On November 1 enjoy the second in the Gardens Trust series on gardens of the French Riviera. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 4 sessions at a cost of £16 via the link here. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Famed for Hidcote Manor, from the 1920s Johnston spent his winters near Menton creating gardens at La Serre de la Madone (below) which he bought in 1924. He experimented with plantings of flower drifts in single colours to contrast with brightly coloured leaved shrubs that he introduced from around the world. Plants from South Africa and China were acclimatised here before being introduced to Hidcote. At its height he employed 12 gardeners for the 7ha of terraces. In 1948 he donated Hidcote Manor to the National Trust and spent his last ten years permanently at La Serre de la Madone. His long-standing friendships included the garden designer Norah Lindsay as well as Charles de Noailles whose Hyères gardens proved too dry, he acquired l’Ermitage de Saint Francois in Grasse, renaming it Villa Noailles. We will explore his plantsman’s garden through the seasons.
Caroline Holmes is an experienced and accomplished lecturer working for a wide range of organizations including leading tour and cruise operators. She is an Accredited Lecturer of The Arts Society and is also a Course Director for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. Her own gardens are open to the public and have featured in many magazine articles and on television in both Britain and Japan. Since the 1990s she has been researching, writing about and lecturing on the Riviera. Caroline is author of 12 books, her latest being Where the wildness pleases – the English garden celebrated (2021).
Join Mass Audubon for a talk and walk at Berkshire Botanical Garden on October 26. The focus? The tricky, skulky, secretive, and absolutely stunning sparrows that spend their fall in Berkshire County. Together, we will learn helpful tips for identification, the various species that breed and migrate through the Berkshires and how to enjoy their subtleties as they dart and dive into grasses and shrubs. Bring binoculars and sturdy walking shoes. We will be exploring the gardens in search of sparrows!
Zach Adams has been studying birds since childhood, when he fell in love with the sounds in the marshes of wood ducks and redwing blackbirds. He holds a BS in Environmental Science from Juniata College and has worked as an educator and program leader since the age of 16. From reptiles and amphibians to live birds of prey, he enjoys teaching on any topic in nature. Zach has been a teacher/naturalist for Mass Audubon’s Berkshire sanctuaries since 2018. He leads programs in birding, hiking, tracking, and canoeing. He is passionate about ornithology and the opportunity to share with everyone around him his love for birds.
As important designed landscapers in their own right, Sheldon Goodman will explore the people behind their histories, such as the disabled cemetery designer whose wife was one of the first women sci-fi writers and the horticultural family who populated Abney Park with tree specimens that still exist today.
This free talk is part of the Lottery funded Engaging With Our Future project at The Gardens Trust – a program of activity which aims to reach out to new audiences and attract new supporters.
Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. Register HERE.
Sheldon K. Goodmanis a public historian, media producer, museum professional and qualified City of Westminster Guide who loves sharing his passion for history and heritage with audiences and institutions. Passionate about public engagement, Sheldon’s approach is to make history as accessible as possible. He is an Associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a member of the Victorian Society. In 2013, Sheldon founded The Cemetery Club which produces films, talks and tours of cemeteries.
As gardeners, our work extends beyond the soil, rippling out to communities of every type. From our human neighbors, to pollinators and beyond, what and how we grow has an indelible effect on the world around us. This year, Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Rooted in Place symposium speakers will consider the impacts of the way we garden on the world around us. Both in person and online options will be available. The event takes place November 13 from 10 – 5 at the Duffin Theater in Lenox, or online. Registration ranges from $45 – $110. Visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/8th-annual-rooted-place-ecological-gardening-symposium-seeding-community-garden
Wambui Ippolito: Growing In Weeds: So many children grow up with sterile green spaces designed with their safety in mind — structured spaces that don’t allow for exploration, imagination and the sense of danger that fuels curiosity. How can landscape designers, gardeners, parents, and communities approach design and create new spaces that bring a new vitality into children’s green spaces? How do these spaces help our children to be emboldened explorers and better stewards of landscapes they inhabit?
