Boston Flora

Month: January 2023

  • Thursday, February 9, 2:00 pm Eastern – The Crevice Garden, Online

    A crevice garden replicates the environmental conditions of mountain tops, deserts, coastlines, and other exposed or rocky places on earth. These striking garden features provide perfect conditions for the plants native to these far-off places, bringing the cultivation of these precious gems within everybody’s reach. In the book, The Crevice Garden, enthusiastic experts Kenton Seth and Paul Spriggs bring us in-depth guidance on the design, construction, and planting of crevice gardens of all kinds including those suitable for containers, small gardens, and public parks and in styles that encompass both naturalistic scenes and non-traditional installations. In this February 9 online talk, Paul will discuss all aspects of rock and crevice gardening, including history, design, construction, and of course, lots of photos of Paul’s favorite plants.

    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. $5 Garden Conservancy members, $15 general public. Register HERE.

    Members of the Frank & Anne Cabot Society for planned giving have complimentary access to Garden Conservancy webinars. All Cabot Society members will automatically be sent the link to participate on the morning of the webinar. For more information about the Cabot Society, please contact Sarah Parker at sparker@gardenconservancy.org or 845.424.6500, ext. 214.

    Paul Spriggs has been rock gardening for roughly 23 years and building crevice gardens for about 16 years. He is an avid plant explorer, photographer, mountaineer, owner of Spriggs Gardens Landscaping company, and past President of the Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden Society. He has a passion for all wild plants, especially those of dwarf stature, and collects and cultivates them at various gardens in his hometown of Victoria, BC, Canada. Paul has learned the craft of crevice garden building directly from one of its innovators, Zdenek Zvolanek, of the Czech Republic, and in the past decade and a half, has built many gardens in public parks and private homes that range in size from small feature troughs, to large installations involving many tonnes of stone. Paul is passionate about spreading the word of this style, through speaking to garden clubs all over the West and by giving workshops for those keen on learning the finer points of this developing art form. He has just finished his work on the first North American book, The Crevice Garden, with co-author Kenton Seth of Colorado, released in spring 2022.

  • Tuesday, January 24, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Tree Equity in Boston: What It Is and How to Grow It, Live and Livestreamed

    The City of Boston recently released a new Urban Forest Plan that aims to grow the city’s urban forest equitably. In this hybrid talk on January 24 co-sponsored by the Brighton Garden Club and the Friends of Faneuil Library, David Meshoulam, Executive Director of Speak for the Trees, Boston, will introduce the idea of tree equity and discuss its critical importance in a rapidly changing climate. The organization has been examining how the distribution of trees has been shaped by race, politics, and history, and works to grow the city’s forest as a tool to build resilient communities.

    The live presentation will be held in the New Balance Room, Presentation School Foundation Community Center, 640 Washington Street in Boston. This is a free event.

    This event will also be livestreamed to YouTube. To sign up for livestream, click HERE

  • Monday, May 29 – Saturday, June 3 – Gardens of the Cotswolds

    This spring join the Royal Oak Foundation for a special garden tour in the Cotswolds. Dream of the English countryside, with gently rolling hills and picture-perfect traditional villages and you may well have a vision of the Cotswolds. Close to London and Oxford, yet still unspoiled, this sought-after area with its gorgeous gardens and royal connections is our destination for spring 2023.

    Staying at a luxurious historic inn in the charming village of Broadway, we will be shown famous and influential gardens such as Hidcote, now in the care of the National Trust and neighboring Kiftsgate, with its monumental rambling rose. We will also have special access to a number of secret private gardens where owners have created their own horticultural paradise.

    We can compare the design and planting of Tudor knot gardens, cottage gardens, organic gardens and walled gardens and admire features from romantic temples and grottoes to imaginative topiary and striking contemporary sculpture. A crowning highlight, subject to confirmation, will be a visit to Highgrove, the garden of His Majesty The King, a pioneer of organic gardening.

    Your tour will be accompanied by art historian and garden lover Rosalind Malandrinos who lives in the Cotswolds and is a guide at Sudeley Castle. For brochure and more information, visit HERE. The sign up deadline is January 27!

