Daily Archives: October 3, 2021

Wednesday, October 20, 10:00 am – An Update on the Boston City Hall Project,Online

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The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s October meeting will take place October 20 at 10:00 am online on Zoom. Kate Tooke, Associate Principal, ASLA, PLA, will discuss the Boston City Hall Plaza redesign and the next stages in the process. The City of Boston has a short video we recommend to bring you up to speed on the project before the meeting: https://www.boston.gov/departments/public-facilities/city-hall-plaza-renovation

Kate is a landscape architect at Sasaki. Her project leadership, strategic thinking, design eye, and technical skills have been instrumental in the success of diverse projects ranging from master planning to site-scale work. As a naturally interdisciplinary thinker, she excels at collaborating across disciplines to craft elegant, contextual solutions to complex design challenges.

Prior to discovering landscape architecture, Kate was a high school math and physics teacher in the Boston Public School system. Her passion for inspiring and empowering urban youth infuses her work as a landscape architect. She values engaging stakeholders in the design of their own urban public spaces through lively workshops, and is particularly interested civic open spaces that support the play and learning of city children. Kate pursues independent research on children’s outdoor environments, including schoolyards, playscapes, and outdoor classrooms.

Kate holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Massachusetts, a master’s degree in education from Lesley University, and a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Dartmouth College. She earned the 2011 National Olmsted Scholar award, the highest honor of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), for her work on urban schoolyards, and has since served on LAF’s board of directors. Kate remains active in the academic world through teaching appointments at the Rhode Island School of Design and University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as through volunteer work with local public schools.

Please note: As COVID and its variants create new challenges, we have decided to hold this presentation virtually on ZOOM. If you are a Garden Club member, you will receive a notice. If you are not a member and are interested in attending, click HERE and we will put you on the notification list.

Wednesdays, October 13 & 20, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm – Botanical Names for the Fearful, Online

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In this two-session Berkshire Botanical course offered on Zoom on October 13 & 20 at 5:30 pm, led by Judith Summer, we will begin with a tour of the plant kingdom with attention to plant names and their history. We’ll explore the work of Linnaeus and the origin of botanical binomials — the naming system in place since 1753 — and decode the Latin and Greek roots that occur commonly in plant names. Illustrated lectures will weave botanical nomenclature with science, exploration, history, and the state of modern plant names, from the ancient Doctrine of Signatures to modern DNA analysis. We’ll also discuss why names sometimes change (Hint: not to vex gardeners!). Visuals will include both familiar plants and some that are quite rare, accompanied by explanation and decoding of their botanical names. An opportunity to gain confidence in dealing with scientific plant names, we will examine several techniques for learning names with ease, and the course will conclude with a collaborative “quiz” to pool our collective knowledge. Participants will receive two recent articles written by Judith Sumne on Linnaean history and the useful details of botanical nomenclature.

Judith Sumner is classically trained botanist and author who specializes in ethnobotany, flowering plants, plant adaptations and garden history. She is a graduate of Vassar College and completed her graduate studies in botany at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She studied at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; at the British Museum; the Jardin des Plantes; and did extensive field work in the Pacific region on the genus Pittosporum. In addition to writing, her projects include field studies in the Great Smoky Mountains and work with the United Nations developing petroleum-rich plants in the Caribbean. She served as a visiting scientist for several summers in the LEAP (Learning about Plants) program at Harvard for Boston school teachers and has volunteered as a National Public Radio Science mentor. Judith has been the scientist-in-residence at the Star Island Natural History Conference and a guest on the “Martha Stewart Living” TV show, the PBS program “Cultivating Life,” and various other PBS and educational programs. She lectures widely and is an award-winning writer including: The Natural History of Medicinal Plants (Timber Press); American Household Botany (Timber Press); and Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II.

$30 for BBG members, $45 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/botanical-names-fearful