This summer Tower Hill is bringing the indoors outside with Wild Hideaways: Designed for Adventure. Visitors will be invited to explore a fantastical collection of interactive, outdoor hideaways inspired by art and nature, and custom designed by local landscape architects and artists. These creative pieces will transport visitors to a world full of imagination and adventure. Come explore ! After checking in at either the Tower Hill gatehouse or the Visitor’s Center, find a Wild Hideaways map. Maps can be found at the Visitor’s Center front desk or you can download it here. Follow the map, in any order you please, to find all eight hideaways which are in the Garden Within Reach, adjacent to the daffodil field, and throughout Tower Hill’s meadows. At each hideaway you will have an opportunity to interact with the piece and to play. Indoors, visitors can pop in to visit our Garden Shop, sub-tropical plant conservatories, and the café during open hours. More information at https://www.towerhillbg.org/wild-hideaways/
Craft in America Center is pleased to present a dynamic virtual exhibition of more than fifty mixed media works made by eleven artists from across the U.S. who depict the beauty of our seas and confront various ecological and human-generated threats. The works are amazing!
Making Waves focuses on artworks that celebrate and champion our oceans. These gathered objects shed light on the impact of climate change on the bodies of seawater across the planet, the hazards to life within them, and their vitality to our survival. Along with all that we have faced over the past year, the ongoing and surmounting climate crisis remains one of the largest existential and physical threats to life on Earth. From global warming and rising ocean levels to microplastics, carbon emissions, and overfishing, the issues are numerous and urgent. The group of artists featured in this exhibition use various craft media to reflect the richness of the natural world that exists underwater. They remind us about the need to protect these resources before we are left with nothing more than their artistic likenesses.
Craft-based artists are particularly honed in on materials and process. Materials can be rich with metaphorical potential. Artists often evoke these messages in their choice of media. In representing nature through delicate, intricately manipulated materials, these artists echo how precious and delicate our environment, its natural assets, and aquatic life truly are. Works in clay, glass, and other materials can endure for millennia but they also have an inherent fragility. In other featured examples, artists adapt and reinterpret discarded materials to give them new life.
As artists who are addressing concerns for the environment, these individuals make every effort to weigh the eco-impact of their own practices. This includes the sourcing of art materials and the carbon imprint of their methods of production. In this era of climate crisis, these artists give shape and form to the environmental issues facing the globe by echoing the transcendent beauty of nature in their work.
Join folk herbalist Amber Kennedy on August 21 at 11 in the morning on a leisurely plant identification hike around the property of Tower Hill Botanic Garden. We’ll begin with an orientation and introduction to plant identification and foraging, followed by a guided walk. We’ll discuss a plethora of native and introduced wild plants, their folklore and beneficial historical uses and folk remedies as well as some of their benefits and uses to modern day herbalists. Learn each plant’s Latin and folk names, habitat and other identifying characteristics. Please dress for the weather and bring a notebook, pen and camera for documenting specimens. Hand-outs will be provided and field guides will be available for use. $35 for Tower Hill members, $45 for general public. Register at www.towerhillbg.org.
Amber Kennedy is a folk herbalist residing in North Brookfield, MA. She has studied both Western Herbal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine (TCM) at Clearpath School of Herbal Medicine in western Massachusetts, along with numerous other herb and natural medicine courses. She is the owner of Boheme Botanika Herbals where she creates and sells herbal products, botanical skincare and therapeutic teas, teaches workshops and classes, offers a yearly Full Moon Herbal CSA and stewards an herbal teaching garden at Bell Brook Farm in West Brookfield.
Best-known for his extraordinary revitalization of the gardens at the National Trust’s Mount Stewart, County Down, North Ireland, Neil Porteous is a garden consultant much in demand elsewhere around Ireland. At present, he is restoring one of the country’s most important gardens created at the start of the last century: Annes Grove, County Cork. In this August 20 Irish Georgian Society online talk, beginning at noon Eastern time, he will explore the site with historian and author Robert O’Byrne, explaining its significance and illustrate what he is doing to ensure the legacy of Annes Grove has a dynamic future. Tickets: $20 + $2.85 fee Registration Required with IGS at eventbrite
The Lecture is sponsored by Hindman. Hindmanis recognized internationally as a leading fine art auction house. Hindman operates more salesrooms in the United States than any other firm and conducts over 100 auctions annually in categories such as fine jewelry, fine art, modern design, books and manuscripts, furniture, decorative arts, couture, Asian works of art, arts of the American West, and numismatics, as well as special focus subjects as the need arises. Please visithindmanauctions.com for more information and the 2021 auction calendar.