Wambui Ippolito is a horticulturist and landscape designer and a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. She develops programming for museums, public gardens and parks exploring the broader context of horticulture, focusing on the intersections between migration, culture, history and science. She lectures both in the USA and internationally and is the principal designer of her New York-based landscape design firm. In her former career, Wambui worked as a Development & Democracy Consultant. She is multilingual, fluent in five languages. Wambui is the founder of the BIPOC Hort Group, a multicultural organization with membership from the African American, Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean public and private professional ornamental horticulture community.
Bringing Meadows into the Garden: With global warming and energy conservation in mind, let’s cut down on mowing and blowing and replace some of our lawns with higher grass. Page Dickey will discuss a wide range of examples showing how beautifully meadows — however small — and meadow plants can be incorporated into our gardens.
Page has been passionately gardening since her early 20s and writing about gardening, as well as designing gardens for others, for the last three decades. She has written eight books and edited another. Most of her books concentrate on aspects of garden design, such as creating gardens that reflect their settings (Gardens in the Spirit of Place and Breaking Ground) or planning gardens as extensions of our homes (Inside Out), in each case illustrated by exceptional examples around America. Duck Hill Journal and Embroidered Ground are about Duck Hill, where she lived for 34 years, about the process of making the garden there, and her thoughts on gardening in general. Page was the editor of the book Outstanding American Gardens, celebrating 25 years of the Garden Conservancy with photographs by Marion Brenner. Her new book, Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again, describes leaving a beloved garden of 34 years, finding a home in the northwest corner of Connecticut and falling in love with its land. Page lectures around the country about plants and garden design. She has written many articles over the years, including in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Horticulture, Elle Décor, Garden Design, and The New York Times. The garden at Duck Hill has been featured in a variety of periodicals. She is a director emeritus of the Garden Conservancy and is one of the two founders of its Open Days Program. She also serves on the boards of Stonecrop Garden, in Cold Spring, N.Y.; Hollister House Garden, in Washington, Conn.; and The Little Guild, in Cornwall, Conn. She and her husband, Bosco Schell, are both members of the Friends of Horticulture at Wave Hill. Page was recently elected as an Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America. In 2015, Page and her husband moved to Falls Village, Conn., to an old church with 17 acres of fields and woods and a view of the Berkshire foothills. They are off on a new gardening adventure.
Agriculture as Conservation: Lessons for the Landscape: Our increasingly complex and dire environmental challenges can’t be met by wildland preservation alone. It has become abundantly clear that we must also radically change our approach to intensively human-managed landscapes. Since 2018, Stone Barns Center has been managing over 350 acres of former traditionally managed pasture land (now predominantly part of a state park preserve) using holistic regenerative methods focused around intensive, multi-species rotational livestock grazing. These efforts have been coupled with a comprehensive ecological monitoring program measuring responses in our soil health, plant biodiversity, bird biodiversity, insect biodiversity, and water quality. This presentation will share some of our preliminary discoveries from listening closely to the landscape and how those lessons could be applied by stewards of a variety of human-impacted landscapes, including the landscaping and gardening community.
Elijah Goodwin is the ecology and GIS manager at Stone Barns Center. He first joined the organization in 2019, monitoring bird populations on the pastured grasslands managed through the Conservation Action Plan with Rockefeller State Park Preserve. He previously conducted a four-year study on the wood thrush populations within the Park Preserve. Since starting an expanded role with the organization in 2020, he has been working to build out the ecological monitoring program and create and implement an ArcGIS-based database system to collect, manage, synthesize, and present the vast array of monitoring and management data collected from across the farm and the Center. Elijah has been working as a research scientist and/or science educator for over 25 years. While his primary training is as an ornithologist, he has experience working with soil, plant communities, and DNA technology . His scientific experience includes banding hawks and owls during migration in New Jersey; surveying beaver activity and bird populations in the Adirondacks; and studying bird song learning all over the Eastern Seaboard and Mexico. He holds a B.S. in wildlife biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an M.S.T in biology education from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology, also from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On the side: Elijah enjoys time spent in the outdoors with his wife, Katherine, and child, Spirit. He is an award-winning nature and night/light painting photographer and owns a small photography, education and ecological consulting business, Whimbrel Nature. He has served as president and a board member for the Color Camera Club of Westchester and is a science advisor for ⅔ For The Birds.
