Daily Archives: February 6, 2016

Sunday, February 14, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Coloring Outside the Lines: The Use of Annuals at Tower Hill

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Many of the gardens at Tower Hill have been purposefully designed to allow the professional staff a chance to paint a fresh scene, and create a new mood, each year with artful plant combinations. These annual and seasonal changes require all the skills that define the field of horticulture – the combination of the art and science of growing plants. It’s not enough to simply choose colors that look good together in the nursery in April – many other factors go into selecting combinations that will go from alluring in April to awe-inspiring in August. Spend an hour at Tower Hill Botanic Garden on Sunday, February 14, beginning at 1 pm, with Horticulture Director Joann Vieira learning about where the horticulture team at Tower Hill derives their inspiration for fresh displays; how they balance the science of growing plants with the art of color and texture; and how space and time influence their choices.

To register for this event, please call Gayle Holland (508) 869-6111 x124 or email gholland@towerhillbg.org. Free with admission.

Saturday, February 20, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Pollinator-Attracting Landscapes: Beyond the Garden Border

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Learning to create a welcoming pollinator habitat is part of stewarding the land. On Saturday, February 20 at the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, landscape and habitat designer Tom Sullivan offers practical advice for making a landscape welcoming to a variety of beneficial insects and pollinators. Through simple acts such as creating connectivity of habitat and modifying the composition and treatment of grass and lawns, Sullivan educates us on how to increase beneficial insect populations and enhance the diversity of pollinators essential to a healthy ecosystem. $20 for BBG members, $25 for nonmembers. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org.

Tom Sullivan, MALD, at PollinatorsWelcome.com, is a pollinator habitat designer, consultant, public speaker, writer, and educator. Tom’s focus is clearly on bee survival through the habitat lens of the nesting, forage, and life cycles, as well as whole system landscape awareness. In Tom’s talks and workshops, self-referred to as his yard-by-yard approach, he offers guidelines and techniques for regenerating native bee habitats in yards, parks, farmland, and other open spaces.  Image from www.amherstbulletin.com.