    Kiftsgate

  • Wednesday, February 7, 10:00 am – Garden Club of the Back Bay February Meeting: Urban Gardening with Gretel Anspach

    Urban gardening is about growing food and ornamentals in small spaces.  Whether you have a huge yard without the time or desire to tend it all, or an apartment with no outdoor space at all, this talk will give you tips and techniques to start and maintain a garden you can call your own. We will also learn about what’s new in small space gardening. The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s February 7 meeting will be held at The Chilton Club, 152 Commonwealth Avenue (entrance on Dartmouth Street) beginning at 10 am.

    Gretel Anspach is a Trustee of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, a Lifetime Master Gardener with the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, and a recently-retired systems engineer for Raytheon. She won the MMGA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Gretel established and maintains a 20,000 square foot food production garden that has provided fresh produce to the Marlboro and Maynard Food Pantries for the last ten years. Her primary interest and focus is always in the science behind horticulture (Biography citation: Plymouth Public Library).


    If you are not a member but are interested in attending, email info@bostonflora.com

  • Saturday, February 4, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm – The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds, Online

    Even as scientists make discoveries about navigational and physiological feats that enable migratory birds to cross immense oceans or fly above the highest mountains, go weeks without sleep or remain in unbroken flight for months, humans have brought many migratory birds to the brink. Based on his bestselling new book A World on the Wing, author and researcher Scott Weidensaul takes attendees around the globe — with researchers in the lab probing the limits of what migrating birds can do, to the shores of the Yellow Sea in China, the remote mountains of northeastern India where tribal villages saved the greatest gathering of falcons on the planet, and the Mediterranean, where activists and police are battling bird poachers — to learn how people are fighting to understand and save the world’s great bird migrations.

    Scott Weidensaul is the author of nearly 30 books on natural history, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Living on the Wind. Weidensaul is a contributing editor for Audubon and writes for a variety of other publications, including Living Bird. He is a Fellow of the American Ornithological Society and an active field researcher, studying saw-whet owl migration for more than two decades, as well as winter hummingbirds in the East, bird migration in Alaska, and the winter movements of snowy owls through Project SNOWstorm, which he co-founded. A native of Pennsylvania, he and his wife now life in New Hampshire.

    This Mt. Cuba Center program takes place online Saturday, February 4, 2023. $25. Register at https://mtcubacenter.org/event/the-global-odyssey/

  • Thursday, January 26, 2:00 pm Eastern – At Home with Henrietta Howard: A Curated Tour of Marble Hill, Online

    The American Friends of English Heritage in conjunction with English Heritage are delighted to invite you to our next webinar taking place on Zoom on Thursday January 26th at 2pm EST.

    Marble Hill, on the banks of the Thames in West London, was in created by Henrietta Howard; a remarkable woman who overcame personal adversity to become a prominent figure in Georgian court society and a visionary patron of the arts. The Palladian villa became a centre for Henrietta’s influential cultural, intellectual and political circle. Here she entertained friends on a scale which was said to rival the royal court.


    Join Dr. Tessa Kilgarriff for this curated virtual tour of Marble Hill through the furniture, silver, porcelain and silk textiles that reveal Henrietta Howard’s passions and personality. Dr Tessa Kilgarriff is Curator of Collections and Interiors at English Heritage, where she researches and cares for the paintings, furniture and decorative arts collections across two eighteenth-century Palladian villas: Marble Hill and Chiswick House. Prior to working at English Heritage, she was Assistant Curator at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Tessa is a specialist in British art and completed her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2019.

    REGISTER HERE

  • Thursday, January 26, 5:00 am – 6:30 am – Garden-Making Between the Wars: Tradition, Modernism and Englishness, Online

    The years 1920-1939 in England can be considered two decades of new thinking and surprising vibrancy and vision despite their setting of the aftermath of war, financial crises, unemployment, the abdication of King Edward VIII and the imminent threat of a Second World War. It was an age of consumerism, unprecedented development and suburban expansion and one in which ‘modern’ concepts of design from Europe and the United States of America began to be more widely seen in architecture, interiors and domestic goods. This talk examines the extent to which modern ideas from abroad also influenced interwar gardens, in contrast to nostalgia for the romantic, plant-focused gardens in fashion before the First World War. It also considers how far ownership of a house and garden represented the countryside idyll, with an emphasis on traditional village life and a desire for fresh air.

