Boston Flora

Month: April 2017

  • Sunday, May 7, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Botany Blast: A Look at Plant Development

    Have you ever wondered why some plants have flowers before they have leaves, while others leaf out before they flower? Looked at flower and leaf buds and asked yourself what protects them as they develop and how they know when it’s OK to open? Arnold Arboretum Director William (Ned) Friedman will lead this walk on Sunday, May 7 from 1 – 2 through the Arboretum, drawing your eye to ephemeral developments in the springtime landscape. He will look at some of the trees observed in our Tree Spotters phenology program, but will also stop to point out other trees and shrubs that show interesting morphological characteristics. Bring a loupe or hand lens if you have one. Fee Free, but registration required. Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277.

  • Friday, May 12, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm, and Saturday, May 13, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm – Muses at the Museum: Art Inspires Art

    The Community Garden Club of Duxbury celebrates its 90th Anniversary with a Standard Flower Show entitled Muses at the Museum: Art Inspires Art.  Horticultural specimens and floral design entries will include designs interpreting art, literature, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance.  Free and open to the public.  The event will be held Friday, May 12 from 1 – 4, and Saturday, May 13 from 11 – 4, and takes place at the Art Museum Complex, 189 Alden Street in Duxbury.

  • Saturday, May 13, 11:00 am – 12:00 noon – Foraged Flora: A Year of Gathering and Arranging Wild Plants and Flowers

    A special Tower Hill Botanic Garden treat for mothers and others on Saturday, May 13 from 11 – noon.  Author Louesa Roebuck will demonstrate how to create a beautiful seasonal arrangement while talking about her book Foraged Flora. The book is a gorgeously photographed new take on flower arranging using local and foraged plants and flowers to create beautiful arrangements, with ideas and inspiration for the whole year. Roadside fennel, flowering fruit trees, garden roses, tiny violets; ingredients both common and unusual, humble and showy, Foraged Flora is a new vision for flowers and arranging. It encourages you to train your eye to the beauty that surrounds you, attune your senses to the seasonality and locality of flowers and plants, and to embrace the beauty in each stage of life, from first bud to withering seedpod. Organized by month, each chapter in this visually arresting and inspiring book focuses on large and small arrangements created from the flowers and plants available during that time period and in that place, all foraged or gleaned nearby. The authors reflect on surprising and beautiful pairings, the importance of scale, the scarcity or abundance of raw materials, and the environmental factors that contribute to that availability.

    Whether picking a small tendril of fragrant jasmine, collecting oversized branches of flowering quince, or making a garland of bay laurel, Foraged Flora is an invitation to seek out the beauty of the natural world.

    Louesa Roebuck is a printmaker, painter, floral artist, and author who divides her time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, currently residing in Ojai, California. She has created flora installations from foraged and gleaned materials for high-end clients like Vivienne Westwood, John Baldessari, and Alice Waters. In addition to her work with flora, Roebuck has worked in fashion for many years and paints monotypes and works in textile design. Tower Hill member price $15, nonmembers $25.  Register online at www.towerhillbg.org.

  • Thursday, May 11, 6:00 pm – The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Natural World – and Us

    Richard O. Prum, William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, will speak in the Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street in Cambridge, on Thursday, May 11 at 6 pm as part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Evolution Matters Lecture Series. Can adaptation by natural selection truly account for everything we see in nature? How do animal mating displays and mate choice drive evolutionary change? What insights can they offer about the evolution of human sexuality? Drawing from his new book, The Evolution of Beauty, Richard Prum will consider Charles Darwin’s long-neglected theory of sexual selection, in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons is an independent engine of evolutionary change. In a reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, Prum will reveal how mating preferences—what Darwin termed “the taste for the beautiful”—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the natural world.

    The Evolution Matters Lecture Series is supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit. Free and open to the public.

  • Friday, May 5 – Sunday, May 7 – The Next Chapter: A Small Standard Flower Show

    The Osterville Garden Club presents The Next Chapter: A Small Standard Flower Show, at the Osterville Village Library on Friday, May 5 through Sunday, May 7, during library hours.  Floral designs will be inspired by the library setting and beautiful local horticultural specimens will be displayed.  Call the library at 508-420-0550 to confirm hours.  Image courtesy of the Daily Mail.

  • Wednesday, June 14, 8:00 am – 6:00 pm – Dale Chihuly at The New York Botanical Garden

    Join the staff of Berkshire Botanical Garden and landscape architect David Dew Bruner for a special tour of the New York Botanical Garden at the height of its early summer bloom. In addition to the amazing gardens and plant specimens (with expert plant advice provided by BBG staff), this trip is scheduled to view the much anticipated installations created specifically for NYBG’s landscape and architecture by world-renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly. David Dew Bruner, an award-winning landscape architect and fine artist, will be our tour guide for this portion of the trip. He will show us the dramatic installations inspired by Chihuly’s exploration of the contrast between glass and environment. Physical expressions of the light, the Chihuly works will be distributed across NYBG’s 250-acre National Historic Landmark landscape, including within the Garden’s Haupt Conservatory, itself considered a work of glass art. This trip, a great way to spend a day with like-minded garden and art lovers, is not to be missed.