Farms and edible gardens are popping up on rooftops across the country. But rooftop, terraces, and balcony spaces have their own unique challenges for soil maintenance, watering, crop management, installation, and more. Manager of NYBG’s Edible Academy Annie Novak, cofounder of America’s first fully landscaped green roof commercial vegetable farm and author of the 2016 bestseller The Rooftop Growing Guide, shows you how to make your rooftop garden thrive. From vegetable selection to pest control to composting, you’ll learn the basics of rooftop, terrace, and balcony growing, covering both container and green roof garden systems. The Rooftop Growing Guide: How to Transform Your Roof, by Annie Novak, is the required text. The New York Botanical Garden’s virtual course will be held every week on Tuesday starting August 17 and running through August 31, from 6:15 – 8:15. $125.00 – register HERE.
Join Clinical Herbalist Liane Moccia and Stevens-Coolidge House & Gardens on August 22 at 10 am for a stroll through the gardens and tea-making workshop to unlock the powerful herbs in your home and garden and support optimal health and well-being. Stevens-Coolidge House & Gardens is located at 153 Chickering Road in North Andover.
Liane is an herbalist who helps people find natural solutions to their chronic health problems. She specializes in stress, energy, sleep, fertility and pre-pregnancy planning.
Space is limited; pre-registration is required. Register HERE
Use leaves and flowers collected at Mass Hort to print images directly on paper using a process called eco printing. In this August 21 class at The Gardens at Elm Bank, you will experiment with two forms of eco printing. First, you will learn how to treat paper with a mordant that helps the plant pigments bind to paper. You will arrange plants on your mordanted papers and steam them to capture nature’s beauty. While your first batch of prints is steaming, you will make a second bundle of plants and paper that you will boil with rusty objects. The iron from the rusty objects will bind the plant pigments to the paper. You will leave with lots of prints that can be used for cards, framed pictures, or collages.Mary DeLano is a fiber explorer who loves eco printing, natural dying, stitching, wool applique, and rug making. Mary enjoys sharing her passion for fiber arts with new students. She teaches throughout New England, including at Maine Fiber College, where she also serves on the organizing committee. Click here for a class example. This class registration will close down a week prior for supplies to be prepared. $75 for Mass Hort members, $98 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
Join us at Highfield Hall & Garden in Falmouth on August 25 at 5:30 under the Highfield tent for the fourth installment of this series featuring Gregory Fiske M.S., Senior Geospatial Analyst, Research Associate, Woodwell Climate Research Center.
The series will explore the synergies between art and science as a way to communicate important issues surrounding the environment and planetary health while inspiring change and stimulating action. In conjunction with two exhibitions at Highfield,SEAChange: Meditations on Sustainability and Turn the Tide: Courtney Mattison, participating artists and scientists will discuss a range of topics, including ocean acidification and coral bleaching, biofuels and the Blue Economy, mapping as an artform and a communication tool, plastics in the ocean, and art as means to amplify science and transform how we learn about the world.
ADMISSION IS FREE, PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIREDRegister online now or give us a call at 508-495-1878, ext. 2
Lecture series is sponsored by the Woods Hole Foundation and the Brabson Library and Educational Foundation.
Join Ameren Missouri for an exclusive virtual electric vehicle (EV) experience. EV 101 provides a brief introductory overview of EV benefits, charging infrastructure, and available incentives. Guest speakers from Ameren Missouri will be available to answer your questions and help you figure out if an EV could be right for you. Underwritten by Ameren Missouri. This free webinar will be conducted online via Livestorm and begins at 7:30 Eastern time (6:30 Central). Register with the Missouri Botanic Garden HERE.
Visit Gore Place on Saturday, August 21 at 9:30 am and learn about our new project on iNaturalist. iNaturalist is an online platform that allows users to record observations, identify living things, and contribute to a body of data used by scientists and researchers around the world.
We are launching a project to record as many of the living things as we can find on our grounds. Join us for this in-person program to learn more about our iNaturalist project and start making observations.
No experience? No problem! During the first portion of the program, we will learn about iNaturalist and how to make and upload observations. We will then move out to the grounds to practice.
This workshop is designed for adults and teens. Children are welcome, but must be 13 years or older to create an iNaturalist account.
The first half hour of this program will take place indoors at our Carriage House. Participants must wear masks or face coverings while indoors.
Participants are required to wear masks at outdoor museum programs if they have not been vaccinated, according to state and local regulations. Gore Place staff will wear masks at all times.
