Boston Flora

Month: January 2022

  • Friday, January 21, 9:00 am – 10:00 am EST- Shaw House: Berkshire’s Hidden Gem, Online

    In this January 21 Berkshire Gardens Trust talk, Sarah Somerville will talk about the history of Shaw House, an Elizabethan manor house, told through the development and changes in its gardens. Built from the profits of the cloth trade in 1581, the house has enjoyed visits from royalty, including Elizabeth I and Charles I, as well as being the setting for Civil War battles and accommodation for soldiers during World Wars. The gardens were once as grand as the building itself, with aromatic shrubs surrounded by painted statues and sparkling fountains.   

    Now, following over £6 million of conservation and restoration, the House is a visitor attraction and conference center. Many of its secrets were not revealed until restoration and Sarah will have great pleasure to share them with us.

    ​While completing her degree in Museum and Gallery Studies, Sarah Somerville first worked as a tour guide at Highclere Castle, used as the setting for the filming of Downton Abbey. She later joined the Public Opening and Events department, remaining at the Castle for over seven years before moving to Shaw House in 2019.  In 2021, Sarah published the first guide book for Shaw House and hopes that her enthusiasm increases awareness of this important historic home and garden.

    ​Booking: Book online by clicking HERE. The tickets are £5. We will send you a Zoom link for the lecture a few days before the 21st January. The lecture will last approximately 1 hour, followed by questions. The lecture will be recorded with the link available for a week to those people who have booked for the event. 

    Queries: Please contact Janet by email at bgtmembership@gmail.com.

  • Tuesday, January 25, 10:00 am GMT – Forgotten Women Gardeners: Petticoats and Plants, the Untold Story of Scotland’s Gardening Women 1800 – 1930, Online

    Celebrate Burns Night with this Gardens Trust lecture on January 25. £5, and you may register HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    The phenomenal success of Scotland’s gardening men has been well documented throughout history, but what of the women? Until now, there have been only glimpses of the extraordinary women who went ‘beyond their garden gates’ – women who cultivated, collected and made substantial contributions to horticulture within Britain. In this lecture, biographies of a selection of Scottish gardening women ranging from plant hunters to landscape architects reveal how they were effectively marginalized and why their work has largely been forgotten within the narrative of Scotland’s garden history.

    Dr Deborah Reid promoted London’s Historic Royal Palaces and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre before swapping a career in Marketing and PR for plants. Having retrained in horticulture at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, she was awarded a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2015 for her thesis entitled ‘Unsung heroines of horticulture: Scottish gardening women, 1800 to 1930’ and has published widely on the subject, including the forthcoming work: Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in 19th Century Canada, edited by Ann Shteir (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh where she lectures on the social history of gardening and mentors apprentice gardeners working within historic gardens at English Heritage properties. She is also a working gardener and serves as a trustee for Jock Tamson’s Gairden, a community garden in the heart of Edinburgh.

  • Saturdays, February 5 – February 26, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm – Garden Design Basics, Online

    Capturing your ideas in an easy to understand plan is essential when creating a landscape design. This online Tower Hill Botanic Garden interactive workshop with Cheryl Salatino gets you focused on the methods and tools required to develop your design approach. We will use a common residential project as the foundation for sparking new ideas for what is possible. Each week you will evolve your design and present your work for feedback and questions. Our collaborative sessions will provide the skills you need to take the next step in designing your own personal garden. The sessions will be from 9:30 – 12:30, and are $125 for Tower Hill members, $150 for nonmembers. Register at www.towerhillbg.org.

    Goals of the Workshop
    1. Understanding existing site conditions, general measurements and reading a plot plan
    2. Capturing your ideas on paper
    3. Understanding key design principles
    4. Applying your design knowledge on a residential project (instructor will provide)

    Material List (Not provided W/ Course)
    1. Pencil & Eraser
    2. Engineering Scale
    3. Circle template
    4. Straight edge (ruler or triangle)
    5. Tracing paper
    6. Sketch paper
    7. 10′ or greater tape measure

    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.