Ecosystem Approaches to Landscape Design: Building Resiliency Through Community: Today’s gardeners are faced with more challenges than ever before—a changing climate, more pressure from invasive plants and pests, and more decisions about what to put into and how to manage our landscapes. Annie White is striving to create a new culture of gardening where we move away from carefully curated gardens, work more with rather than against nature, and become better stewards of the ecosystems within and around our gardens. Annie will share her ecosystem approach to landscape design that helps build resiliency through community. Sharing case studies of her successes and failures, Annie’s talk will open your eyes to the myriad of naturally occurring processes in the landscapes and how we can steward these to create both beautiful and ecologically significant landscapes.
Annie White (below) is an Ecological Landscape Designer and the owner of Nectar Landscape Design Studio in Stowe, Vermont. She is also a full-time Lecturer of Sustainable Landscape Horticulture + Design at the University of Vermont. Annie earned an MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2005 and a PhD in Plant & Soil Science from The University of Vermont in 2016. She is passionate about designing cutting-edge and science-based ecological landscapes at all scales—from urban backyards to rural agricultural landscapes.
This two-day Native Plant Trust symposium on November 2 and 3 from 10 – 3 (one hour reserved for lunch) 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. Please visit http://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/symposium-need-seed-strategy-northeast-class/ for details and to register. $120 for NPT members, $144 for nonmembers.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts will present James Wines on Tuesday, November 1 from 6:30 – 8 at the Gund Hall Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. Free and open to the public. Speaker James Wines – born in Chicago, IL 1932 – is the founder and president of SITE, an environmental art and architecture organization, chartered in New York City in 1970. He is the former Chairman of Environmental Design at Parsons School of Design and a retired Professor of Architecture at Penn State University. His architecture, landscape, and public space projects are based on a site-specific response to surrounding contexts. Prof. Wines’ educational philosophy advocates ‘integrative thinking,’ as a means of including multi-disciplinary ideas from outside the design professions. He has written seven books on art and design, including ON SITE-ON ENERGY – Scribners & Sons 1974, DE-ARCHITECTURE – Rizzoli International 1987, and GREEN ARCHITECTURE – Taschen Verlag 2000. He has designed more than one hundred and fifty buildings, public spaces, exhibitions, landscapes, and environmental art works for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, the ANCE Annual Award for an International Architect (Italy 2011), and the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation (USA 1995). He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kress Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Graham Foundation, and Ford Foundation. In 2021 there was a retrospective of his drawings for SITE at the Tchoban Museum in Berlin. Prof. Wines continues to work on international art and design projects, write, lecture, and engage in educational programs based on environmental initiatives.
Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.
The Garden Club of the Back Bay will once again be selling gorgeous holiday wreaths, both decorated and undecorated, after a two-year hiatus due to COVID. We will be back creating at The First Lutheran Church, Boston, from December 5 – 8, and deliveries and pick up will begin in the afternoon of Tuesday, December 6 through Thursday, December 8. Responding to the new realities of social distancing, however, there are a few changes from the past.
Sales will move completely online, at https://bostonflora.com/shop/ If you absolutely must pay by check, please email info@bostonflora.com with the specifics of your order, and we will confirm availability, after which a check made out to The Garden Club of the Back Bay must be mailed to us at PO Box 991017, Boston, MA 02199.
Our offerings are streamlined. We will be selling a limited number of fully decorated standard (23” diameter) wreaths, with your choice of bow color and accent designations of Natural, Glamorous Glitz, or Designer’s Choice. Wreaths with bows and plain wreaths are available in two sizes, standard and large (29” – 30” diameter). There will be no special sizes available this year.
