Wednesday, April 9, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm Eastern – What We Sow in Cultivated Places, Online

Jennifer Jewell, Creator and Host of Cultivating Places, will present a free Grow Native Massachusetts webinar on April 9 at 7 pm as part of Grow Native’s Evenings with Experts series. Gardeners are powerful agents of change; the landscapes we steward can impact climate change, habitat loss, and more. Jennifer Jewell will explore this power through the lens of the ecology, cultural history, and industry surrounding seeds, a story that holds both cautionary tales and guiding lights as we seek to effect positive change. https://grownativemass.org/Our-Programs/calendar

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Tuesday, April 8, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm GMT – The Swimming Pool Garden, Online and Recorded

Christopher Woodward explores the history of swimming pools as features in the design of private gardens from the 17th-century until 1939. This Garden Museum program will be livestreamed on April 8 at 7 pm – 8 pm Greenwich Mean Time, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what that means in your time zone, but you will be able to access the talk after the event with a link which will be sent to registrants. The cost of the livestream is £10. Buy your ticket at https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/product/livestream-christophers-lecture-08-04-25/.

In this talk, Christopher Woodward will begin by discussing candidates for the earliest swimming pool in Britain, and the distinction between cold bath and swimming pool in the Georgian age; public swimming pools became a phenomenon of the Victorian city but it was not until the Edwardian age that country house gardens gave centre stage to the pool as an ornamental feature.

The 1920s and ‘30s were the Golden Age of the swimming pool, owing to a heady cocktail of Hollywood movies and Country Life magazine, chlorinated water and elasticated swimsuit – and for the first time men and women swimming together in a fashionable new sport.

This talk is research in progress by Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum. Christopher is an architectural historian and a swimmer, who has recently swum 100 kilometres in Greece to raise funds for the new public garden of Lambeth Green. He reviews swimming pools for Country Life, the Telegraph and the Financial Times.

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Sunday, April 6, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – Vernal Pool BioBlitz in the Webster Conservation Area

A Vernal Pool BioBlitz at Webster Conservation Area will take place Sunday, April 6 from 10 – noon. The area to be covered is the trail head to Webster Conservation Area on West Side of Hammond Pond Parkway, 450 Hammond Pond Parkway, in Newton .

These BioBlitz events are part of a larger effort by Newton Conservators to document and raise awareness about the great diversity of plants and animals that inhabit Newton’s open spaces. At the beginning of the event, we will give a brief tutorial on the iNaturalist app, which we use to document species and as an identification aid. Download this free app ahead of time if you want to use it yourself.

Vernal pools are small wetlands that are important habitats for a great diversity of amphibians, aquatic insects, and other invertebrates. Join us as we explore vernal pools in Webster Woods/Hammond Pond Reservation and document what we see in iNaturalist. Bring calf boots if you have them, but waterproof boots will not be needed. We may encounter frog or salamander eggs and might hear calling spring peepers or American toads. We will also look at a variety of vernal pool invertebrates under magnification.

Meet at Hammond Pond Parkway trailhead just south of the MBTA tracks on the west side (parking available along the west side of the road).

Trip leader: Jonathan Regosin, a Director at Newton Conservators and Technical Advisor and Consulting Biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife.

For questions, email jonathan.regosin@gmail.com

Registration is optional but recommended, so we can send you scheduling changes, directions or advice (such as about trail hazards) before the event and educational resources after it. Please register at:

https://newtonconservators.org/…/vernal-pool-bioblitz-2

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Thursday, April 3, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm Eastern – A Small Backyard Natural Swimming Pool, Online

Natural swimming pools are great for cooling off, diversifying habitat, and creating beauty in the garden, but they can seem out of reach for some because of the cost to install and maintain. Learn about Ecological Landscape Alliance’s Education Committee member Jennifer H. Campbell’s experience building and nurturing a small, informal natural pool at her home in northwestern New Hampshire, powered by a bubble pump system and native plants, for a fraction of the cost of traditional natural pools.

The April 3 webinar is FREE for ELA members $10 for non-members

Register on Eventbrite

Jennifer H Campbell made a mid-life change of career 20 years ago to ecological landscape design based in Northwest NH and Southeast Vermont. She is a graduate of the Conway School of Landscape Design 2007 and holds a Certificate in Native Plant Studies from the Native Plant Trust.

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Saturday, May 10, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Middlesex County Open Day

The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program will visit Middlesex County on Saturday, May 10, with five gardens open to the public. Three gardens in Stow, one in Carlisle, and one in Concord will be in full spring display.

Clark Gardens has been in development for over 30 years. It started with a chance encounter at a parent teacher school event, held during the owners’ first winter in Stow, with a local landscape architect, Yurich Fenigsen-Zieba. When he stated he was a landscape architect, they explained to him their wish to have a waterfall built and the following summer he built a beautiful waterfall with large boulders previously removed from the foundation of our house. And thus began a collaboration which continues to this day. Over the 30 years, many garden “rooms” have been created culminating with the “woodland garden” which has been developing over the last three years and occupies the last section of the two acres of gardens and lawn available. There has never been a formal “plan” to the gardens. Identifying an area and then adding desirable shrubs and plants, has been the only “plan”.