  • Wednesday, January 26, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Balmoral Cottage, Benenden, Online

    A visit to the extraordinary and charming garden around Balmoral Cottage in Benenden, Kent has become a ‘must‘ for all lovers of topiary. This Gardens Trust lecture , co-sponsored with the Kent Gardens Trust, on January 26 at 1 pm Eastern time will attempt to recreate the magic on our screens. £5. Register HERE.

    Just over 30 years ago, Donald and Charlotte Molesworth were, by good fortune, able to purchase the almost derelict small house that stood in the abandoned old kitchen garden of Collingwood (Cherry) Ingram’s house, The Grange. They moved in with one light bulb, a bed, a small table , 2 dogs, a donkey , 7 hens, and boxes of Narcissus pseudo-narcissus from Donald’s father’s garden, yew seedlings as part of a wedding present, and numerous plants in every conceivable kind of container. A new garden started to form in their minds the next day.

    Thousands of boxwood and other cuttings were taken, the old kitchen garden dug over and weeded to form a temporary nursery, and a pond was dug by a friend as a wedding present! A detailed plan emerged, and in time became a reality. Donald had gained inspiration from a wonderful garden made by his father; Charlotte had become inspired by the topiary loved by her mother. The fusion of interests at Balmoral Cottage has resulted in a marvelous blend of weird and wonderful topiary interspersed with quiet niches filled with plant treasures of all kinds.

    Charlotte Molesworth is a professional garden designer and artist and has built up a reputation for her topiary designs. Donald has been a horticulturist for as long as he remembers!

  • Tuesday, February 1, 6:30 pm – Deer Resistant Design, Online

    Deer Resistant Design author and garden expert Karen Chapman shares tips and tricks in this Morven Museum & Garden virtual program at 6:30 on February 1, with Q&A.

    Discover time-and taste-tested design strategies, tips, and tricks that will help you create a beautiful fence-free garden that thrives despite the deer.

    This informative and entertaining virtual lecture includes a powerpoint presentation highlighting information from Karen Chapman’s Deer Resistant Design book and is a great opportunity to share your garden’s deer challenges and find solutions during the live Q&A session.

    Email questions to dlampertrudman@morven.org in the week prior to the program. This program will *not* be recorded, so be sure to save the date, reserve your most comfy seat at home, and have a paper and pencil handy to jot down lots of great tips!

    Detailed handouts will be provided by email prior to the program. Zoom link will be sent to participants the day of the program – with reminder emails sent in the hours leading up to the program.

    From Karen Chapman:

    Born in England, I grew up with a trowel in my hand.

    After moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1996 I joined one of the leading garden nurseries as a garden plant specialist. Helping hundreds of customers create beautiful combinations of plants to enhance their outdoor living spaces was always a delight. Ten years later I established my business Le jardinet in order to provide a service that takes all the time, stress and guesswork out of the design process.

    In the recent past I have taught container gardening at a local Community College, and continue to teach both container and landscape design in occasional workshops and events as well offering a range of online learning opportunities .

    When I’m not teaching garden design or talking about it I am usually writing about it, and my articles and designs have been featured in many national gardening publications including Fine Gardening, Country Gardens, Sunset, and Garden Design. I have co-authored two books: the award winning Fine Foliage (St. Lynn’s Press, 2013) and highly acclaimed Gardening with Foliage First (Timber Press, 2017), while my latest book Deer-Resistant Design was released in 2019 (Timber Press).

    Specializing in creating artistic plant combinations with a four season foliage framework, functional outdoor living spaces and deer resistant, summer-dry designs, it would give me great pleasure to share my love of gardening with you.

    $10 for Morven members, $15 for nonmembers. Register through Eventbrite HERE.

  • Tuesday, January 25, 6:30 pm – Genetically Modified Plants: Friend or Foe? Online

    The Gardening Consultants Council, in conjunction with the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts. will sponsor a free January 25 Zoom lecture on Genetically Modified Plants: Friend or Foe? at 6:30 pm. The speaker is Gretel Anspach. Register HERE.

    Gretel is a Lifetime Master Gardener with the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, a Trustee of Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and a recently-retired systems engineer for Raytheon. Gretel helped to establish and maintain two food production gardens that have provided fresh produce to the Marlboro Food Pantry for the last ten years.

