as a District Teacher of the Year, South Carolina State Teacher of the Year finalist, and South Carolina Department of Education State Consultant for Autism Spectrum Disorders. She is a national speaker and published author on behavior and autism.

As owner of Joyful Souls Heirloom Nursery, Dr. Kershaw combines her passion for growing food with community education, teaching people how to cultivate healthy food in any space. She has helped establish or revitalize seven school and community gardens and has provided sustainable growing education to more than 500 students through her Sow & Grow Sustainable Growing Education Program. Certified in Horticulture Therapy, she also manages The Bee Suites apiary and co-founded the GROW (Growing for Resiliency, Opportunity, and Wellness) Farm in Columbia, South Carolina, promoting food sovereignty, nutrition, mental wellness, and agricultural education.

Christina Smith-Galloway is the daughter of land stewards, farmers, and educators from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. After more than twenty years of working in education, she returned to the land in 2018. Since then, she has participated in herbal immersion and seed saving programming, field-based beekeeping training, horticultural work for plant nurseries, horticultural therapy training, and provided screen printing, natural dye, and garden education and outreach for organizations, schools, and farms. In addition to stewarding her own backyard garden and serving as a newly Braiding Seeds Fellowship recipient, Christina currently stewards land in the Historic Waverly Community of Columbia, SC at the Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center where she is transforming a small asphalt lot of the center to a community gathering of seeds, trees, plants and stories of communities across SC through her pass-along nursery project “Porch Sittin’ with Kinfolk." 

Her work stresses the importance and relationship of land, heirloom seeds, local trees and plant species to one another and to their wider ecosystems, to include the people who have tended and harvested from them for generations. 

Will Green is a Columbia native. A nearly two-decade veteran of the bar industry, he is part owner in two Columbia institutions: WECO Bottle and Biergarten and The Hoot. He also works as a bar/restaurant consultant.