Daily Archives: February 16, 2017

Wednesday, March 8, 10:00 am – How the Glaciers Affected New England’s Plants

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Today, Massachusetts is a network of houses, businesses, farms, forests, and wetlands—but how did it get to be that way? What did it look like when the Laurentide Glaciers melted 12,000 years ago? How did a state that was only 25 percent forest by 1850 come to be 64 percent forested today? As part of our ongoing series The Prehistoric Garden, The Garden Club of the Back Bay welcomes Meg Muckenhoupt to our March meeting on Wednesday, March 8 at 10 am at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue. This broad overview traces how and why the land has changed and what people thought about it—from Wampanoag King Philip to Frederick Law Olmsted to Governor Charlie Baker.

Our speaker Meg Muckenhoupt is an environmental and travel writer. She has appeared on NPR’s Radio Boston and WCVB’s Chronicle, as well as WGBH’s Forum site. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, Boston Magazine, and the Time Out Boston guide; her book Boston Gardens and Green Spaces (Union Park Press, 2010) is a Boston Globe Local Bestseller. She currently serves as Executive Director of Community Outreach Group for Landscape Design (COGdesign).

Meg was awarded a certificate in Field Botany by the New England Wild Flower Society and earned degrees from Harvard and Brown University. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. Garden Club members will receive notice of the meeting. If you are not a member but are interested in attending, please email info@gardenclubbackbay.org. Image from bostongeology.com.

Tuesday, February 21, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm – Toward an Urban Ecology

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The Harvard Graduate School of Design will host a lecture by Kate Orff in Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium on Tuesday, February 21 from 6:30 – 8:30.

Kate Orff, RLA, is the founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York City, and author of Toward an Urban Ecology, a book about the practice. SCAPE re-conceives urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology. A range of participatory and science-based strategies will be discussed and shown in the lecture through the lens of the office’s work, featuring projects, collaborators, and design methods that advance urban ecological design.

Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu. The event is free and open to the public.