Daily Archives: March 7, 2022

Saturday, March 12, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm – Spring Planting for Fall Color, Online

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As the spring equinox approaches, winter turns to spring and our thoughts turn towards planting and visits to the local garden center. The Berkshire Botanical Garden invites you to shift your focus and consider what plants will enrich your garden during the next yearly equinox, from Summer to Fall. Planning now for Fall color and Winter interest will pay off in droves come Autumn. This online lecture will help you plan ahead, making the most of your garden year-round. Both woody plants and perennials will be addressed. Bring paper and a pencil, we’re sure you’ll want to take notes!

Allyson Levy & Scott Serrano are two obsessed gardeners who garden all year long. Their goal has been to create a botanical garden that can serve as an educational resource for the public, as well as a “living textbook” of the diversity of plant life that can be grown in the Hudson Valley. Both are botanical artists who began buying plants for their artwork. When they realized they were buying and planting the same plants, they began to design a garden that is now the Hortus Arboretum & Botanical Garden.

BBG members $20; nonmembers $30. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org

Courtesy www.melindamyers.com

Monday, March 21, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Lava and Water: Great Floods of the Pacific Northwest, Online

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The landscape of the Pacific Northwest has been significantly shaped by massive floods in the geologic past. Beginning approximately 17 million years ago, the broad lava flows of the Columbia River Flood Basalts poured forth from widespread fissures near the borders of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. An estimated 160,000 km3 of basalt was emplaced, mostly within a million-year span centered around 16 million years ago. Anyone traveling the Columbia River Gorge by ship or car can appreciate the voluminous nature of these flows, representing over 300 individual eruptions. In a March 21 Zoom presentation brought to us by Smithsonian Associates, geologist Kirt Kempter explores the likely connection of these eruptions with the Yellowstone hot spot, along with a trail of supervolcano eruptions across southern Idaho.

Kempter fast-forwards to the end of the last Ice Age cycle, in which flooding again sculpted the landscape of the Pacific Northwest—although this time it was water, not lava, that claimed responsibility. The vast Lake Missoula, formed by an ice dam from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, catastrophically breached the dam and poured across the central and eastern Washington region, scouring the flood basalt province and carving much of the Columbia River Gorge. The scenario would then repeat, as there is evidence for more than 100 of these breached ice-dam floods.

Almost synchronously, another Ice Age lake in Utah, Lake Bonneville, produced a catastrophic flood that emptied into the Columbia River, creating its own scoured landscape along the Snake River in southern Idaho. Kempter uses maps, diagrams, and Google Earth images to help tell these amazing stories of flooding. $25 for Smithsonian Associates members, $30 for nonmembers. Register at www.smithsonianassociates.org