We can’t say it often enough – if you haven’t already done so, please go to the polls tomorrow and cast your vote. Wear a mask. Bring a folding chair if you have to. Carry your hand sanitizer. But vote. As a not for profit charitable corporation, we cannot suggest how you should vote, but please keep the environment in mind as you do so.
Join the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, New England, on November 12 at 11 am for a Zoom webinar with Judith B. Tankard on Gardens of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Free with registration HERE.
English gardens from the Arts & Crafts era are jewels of early 20th Century design. Part of the same design movement that flourished in Europe and North America between 1880 and 1920, these gardens emphasized medieval and romantic styles. Designed on an intimate scale, they blurred the distinction between indoors and outdoors, and emphasized the symbiotic nature of the house and garden as a unified landscape. Many contained a series of distinct outdoor ‘rooms’ often delineated by hedges and embellished with whimsical topiary. Most had lavish plantings of perennials, ornamental shrubs, bulbs, and annuals—all massed for color, textural effect, and seasonal impact. Small structures, such as pergolas, arbors, sundials, and other traditional ornaments produced storybook-like gardens that referenced Old English manor house surroundings of the 17th Century.
In this illustrated lecture, Judith Tankard will give insight into the minds of the movement’s creative giants such as William Morris and Gertrude Jekyll, as well as lesser known designers such as Avray Tipping, Thomas Mawson, and Robert Lorimer. She will illustrate gorgeous National Trust gardens such as Hidcote, Standen, Snowshill Manor, Red House, and Kellie Castle, among others, and give visual tours of other stunning gardens, such as Hestercombe, Great Dixter, Gravetye Manor, and Munstead Wood. Tankard will show how these English models created a lasting impact on gardens across the pond, as American designers took inspiration from their British contemporaries.
Judith B Tankard is a landscape historian, award-winning author, and preservation consultant. She is the author of 10 illustrated books, including Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, winner of the 2019 J. B. Jackson Book Award. Her book, Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, was named an Honor Book for the 2010 Historic New England Book Prize. She taught at the Landscape Institute of Harvard University for twenty years. Judith is a Garden Conservancy Fellow, a Heritage Circle member of The Royal Oak Foundation, and a Stewardship Council member of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. She lives in Boston, is a member of The Garden Club of the Back Bay, and gardens on Martha’s Vineyard. www.judithtankard.com
For information on other upcoming ICAA New England Chapter tours and lectures, please visit: www.classicist-ne.org/calendar
Enjoy a virtual lecture and Q&A session on November 23 at 5:30 with author Dr. Chris Thorogood about his new book, Weird Plants. In this little book of horrors, Chris Thorogood reveals the weird, the wonky, and the sinister specimens he has encountered during his travels in the wide world of plants. Far from passively absorbing the sun’s rays, these plants kill, steal and kidnap, making them dynamic participants in the ecosystems around them. From orchids that duplicitously look, feel and even smell like a female insect to bamboozle sex-crazed male bees, to giant pitcher plants that have evolved toilets for tree shrews to carnivorous plants that drug, drown, and consume unsuspecting insect prey, Weird Plants takes us deep inside the worlds of plants whose imaginative and calculating survival methods are startlingly reminiscent of human schemes.
Dr. Chris Thorogood is the Deputy Director and Head of Science of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum in the UK, and a lecturer in biology at the University of Oxford’s Department of Plant Sciences.
Chris’s research focuses on the evolution of ‘weird plants’ – parasites and carnivores, as well as their conservation. He also works on plant diversity in the Mediterranean Basin and Japan, and the uses of plants in technology (biomimetics).
Chris is an ambassador for public engagement with plant sciences, and makes regular television appearances, He is also an international best-selling author of specialist and non-specialist titles including three specialist field guides to the wild flowers of the Mediterranean published by Kew (the Algarve, the western Mediterranean and eastern Mediterranean), popular title ‘Weird Plants’ (which has a focus on parasitic plants) and the children’s book Perfectly Peculiar Plants.
The Zoom author book talk is sponsored by Tower Hill Botanic Garden, $10 for Tower Hill members, $15 for nonmembers. Register at www.towerhillbg.org.
