Boston Flora

Month: October 2021

  • Thursdays, October 28 – November 11, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Design for Landscape Regeneration

    Learn how to design unique landscapes and garden spaces that strengthen the health of the environment immediately around you. Most yards are biological deserts as well as an ecological burden due to too much lawn coupled with non-native species. However, our yards can be readily transformed into beneficial habitats that sink carbon and reduce pollution while also providing beauty and a stronger connection to the natural world, all right outside your own door. Using strategies based on the observation and emulation of naturally existing plant communities, landscape designer Owen Wormser offers key techniques for creating enjoyable, low-maintenance garden spaces. Discover important functional and aesthetic qualities of the native plants that are the building blocks for creating easy-to-care-for, sustainable landscapes. Owen will also discuss how to design and prepare landscapes so that those plants can work together for maximum effect. In this interactive format, participants will be asked to apply what they’ve learned into a design and plant list that can be applied to an actual landscape. They will be asked to  share this and their process in the form of photographs, plans, and sketches. These  landscapes will be used as examples for ongoing discussion throughout the course.  The Berkshire Botanical hybrid class, to be held October 28 – November 11, will be at Berkshire Botanical Garden and online. $ 115 for BBG members, $135 for nonmembers. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org.

    Owen Wormser is a native of rural Maine. Since 1998, he has built hundreds of regenerative landscapes in Western Massachusetts, influenced by his study of horticulture, permaculture, organic agriculture and ecology. In 2010, he started Abound Design, which provides design and installation services with a focus on creating sustainability, regeneration and beauty. Six years later, he co-founded Local Harmony, a nonprofit that promotes local regenerative projects and has overseen the planting of many thousands of native perennials. His first book, Lawns Into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape, was released by Rodale Press in July, 2020.

  • Wednesday, October 27, 12:00 noon – 1:30 pm – Planting Workshop: Indoor Bulbs for Winter

    Nothing brings spring to your home like a beautiful pot of blooming bulbs. In this October 27 Massachusetts Horticultural Society class at The Gardens at Elm Bank at noon, you’ll learn how to buy the correct bulbs for indoor forcing and how to plant and hold them for spring blooming. See a multitude of indoor bulb planting ideas – then plant and bring home a perfectly planted pot of blue grape hyacinth (M. Armeniacum).

    Workshop will be led by Melissa Pace. Melissa Pace is an award-winning horticulturalist who competes in numerous garden and flower shows, from Philadelphia Flower Show to the Bolton Fair. She has been a University of Rhode Island Master Gardener since 2003. Melissa has been a presenter for numerous garden clubs and civic organizations throughout New England since 1995. Melissa holds a master’s degree in teaching from Bridgewater University, is an artist and art teacher and is currently employed as a Garden Educator for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

    $45 for Mass Hort members, $65 for nonmembers. Register at www.masshort.org

  • Friday, October 29, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm – Climate Resilience Symposium, Online

    Join Native Plant Trust online on October 29 from 1 – 4 for a symposium on the changing climate and New England’s native plants, featuring the region’s prominent conservationists and environmentalists. Through a keynote lecture, workshop, and panel discussion, we will examine current climate change patterns and their implications for the future of the region’s plant life, key factors for building climate resilience, and how key players can make resilience possible. Reserve your spot at NativePlantTrust.org and keep checking the NPT website for the most up-to-date details. $45 for NPT members, $54 for nonmembers.

  • On Line: Effects of Climate Change at Mount Stewart

    Overlooking Strangford Lough in County Down, Mount Stewart is affected by climate change in many ways 
    Rising sea levels threaten to damage wildlife-rich mudflats on the shores of the lough and destroy islands that provide habitats for seabirds and seals. The sea plantation, which protects the house and gardens against the damaging effects of storms and saltwater, is also being eroded.  Watch this YouTube five minute video produced by the National Trust to find out what the Trust is doing to make this precious landscape more resilient.  The link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1PavzuTuHY

  • Sunday, October 24, 11:00 am – 12:00 noon – Victory Gardens: How a Nation of Gardeners Helped to Win the War

    During World War II, homefront Victory Gardens flourished nationwide—in former lawns, flower gardens, school yards, parks, abandoned lots, and ball fields. As part of the war effort, posters encouraged patriotic Americans to “Grow vitamins at your kitchen door” and “Eat what you can, and can what you cannot eat.” In fact, Americans needed to supplement their diets during a time of food rationing and shortages. Nearly 20 million gardeners answered the call, including many who had never wielded a hoe. Victory gardeners learned to prepare soil beds, grow seedlings, cultivate, control weeds, irrigate, and eliminate pests—raising successful crops for the duration of the war years. Join Berkshire Botanical Gardens on October 24 at 11 as we explore the role of 1940s vegetable gardens, ration-book cookery, and food preservation in wartime victory. Victory gardens provided food and promoted morale during World War II, and by 1944 American gardeners grew forty-four percent of the produce that fed civilian families. In this slide illustrated talk Judith Sumner will trace the Victory Garden movement, including the Roosevelt White House garden, urban gardens, school gardens, food preservation, wartime nutrition, and ration book cookery. We will also look at the British Dig for Victory campaign, Hedgerow Harvest program, and the Women’s Land Army. This program is led by Judith Summer, author of Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II (McFarland Books, 2019).

    Judith Sumner is the author of Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II (McFarland Books, 2019), the first book to examine the historical roles of plants and botanical science in warfare. Judith is a 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. Judith is currently at work on a botanical history of the American Civil War.