  • Wednesday, January 26, 6:30 pm – Curated Cuisine: Root Cellar Cooking with Jason Bond

    Curated Cuisine is a monthly WBUR series where renowned chefs, both local and national, share their food philosophy, their career journeys, and what they learned during the pandemic.

    Join us for a virtual conversation with chef Jason Bond, James Beard Award nominee for “Best Chef, Northeast” and executive chef of Clover Food Lab. He’ll discuss his “root-cellar” style of cooking, which was shaped by being raised as a kid around farming and preserving the harvest in Wyoming and Kansas. Irene Li, co-founder of Mei Mei Restaurant Group, moderates.

    Join the conversation! Submit questions before or during the event here. $5, free for WBUR Sustainers. Register HERE.

  • Tuesday, January 25, 5:15 pm – 6:30 pm – Earthquakes in New England, 1600 – 1800: Extraordinary Natural Events and Timekeeping Practices in Early America, Online

    Katrin Kleeman of the German Maritime Museum at the Leibniz Institute for Maritime History, will speak with the Massachusetts Historical Society on January 25 at 5:15 online, with comments by Lukas Rieppel of Brown University.

    New England is more seismically active than most would expect. Several notable earthquakes shook the northeast in the past, such as in 1638, 1663, 1727, 1755, or 1783, to name but a few. In early America, earthquakes were rare enough, however, to be perceived as unusual events that contemporaries remarked upon them in their diaries, almanacks, sermons, and newspapers. Although clocks were still rare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, diarists often gave a precise time when an earthquake struck—which varied, often, drastically from observer to observer. This allows for questions on how and how reliably time was kept.

    The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

    Please note, this is an online event hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information. Register to attend online

  • Sundays, January 23, February 27, and March 27, 2:00 pm – The Big Chill: Early Environmental Histories of Climate Change, Online

    Historic Deerfield presents a free three part virtual lecture series beginning Sunday, January 23 at 2 pm, and continuing monthly. From a centuries-long Little Ice Age to the global aftermath of the largest volcanic eruption in the last 10,000 years, this year’s series is devoted to early environmental histories and their impact on people and places. Join us for three virtual webinars this winter exploring how North American Indigenous communities and European colonizers understood and experienced the plunging temperatures and deep freezes, catastrophic flooding, and severe droughts and famine that became part of cultural memory and identity.

    Topics include The Problem of Climate in Early Colonial History, presented by Sam White of Ohio State University, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World, presented by Gillen D’Arcy Wood of University of Illinois, and Snow Cover and Winter Knowledge of the Little Ice Age, presented by Thomas M. Wickman of Trinity College. Thomas Wickman, by the way, is author of Snowshoe Country: An Environmental and Cultural History of Winter in the Early American Northeast.

    Free, but registration is required by clicking HERE This lecture series will be presented live via Zoom webinar. The link to the webinar will be sent to registrants prior to the event. Webinar will be recorded and available to registrants for viewing for two weeks after the live event.

  • Wednesday, January 19, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Trees That Always Please, Online

    Join Fine Gardening Magazine on January 19 at 7 for a free one hour webinar followed by a thirty minute Q &A on Trees with Paul Cappiello.

    Trees are a big investment. This isn’t only because they often have a hefty price tag, but also because they take up a lot of garden real estate and aren’t plants that you’ll be able to readily relocate. When choosing a tree, it’s important to make sure it performs in all four seasons. It shouldn’t just have lovely spring blooms and decent fall color. It should also have winter interest and other noteworthy traits that shine when it’s not at its peak. And a tree should be largely pest- and disease-free, with low needs when it comes to care. After all, who wants to invest in a plant that will require 50 years of high maintenance?

    Woody plant expert Paul Cappiello understands these requirements well. As executive director for the Yew Dell Botanical Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky, he is constantly evaluating the pros and cons of trees. And on his plant travels around the world, he’s always keeping an eye out for trees that are exceptional in myriad ways. For this presentation, Paul reached out to several of his horticultural friends and colleagues to provide you with a list of incredible trees that you will never regret planting. Whatever you choose, it will be one of the best garden investments you’ll make. Register at https://www.finegardening.com/article/trees-that-always-please-webinar