    Barbara Simms is a garden and landscape historian with a particular interest in the history, conservation and interpretation of gardens of the 20th and 21st centuries. She has qualifications in garden history, garden design and the conservation of historic landscapes, has completed projects for heritage organisations and was chair of the London Parks & Gardens Trust 2002-8. Dr Simms has written a number of articles and two books, Eric Lyons and Span (ed.) (RIBA Publishing, 2006) and John Brookes. Garden and Landscape Designer (Conran Octopus, 2007). From 2014 she was course director for the MA in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, until the course closed in 2022. She is editor of Garden History, the Journal of the Gardens Trust, and also the new annual academic journal of the Sussex Gardens Trust.

    This Gardens Trust online lecture is one in a series on the 20th Century Garden. Tickets £30 for series or £5 each. Register HERE through Eventbrite. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

  • Monday, January 23, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern – Gardens of Peace: John Soane and Idyllic Paradise, Online

    Many aspects of garden design were informed by experiments conducted in the 18th century. Mausolea and spaces of remembrance were toyed with by John Soane and his students to push their architectural potential. Images of these designs echo the grandeur of earlier times and sites be it monuments along the Via Delle Tombe in Pompeii or monuments of Palmyra in Syria.

    Most of these designs were never built, yet their imprint on successive buildings and sites looms large in the architectural record, particularly in the 19th century cemeteries. Emulating the discovery many contemporary architects experienced as they journeyed on the Continent and further afield, Sheldon will assess some of these architectural sketches and how they would develop as the 18th century progressed.

    £5 Register through the Gardens Trust and Eventbrite 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.

    Sheldon K Goodman is a public historian, tour guide, heritage professional and founder of Cemetery Club, which seeks to show cemeteries as ‘Museums of People’ that are full of social history rather than as morbid, mournful spaces to be avoided. As a heritage communicator, he has worked with museums and other heritage spaces, including co-developing the first event to celebrate queer history in a historic cemetery (the first in the U.K) entitled ‘Queerly Departed’ for the Royal Parks, with successful sequels for Arnos Vale and Birmingham Jewellery Quarters Cemeteries Trust. He has also worked with the Brunel Museum, created visual content for Schools Out UK and has given talks at the National Archives and at the BBC. Sheldon is also a qualified City of Westminster guide and regularly leads walks around the British Museum and London’s pubs.

  • Tuesday, January 24, 10:00 am – 11:30 am GMT – Garden Archaeology: Baddesley Clinton, Online

    This is the third series of Gardens Trust talks exploring how archaeology helps the garden historian find vital evidence on the ground which then informs future restoration projects and garden management plans. Our distinguished and popular speakers will be reporting mainly on current and on-going archaeology at various sites and with an emphasis on water features. £5 through Eventbrite. Register 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 will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

    Work at Baddesley Clinton began early in 2022 to examine and appraise recent LiDAR coverage for the park. It revealed a number of new features including the sites of former fishponds and possible formal garden and moated mound. Further consideration of the sites on the ground and some new documentary material enabled a reassessment of the historic development of water management in the park and the suggestion made that the current ponds and canal north of the house are likely to be part of an early modern pleasure garden, in short a radical reappraisal of the entire landscape.

    Dr. Stephen Wass is a researcher and has just completed his D. Phil. on the subject of seventeenth-century water gardens. In addition, he works as a commercial archaeologist. In this capacity most of his projects involve historic gardens and he is currently occupied with a series of archaeological investigations connected with the latest programme of restoration at Stowe Landscape Gardens near Buckingham. He is also working to set up a new research programme alongside the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust into the ‘lost’ Tudor and Jacobean gardens in the county.

  • Saturday, January 21, 11:00 am Eastern – The Perennial Plant Collector’s Treasure Chest: Unusual, Easy-to-Grow Beauties and Where to Purchase Them, Online

    This colorful, one-hour talk by Kerry Ann Mendez on January 21 is for plantaholics seeking unusual and striking perennials that will have heads turning and onlookers mumbling “What is that?” As an avid collector, Kerry has walked many miles in her muck boots to find some unique plants that transform ho-hum gardens into eye-popping, extraordinary ones. The presentation includes sources for these plants. You’ll see eye-popping specimens for sunny and shady gardens, perennials with three seasons of riveting interest, uncommon plants that are a bonanza for pollinators, and mail order sources for these extraordinary beauties, if they are not in your local garden center. Register at https://pyours.com/perennial-plant-webinar/ $13.95.