Daily Archives: November 4, 2022

Tuesday, November 15, 5:00 am – 6:30 am – Garden Designs Around the French Riviera: Contemporary Delights, Online

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The last in the four part Gardens Trust online series on Garden Designs around the French Riviera will take place November 15 very early in the morning, although the lecture is recorded. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5. 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.

On November 15 the topic will be Contemporary Botanical Delight and Artistic Sensitivity. The roots run deep in the two final gardens, La Mouissone and Fort France, about 20 miles apart in hills above Cannes, but they are resolutely twenty-first century gardens in their exceptional seasonal planting. Both flourish and grow in private hands: La Mouissone (below) thanks to plantsman Maggie Lockett who has worked to expand the plant repertoire whilst absorbing the influences of Villa Noailles, La Serre de la Madone and, just over the Italian border, La Mortola; the second, Fort France originally Fort Escu, is famously associated with the writings of Lady Fortescue’s Provencal and gardening adventures, the current owners are artist Valerie de Courcel and her husband Pierre. Both gardens have experimented in creating year-round interest with a profusion of planting, the glorious Mediterranean light playing through the trees, shrubs, flowers and bulbs.

Caroline Holmes is an experienced and accomplished lecturer working for a wide range of organisations 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).

Saturday, November 5 – Sunday, November 27 – Fanfare

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Berkshire Botanical Garden presents a new art exhibition, Fanfare, opening on Saturday, November 5, with a reception scheduled for Friday, November 11, from 4 to 6 p.m. Featuring works by John Thompson, Fanfare will exhibit in the Garden’s Center House Leonhardt Galleries. The exhibit will run through Sunday, Nov 27.

“The basis for my work is landscapes where I choose specific moments and small elements as my focus,” said Thompson, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Harpswell, Maine. “These intimate observations are often fleeting glimpses of a pond or a garden. The immense variety of what we may observe in nature I find endlessly fascinating.

“The simple occurrence — the stray stick fallen across a background of decaying ferns or the pattern of leaves in a stream — can lead to a series of prints or paintings. In making work, I begin with the simple observing, often with a sketch or small painting. In taking those fleeting images back to my studio, as recall fades, imagination takes over and the images begin to change.”

Thompson said, “Making art has become a source of quiet refuge in these turbulent times. I am comforted by being able to draw on the landscape to replenish a sense of balance and control in life. My observation and invention on the borrowed landscape renews and replenishes.”

Thompson has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Framingham State University, The Art and Innovation Center in Weston, Mass., the Washington Art Association in Washington, Conn., and many other workshops around the country. He works with master printers Peter and James Pettengill in Hinsdale, N.H., and Susan Oehme at Oehme Graphics in Steamboat Springs, Colo. He serves on several boards of art and educational institutions.  

Thompson holds degrees from Syracuse University (BFA), University of Wisconsin-Madison (MA), Babson College (MBA), and Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MFA).   Gallery hours for Fanfare are 10 to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays through Fridays (Mondays, by appointment) and 11 to 3 p.m. on weekends through November 27. Berkshire Botanical Garden is located at 5 West Stockbridge Rd., Stockbridge, Mass. Visit Berkshirebotanical.org.