    Coach bus leaves Berkshire Botanical Garden promptly at 8am. Dress for the weather: comfortable, sturdy footwear and warm, waterproof outerwear, umbrella
    Bring a bag lunch (limited access to a garden cafe is available at the entrance to NYGB for those wishing to purchase lunch). $120 BBG members, $130 nonmembers. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org.

  • Sunday, June 11, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm – Sea Level Rise and Extreme Precipitation: Preparing for Boston’s Uncertain Future

    How should communities build resilience for dealing with weather and climate-related hazards in the coming decades? On Sunday, June 11 from 9 – 4, participants will use visualizations to explore potential vulnerabilities to our infrastructures, social networks, and ecosystems from sea level rise and extreme precipitation events, then discuss potential strategies for addressing these threats, focusing on the priorities and needs of relevant stakeholders. At the event’s conclusion, participants will make recommendations for increasing Boston’s community resilience. The event takes place at the Museum of Science, Boston.

    Apply to participate in this free day-long forum. The event is designed to gather the opinions of a diverse range of people from different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. You don’t need to have knowledge about the topic to be selected. This project is supported by a NOAA Environmental Literacy Grant. In collaboration with Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology.

    For application and more information: ecastonline.org/climate/boston

  • Saturday, May 6, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – Spring Ephemeral Wildflowers of the Northeast

    On Saturday, May 6 at 10 am, the Berkshire Botanical Garden will sponsor a program on Spring Ephemeral Wildflowers of the Northeast.
    Starting with a lecture highlighting the wildflowers of New England’s natural habitats, including alpine summits, forests, meadows, wetlands, and coastal environments, Garden in the Wood’s staff botanist Ted Elliman will also take the class on an optional walking tour of Stockbridge’s Ice Glen, just minutes down the road. Based on Elliman’s research for his book, The Wildflowers of New England, the talk will focus on spring-flowering plants that will be in (or almost in) bloom in the forests and meadows of the Berkshires. After the lecture, attendees can have their books signed by the author, before heading off to hike the trails of the Ice Glen, where he will identify the plants along the path of the mossy ravine and answer any questions about the local flora.

    Ted Elliman has worked for the New England Wild Flower Society as a staff botanist, invasive species program manager, and as an instructor of botany, ecology, and conservation classes. His book, The Wildflowers of New England, an identification guide to much of the region’s native flora, was published in 2016 by Timber Press. In the 1980’s, Ted started and directed an environmental education and wilderness adventure center in the Berkshires. Since the mid-1990’s, he has periodically led natural history tours to southwest China, where he worked for two years as a teacher and forest ecologist.

    Advance registration is highly recommended, but walk-ins are always welcome, space permitting. BBG members $15, nonmembers $20. Register online at www.berkshirebotanical.org.  Photo from www.yourgardensanctuary.com.

  • Wednesday, May 10, 7:00 pm – Building Old Cambridge

    Old Cambridge is the traditional name of the once-isolated community that grew up around the early settlement of Newtowne, which served briefly as the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then became the site of Harvard College. This abundantly illustrated volume from the Cambridge Historical Commission traces the development of the neighborhood as it became a suburban community and bustling intersection of town and gown. Based on the city’s comprehensive architectural inventory and drawing extensively on primary sources, Building Old Cambridge considers how the social, economic, and political history of Old Cambridge influenced its architecture and urban development.

    Old Cambridge was famously home to such figures as the proscribed Tories William Brattle and John Vassall; authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Dean Howells; publishers Charles C. Little, James Brown, and Henry O. Houghton; developer Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a founder of Bell Telephone; and Charles Eliot, the landscape architect. Throughout its history, Old Cambridge property owners have engaged some of the country’s most talented architects, including Peter Harrison, H. H. Richardson, Eleanor Raymond, Carl Koch, and Benjamin Thompson.

    The authors, Susan Maycock and her husband Charles Sullivan, explore Old Cambridge’s architecture and development in the context of its social and economic history; the development of Harvard Square as a commercial center and regional mass transit hub; the creation of parks and open spaces designed by Charles Eliot and the Olmsted Brothers; and the formation of a thriving nineteenth-century community of booksellers, authors, printers, and publishers that made Cambridge a national center of the book industry. Finally, they examine Harvard’s relationship with Cambridge and the community’s often impassioned response to the expansive policies of successive Harvard administrations.

    Susan and Charles will speak at Porter Square Books on Wednesday, May 10 beginning at 7 pm. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.

  • Thursday, May 11, 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm – CitySprouts – Dig It!

    CitySprouts introduces school gardens as a core element of children’s public education. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society partners with public schools to ensure that hands-on learning, environmental stewardship and the experience of growing and eating healthy food become part of every child’s life.
    Join them for an evening of fun, food, and silent auction to celebrate garden-based learning in Boston and Cambridge Public Schools. Help pollinate garden-based learning! For more information visit www.citysprouts.org, or call Andrea at 617-876-2436.