We are discontinuing poinsettia sales for 2022.
Prices have gone up due to the rising prices of our core supplies. We are still competitive with what local florists are charging. This is one of our two annual fundraising activities, and every penny earned goes back to the trees and neighborhood beautification. This is an all-volunteer endeavor. Prices range from $50 for a standard size undecorated wreath to $75 for a standard wreath with bow, up to $195 for a fully decorated, “museum quality” wreath. Large wreaths are $70 (undecorated) and $100 (large with large bow). Large wreaths cannot be ordered fully decorated. All wreaths will be trimmed and fluffed, with a hanging loop added for your convenience. Bows are also available in two sizes, standard ($25) and large ($30), with wires for attaching.
Because fewer decorators will be working at the Church to reduce crowding, we will be cutting off sales of fully decorated wreaths when we reach our expected capacity for fulfillment.
Confirmations of purchases and delivery times will be made by email.
For other inquiries, you may call our new phone number, 617-872-2697, but email is always preferred.
We know many of you found other sources for holiday decorations during the pandemic, but remember how beautiful our wreaths are, and the joy of having them delivered to your door.
A very special art class will take place at Hollister House Garden, 300 Nettleton Hollow Road in Washington, Connecticut, on November 12 at 10 am. Create a “gift from the heart” with this simple woodland watercolor scene, just in time for gift-giving or a holiday card! All skill levels welcome in this workshop filled with step-by-step demonstrations of a variety of fun watercolor techniques and plenty of individual instruction.
The watercolor workshops at Hollister House Garden are taught by Betsy Rogers-Knox. Betsy received a Certificate in Botanical Illustration from NYBG in 2006. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and at the Royal Horticultural Botanical Art Show in London where she was awarded the Silver Gilt Award.
Open to all skill levels. Materials List. Hollister House Garden Members $95 Non-Members $120 Register HERE.
Be one of 35 guests to enjoy libations, hors d’oeuvre, and conversation with luminaries at a series of cocktail receptions prior to engaging public programs. Each ticket of $250 includes a reception with the speakers as well as reserved seating for the program to follow. Register for all three events for $650. Your ticket supports the MHS’s public programs, K-12 educational initiatives, collection and conservation efforts, and stewardship of the primary resources that are the backbone of civic and historic scholarship.
On October 28, Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff discusses The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, with Sara Georgini, Series Editor for The Papers of John Adams. On November 2, join Harvard professor and host of Finding Your Roots on PBS, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, who asks Donald Yacavone about his latest book Teaching White Supremacy. Finally, on November 16, Pulitzer Prize winner Megan Marshall interviews Lydia Moland about Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life, the forgotten story of a remarkable abolitionist. Register for all three HERE or visit www.masshist.org for information on each individual evening.
Taught by John Howell, this four-session Berkshire Botanical Garden course will explain how plant growth is affected by soils, from drainage to pH and nutrients. Learn how to evaluate soils, improve those that are less than ideal and amend soils for specific garden uses. Fertilizers, soil amendments, making and using compost, moisture management and the pros and cons of mulching will be covered. Students need to get a soil sample before class and bring the results to the first class. The dates are Tuesdays, November 1 – 22, from 5:30 – 8:30. $185 for BBG members, $210 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/understanding-soil-health-and-structure-0
We recommend all students take and submit a routine soil analysis for home grounds and gardening to UMass Amherst. Request an additional soil organic matter test. Please do so as soon as possible. Further information can be found here and here and order forms can be found here. Please have a copy of your results sent to howell@umass.edu.
John Howell MS is the former Extension Vegetable Specialist for the University of Massachusetts and currently lectures on vegetables, fruits and soil management. Author of numerous newsletters for growers, he is currently the editor for New England Vegetable Management Guide, published biennially by the University of Massachusetts.