  • Wednesday, October 20, 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm Eastern – Rose Standish Nichols: Garden Designer and Writer, Online

    Garden Club of the Back Bay member Judith Tankard will be lecturing on Rose Standish Nichols on October 20 from 8 – 9, hosted by the Southern California Chapter | Presented as Part of the Bunny Mellon Curricula at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. $20 for the general public. Register at https://www.classicist.org/calendar/events/rose-standish-nichols-garden-designer-and-writer/

    Thanks to a generous $1 million grant from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation, the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art is proud to present first-of-its-kind programming in landscape architecture for designers, students, and enthusiasts, with particular emphasis on educating the next generation: the Bunny Mellon Curricula. This curricula, the first to be named in honor of Bunny Mellon, honors her commitment to landscape design, and her deeply-held belief that architecture is firmly linked to its surrounding landscape.

    Please join landscape historian and author Judith Tankard in a talk about Rose Standish Nichols, who was among an elite group of East Coast women who took up residential garden design in the early 1900s when the profession of landscape architecture was in its formative stage. Her colleagues Beatrix Farrand, Marian Coffin, and Ellen Shipman among others are better known because they focused exclusively on garden design, while Nichols was a prolific author, antiquarian, and political reformer, among other roles. Most of her gardens, which ranged from New England to the South have disappeared except for several in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she collaborated with the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. Rose was born into an old Boston family with ties to both Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens and her formative years were spent in the famed Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire where she learned the finer points of garden design. An inveterate traveler with a critical eye for design, Rose’s most lasting claim to fame were her articles on design for House Beautiful and her books, English Pleasure Gardens, Spanish and Portuguese Gardens, and Italian Pleasure Gardens. Today her family home is the Nichols House Museum on Beacon Hill in Boston, where one can learn more about her life and accomplishments.

    Judith B Tankard is a landscape historian and author of Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, and Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes.

  • Tuesday, October 26, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Daniela Bleichmar, Online

    Daniela Bleichmar is Professor of Art History and History at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as the founding director of the Levan Institute for the Humanities and director of the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Her research and teaching address the history of images, objects, and texts in colonial Latin America and early modern Europe, focusing on the histories of science and knowledge production, cultural encounters and exchanges, collecting, and books. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the ACLS. Her publications include the books Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (Yale University Press, 2017).  She is currently writing a cultural biography of the Codex Mendoza, an Indigenous illustrated manuscript produced in early colonial Mexico, which traces the extraordinary life of this transcultural object from Mexico City in the 1540s to London in the 1830s.

    Daniela will speak on October 26 at 6:30 pm in a Harvard Graduate School of Design virtual lecture.

    Click here to register for the Public Lecture with Daniela Bleichmar. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event. 

  • Saturday, October 23, 12:00 noon – 3:00 pm – New England Hosta Society Annual Meeting

    The New England Hosta Society is happy to return to in-person meetings, and its 2021 Annual Meeting will take place October 23 at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, in Classrooms A and B. At noon, bring your own lunch (tea, coffee, water, and soda will be provided) and socialize before the meeting and elections beginning at 1 pm. At 2, Bob Solberg, hosta hybridizer and owner of Green Hill Hosta in North Carolina, will speak. He is the recipient of the 2003 Alex J. Summers Distinguished Merit Award by the American Hosta Society. The company is among the leading introducers of new hostas in the world. Many of them were hybridized by Bob Solberg and other leading hosta hybridizers. The high quality of our plants and their very large root systems is well known. (Great roots make a great growing hosta!)

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  • Saturday & Sunday, October 23 & 24, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Pumpkins, Pumpkins, Pumpkins

    Celebrate the fall harvest by creating your own carved pumpkin with your family group at your own table, playing pumpkin games, and enjoying a fall socially distanced scavenger hunt. Learn about the history of pumpkins and the Jack-O-Lantern story. Register at least a week in advance to ensure a pumpkin of your own.

    PLEASE NOTE: This program will be conducted in accordance with current Municipal, State, and Mass Audubon Covid-19 protocols. Groups are limited to 25 pre-registered participants. Participants are required to wear a face covering inside, and when less than 6 feet apart outdoors.

    Each time slot (10 – 11:30, 12:30 – 2, 2:30 – 4) will have a maximum of 25 people.

    Please call 617-983-8500 to register. Mass Audubon members $13.00, Nonmembers $15.00 per person. Pumpkins are available for an additional $6.00 each, or bring your own pumpkin to carve! Registration is required. Register now with our secure payment portal.

    The program takes place at the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, 500 Walk Hill Street in Mattapan.

  • Thursday, October 21, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Oh Deer! How to Manage Deer at Home Webinar

    Let’s face it, most of us are sharing our landscape with the deer. If you are in need of practical approaches to deter the munching, join Cheryl Salatino and Tower Hill Botanic Garden online on October 21 at 7 for ideas to safeguard your garden. We will also review a selection of “deer tolerant” plants and point out those considered “deer candy.”

    Cheryl is the principal designer and owner of Dancing Shadows Garden Design, a residential landscape design and services firm. She has been designing gardens across Massachusetts since 2002. Cheryl is a Certified Landscape Designer and a Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist (MCH). She received her certificate in landscape design from the Radcliffe Seminars Landscape Design Program of Harvard University. She was awarded the status of Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist by the Massachusetts Nursery & Landscape Association (MNLA) as evidence of achieving the industry’s highest standards in nursery and landscape professionalism. Cheryl has also earned an Advanced Certificate in Horticulture and Design as part of the New England Wildflower Society’s Native Plant Studies Program.

    $10 Member Adult; $15 Adult Register HERE.

    1. This program will be held virtually. Once you register you will receive a Zoom link in the confirmation. 
    2. This webinar will be RECORDED and available for 2 months all registrants.