Join Kyle Port, Manager of Plant Records, on November 2 at 2 pm to learn how plant inventory work is being tackled on Hemlock Hill at the Arnold Arboretum. Participants will travel less than a quarter mile over gravel, woodchips, and pavement. Meet at the bottom of Hemlock Hill Summit Road near Tsuga canadensis 1230-98*A. See map at website https://arboretum.harvard.edu/events/event-signup/?id=59014 for on-site location.
On November 19 from 1 – 3 at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, learn to make a lush autumn floral table centerpiece, using seasonal flowers and foliage. We’re using chicken wire mechanic in a vase to support the stems (no floral foam). Your centerpiece will include unusual flowers in rich tones and with textural interest.
Mary Beth Hayes is an avid gardener and floral designer who began studying floral design so she could bring the beauty of the garden into her home. She’s taken classes with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and Cass School of Floral Design in Watertown, MA. She has studied with noted floral designers Francoise Weeks, Holly Chapple and Hitomi Gilliam. Mary Beth loves to share the techniques she’s learned with others so we can all “play with flowers” and create beautiful, natural flower arrangements and more.
$115 Member Adult; $130 Adult; $140 Adult Pair (Registration includes admission to the Garden) Register at www.nebg.org
This two-day Native Plants Trust symposium on November 2 and 3 focuses on establishing a groundbreaking network of native seed users and producers in New England, including government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Speakers (to be announced) from other parts of the country will share success factors in establishing a native seed network and discuss strategy, logistics, and tasks, from seed collection and storage to the uses of seed in restoration and nursery cultivation. NPT members $120, $144 nonmembers. Register and learn more details at http://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/symposium-need-seed-strategy-northeast/
The next New England Botanical Club meting will be held November 5 at 7 pm Eastern at Harvard University in Haller Lecture Hall, Room 102, Geological Museum, 24 Oxford Street in Cambridge. The door is to the right of Harvard Museum of Natural History entrance. Dr. José Eduardo Meireles, Assistant Professor of Plant Evolution and Systematics, School of Biology and Ecology at University of Maine, will speak on Plant Diversity Shows its True Colors. There is an urgent need to understand the phylogenetic and functional dimensions of plant diversity at global scales. Reflectance spectral data — how leaves reflect light across different wavelengths — is emerging as a phenomenal tool for characterizing plant traits and physiology as well as identifying lineages at different evolutionary scales. He will discuss applications of spectral data in plant biodiversity science, including monitoring biodiversity, estimating traits, and identifying lineages using spectral data. He will also demonstrate how to integrate phylogenetic models and spectra as well as leverage herbarium specimens to rapidly advance our knowledge of phenotypic evolution in plants. Free and open to the public.
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts is a one-stop compendium of the most productive, edible fruit-and nut-bearing crops that push the boundaries of what can survive winters in cold-temperate growing regions. While most nurseries and guidebooks feature plants that are riddled with pest problems (such as apples and peaches), veteran growers and founders of the Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano, focus on both common and unfamiliar fruits that have few, if any, pest or disease problems and an overall higher level of resilience. With beautiful and instructive color photographs throughout, the book is also full of concise, clearly written botanical and cultural information based on the authors’ years of growing experience. The fifty fruits and nuts featured provide a nice balance of the familiar and the exotic: from almonds and pecans to more unexpected fruits like maypop and Himalayan chocolate berry. Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts gives adventurous gardeners all they need to get growing.
Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano are both visual artists and codirectors of Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens in New York’s Hudson Valley. Their garden began as a source of inspiration and raw materials for their art. Over time, their interest in growing a wider selection of plants expanded until the garden encompassed eleven acres and became their primary passion. Along the way, they began planting a vast diversity of plants, both edible and ornamental. This grew into an extensive collection of cold-hardy cactus, magnolia trees, viburnums, and grafted fruit trees, with a focus on rare, underutilized plants. The arboretum is a nonprofit organization and level II arboretum. Levy and Serrano have been opening Hortus Arboretum for Open Days for many years.