The Gardens at Clark Barn has been on the Open Days program before. The Ruettgers have been gardening here 45 years, although the house and drying barn date to 1790. Entering the gardens from an arched gate, explore the old barn with trays of dried flowers and herbs harvested from the adjacent gardens. During 1939, these trays were drying digitalis leaves for a WPA project for the war effort while cut off from Europe. The digitalis was used medicinally for the heart. As you exit the first garden, you enter by a Belgian espalier fence of pears which encloses this room with borders of tulip mixture of ‘Lemon Chiffon,’ ‘Explorer,’ and ‘Avant Garde.’ Later, the bed changes to dahlias potted in the greenhouse, as well as seed trays of zinnias and salvias. A grape arbor leads you into a walled garden in four quadrants. In the early season, it is just awakening with antique roses, beds of thyme and lavender, purple fennel, angelica, and lovage. The greenhouses are filled with tender perennials, annuals, and a collection of scented geraniums, over 25 varieties of dahlias, and Abyssinian bananas, all waiting to be planted. The outside cold frames are filled with a mix of soft pink petals of Tulip ‘China Town’ and Tulip ‘Esperanto.’ Looking to the East, you see an orchard of apples and peaches. West of the greenhouse is a tall stand of oaks showing you the way past the children’s tree fort to the woodland garden and pond. This is the garden that appears in April and May. The woodland ephemerals put out a show each day with bloodroot, Erythroniums both white and yellow, trillium, Dutchman’s breeches, Podophyllums, squill mix, anemones and Leucojum. Later in May, alliums pop up between the hosta collection and Japanese Peonies japonica and obovata. Pass through a hornbeam hedge to the Clock Barn. In this barn, don’t miss several spring floral displays in the downstairs space. As you exit the barn, the house is on the left. Step up onto the patio to view the Italian pots and trough filled with bulbs and a collection of dwarf conifers. As you descend the end stairs, you see a border of tulip mixture leading to the secret garden with Japanese fencing on one side.

Also in Stow is Glenluce Garden, a small, personal, and romantic garden. Entering by the western gate, you will fnd yourself on a mound with green paths beckoning in seven directions. Explore these paths to discover a grove of paperbark maples, an island of tree peonies, or a border of fragrant native azaleas. A pergola covered by climbing roses leads to a frog pond shaded by heptacodium and a courtyard with raised vegetable beds. Magnolias, rhododendrons, peonies, and roses abound in Glenluce Garden.

Rock Bottom Garden is a one acre garden shaped by three decades of collaboration between a woody plant zealot and a perennial gardener. From the 1855 house situated on top of a dry knoll, one enjoys sweeping vistas of the gardens below. When we first started gardening here, the property was a jungle of invasive trees, dying white ash, and multiflora rose. All were cut down, leaving us with a garden as sunny and windswept as the plains of Kansas for some years. We remedied this by planting trees, some of which are now nearly 60 feet tall. At present the garden is shaded in large part, and the perennial plantings are transitioning to reflect that. The garden features many unusual trees and shrubs, including rare magnolias and maples (some grown from seed), an herb garden, gravel garden, and a small vegetable garden. The striking topography makes the garden seem much larger than its actual size, and the trees include beautiful specimens you probably won’t see anywhere else in New England.

Finally, visit a Wildflower Woodland Garden (pictured below) in Concord. Nearly ten years ago, an uninhabited 1962 modern home and its abandoned garden were revived and reimagined. An indigenous woodland wildflower plant palette is arranged using concepts of midcentury modern garden design. The garden is organized as a stroll garden, with a main path giving access to a variety of experiences and some surprises.

Admission to each garden is $10 for nonmembers, $5 for members, and pre-registration is now open at www.gardenconservancy.org.

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Wednesday, April 9, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Derek Jarman’s Garden, Online

Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite HERE

The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely talented theater director, filmmaker and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station, almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.

Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and still contributes to the MA program on West Midlands History at Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer in a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust online program, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press (2018).

Image: Derek Jarman’s Cottage and Garden, photo ©Jill Francis

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Saturday, April 12, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm – Honor the Earth Fair

The Honor the Earth Fair is returning to the Mashpee Wampanoag Government Center, 414 Main Street in Mashpee, on Saturday, April 12 from 11 am to 4 pm. Native Land Conservancy is thrilled to once again partner with the tribe’s Natural Resources Department to sponsor this event featuring organizations that share our mission to rescue, protect and preserve land and all the gifts of the Earth. There will also be tribal craft vendors and artisans, cultural activities, activities for children, and the Taste of the Earth Cooking Contest. Save the date!

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram

Wednesday, April 16, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Don’t Waste Perfectly Good Food!

Join the Boston University Food & Wine department on Wednesday, April 16 from 1 – 2 for a cooking demonstration with Irene and Mei Li in celebration of Earth month. Learn how to turn scraps into delicious dishes. Free, but reserve your spot through Eventbrite HERE. This event is part of the Spring 2025 Pépin Lecture Series and will take place at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124.

RSS
Follow by Email
Instagram