The webinar with the authors, sponsored by The Garden Conservancy, takes place November 3 beginning at 2 pm. Conservancy Members $5 per person; General admission $15 A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar. Register at www.gardenconservancy.org
In this Wellesley College Botanic Gardens class on four mornings, November 2, 4, 9 and 11, from 9:30 – 12:30, Tara Connaughton will help sharpen your drawing, painting, and color mixing skills through a series of small studies of fall treasures such as leaves and dried fruits. Each week will focus on a different subject with the goal of accurately representing each specimen’s form and color with watercolor. Emphasis will be placed on painting technique as well as the process of analyzing, mixing, and rendering color. Prerequisite is the completion of at least one Foundations class, or equivalent. Online via Zoom. WCBG members $150, nonmembers $190. Register by calling 781-283-3094.
The natural world teems with remarkable conversations, many beyond human hearing range. However, scientists are using groundbreaking digital technologies to uncover these astonishing sounds, revealing vibrant communication among our fellow creatures across the Tree of Life.
Guggenheim Fellow Karen Bakker, an award-winning professor at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, shares fascinating and surprising stories of nonhuman sound, interweaving insights from technological innovation and traditional knowledge. She explores scientists using sound to protect and regenerate endangered species from the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic and the Amazon and reveals the shocking impacts of noise pollution on both animals and plants.
Bakker examines how artificial intelligence can decode nonhuman sounds and how researchers are building dictionaries in East African Elephant and Sperm Whalish. Surveying the frontiers of innovation, she recounts scientists’ successful attempts to engage in digitally mediated dialogues with bats and honeybees. Technology often distracts us from nature, but what if it could reconnect us instead?
Bakker offers hope for environmental conservation and affirms humanity’s relationship with nature in the digital age. After learning about the unsuspected wonders of nature’s sounds, you’ll never view (or hear) walks outdoors in the same way again. This Smithsonian Associates presentation takes place November 3 at 6:45 pm on Zoom, and is $20 for Smithsonian members, $25 for nonmembers. Register, and receive information how to avail yourself of a discount offering on Bakker’s book The Sounds of Life (Princeton University Press), at https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/sounds-of-life
Treat your dog or cat to delicious homemade snacks and learn about the benefits of herbal infusions for pets in an educational, hands-on environment. You’ll learn a technique for making herbal, pet-friendly tinctures with chamomile, rosemary, mint, cannabis, and others, which we’ll incorporate into wholesome, limited-ingredient pet treats. All supplies will be provided by the instructor except for cannabis; if you want to make a cannabis infusion to take home, you must bring your own cannabis. Small vials will be provided to take the tinctures made in class home. You must be 21+ to take this class. The class and venue are in compliance with MA cannabis laws; no cannabis may be bought or sold with the venue or on the property. The instructor for this Cambridge Center for Adult Education class, to be held Saturday, November 5 from 1 – 4, is Melissa Smith. This class will meet in-person at CCAE with a limited student capacity. Please note that COVID-19 proof of vaccination is required. Please view our In-Person Class Guidelines prior to enrolling. $75. Sign up at www.ccae.org.
Join The Boston Public Library at the main branch on Boylston Street on the 150th anniversary of the Great Boston Fire with local author Stephanie Schorow as she recounts the event’s history, from the foolish decisions that precipitated it, to the heroics of firefighters who fought it. The lecture will be held on November 9 beginning at 6 pm.
For two days in November 1872, a massive fire swept through Boston, leaving the downtown in ruins and the population traumatized. Coming barely a year after the infamous Chicago fire, Boston’s inferno turned out to be one of the most expensive fires per acre in U.S. history. Yet today few are aware of how close Boston came to destruction. Both the book and presentation are lavishly illustrated with period artwork and photographs. Published just before the fire’s 150th anniversary, The Great Boston Fire captures the drama of a life-and-death battle in the heart of the city.
Stephanie Schorow is a journalist, writing instructor, and the author of eight nonfiction books on a variety of topics in Boston history. They include: The Great Boston Fire: The Inferno that Nearly Incinerated the City (Globe Pequot); Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood (Union Park Press); and Drinking Boston: A History of the City and its Spirits (Union Park Press), and, with Beverly Ford, The Boston Mob Guide: Hitmen, Hoodlum and Hideouts. She will publish an updated version of her 2005 book The Cocoanut Grove Fire: A Boston Tragedy in November. Her novel Cat Dreaming will be published in 2023 by Small Town Girl Press. She shares her home in Medford with two cats that like to walk over her keyboard when she is typing.
Seating limited to 228. Registration required HERE or email research@bpl.org
Discover America’s Eden: Newport Through the Ages with architectural historian and Honorary Member of the Garden Club of America, John Tschirch. Newport, Rhode Island has been often referred to as “The Eden of America.” This richly illustrated lecture series celebrates the publication of America’s Eden: Newport Landscapes Through the Ages (2022). Lectures will explore over three centuries of landscape design, literature, and art that have been created in this verdant place. With garden shovel and spade, pen, brush, paint, and camera, generations of gardeners, nursery owners, writers, and artists have literally and figuratively shaped the land. Among them were renowned figures such as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons, writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry James, the painter Childe Hassam, and pioneering photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston. The result of their work is an extraordinary heritage, a vision of human-made Eden through the ages.
Lecture I on October 26 is The Colonial Landscape, an exploration of the development of Newport’s topography from colonial settlement through the 18th century, when classical ideals of landscape planning fused with practical horticulture. A view of period maps, rare literary works, and letters reveal this lost world. On November 2, explore The Genteel Landscape. Immerse in Newport’s rise as a fashionable seaside resort during the Victorian age, when the builders of summer cottages, nursery owners, and gardeners created an enclave of picturesque gardens while sight-seers and renowned painters and writers celebrated the city’s natural scenery and geological wonders. November 9 brings The Art of Scenery. Shaping the land as an art form became an evolving subject for both practice and theory during the late 19th century. The work of master landscape architects from Frederick Law Olmsted to Rose Standish Nichols are addressed in a series of gardens that combined both extraordinary trees with distant views of sea and rolling hills. Finally, on November 16, enjoy The Gilded Age. Monumental architecture and formal gardens made their dramatic appearance in Newport in the 1890s, when classical pavilions and parterres transformed the city’s windswept cliffs and meadows. This lecture examines the era’s elaborate gardens and the estate gardeners who formed a vibrant creative community.
John Tschirch is an architectural historian, writer, teacher and Honorary Member of the Garden Club of America. His latest books include America’s Eden: Newport Landscapes through the Ages (2022) and Newport: The Artful City (2020), which received the Victorian Society of America Book Award in 2021. John received his M.A. (1986) in Architectural History and Historic Preservation from the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. His thirty-year career in the preservation and study of historic landmarks and landscapes across the globe has led him on treks to French chateaux, English castles, Italian villas, Austrian palaces, Croatian fortresses, Argentinian mansions and the Gilded Age houses of America. Currently, he teaches the theory and history of design at Rhode Island School of Design, advises on historic preservation projects, and has entered the world of historical fiction writing, inspired by his travels, with the publication of Gods and Girls: Tales of Art, Seduction and Obsession (2019).
John’s work in preserving and interpreting historic places has been featured in the Magazine Antiques, Martha Stewart Living, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler and he has appeared on the A&E documentary series, America’s Castles. From 1986 to 2013, he served the Preservation Society of Newport County, first as Director of Education and later as Director of Museum Affairs and Architectural Historian, overseeing the curatorial, conservation, education and research activities at the organizations eleven historic house museums and gardens. He has published essays on history and socio-cultural issues for The Public Humanist (2018-19), “The New Thing at Newport: The Tiffany Glass Wall at Kingscote” in The Magazine Antiques (January 2013), the essay, “Newport Cottages” for The Encyclopedia of New England Culture (Yale University Press, 2005) and “Newport” in Parisian Palaces of La Belle Epoque (Paris 1992). He was inducted as an Honorary Member of the Garden Club of America in 2012 for his contributions to the research and restoration of historic landscapes. In recognition of his service to historic preservation, he received the 2013 Frederick C. Williamson Professional Leadership Award from the Rhode Island State Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission.
The preservation of heritage sites of international significance is of foremost interest to John. He has lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad on architecture, landscapes and historic cities, from the Attingham Conference in London to Yale University’s Mellon Center Seminar on 18th Century French Design and the UNESCO sponsored conference on Architecture and Culture in Buenos Aires.
