Join the Thursday Garden Club of Sudbury for our free January General Meeting on Zoom. Our speaker will be Joanne Pearson, a local landscape architect and professional photographer. In addition to a vibrant slideshow, Joanne will explore the fascinating ways plants use scent to attract pollinators and deter predators. She will describe specific plants, shrubs, and trees with fragrant flowers and foliage and where to place them in the landscape to maximize their enjoyment.
Attendees will receive a plant list of recommended fragrant plants. All meetings are free and open to the public. If you are interested in receiving the Zoom link, please email tgcsudbury1776@gmail.com by 1/11/2023.
Imagine traveling the world passionately searching for the most exquisite and creatively designed gardens. Now imagine having the time and resources that would enable you to escape the daily demands of life and offer the chance to focus entirely on studying and becoming engrossed in every aspect of these gardens.
Baltimore landscape architect Scott C. Scarfone was given just such an opportunity through a research fellowship awarded by Philadelphia’s famous Chanticleer Garden, renowned for its cutting-edge horticultural and creative planting practices. During the year-long fellowship, Scarfone focused his efforts on expanding his knowledge of society and culture as expressed through the gardens’ physical representations and intrinsic meanings.
His travels led him to England to garden at Great Dixter with the late Christopher Lloyd, a noted gardening writer and horticulturist; to Italy to visit the gardens of the Renaissance era; to Japan’s ancient gardens of Kyoto and Nara; to Thailand to study eastern philosophy and garden design; to Costa Rica to view tropical vegetation in a native rainforest environment; to California to study Mediterranean plants in a design style that only that state can boast; and his most recent trip to Morocco to visit the amazing sculpture gardens of Anima.
Join Scarfone on Zoom with Smithsonian Associates on January 18 at 7 pm Eastern as he shares stories from his excursions across the globe, illustrated by views and discussion of some of the most prolific gardens ever created. $25 for Smithsonian Associates members, $30 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
Dr Clare Hickman is Reader in Environmental and Medical History at Newcastle University where her work focuses on the interconnections between landscape, health and sensory experience. As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semi-public, and private gardens across Britain. Dr. Hickman highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.
This London Parks & Gardens online lecture on January 10 will focus on the topic of her book – which shares a title with this lecture and highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. £5.00 – Register HERE
Join geologist Kirt Kempter as he explores the geology of Western National Parks over the course of 2023, with an in-depth look at one location every month. Each Smithsonian Associates’ program’s content is enhanced by geologic maps, photos, and Google Earth imagery.
Please Note: Individual sessions are available for purchase. Separate Zoom link information will be emailed closer to the date of each session.
Kempter explores the volcanic underpinnings of this stunning national park in West Texas. Volcanic rocks and landforms reveal the park’s explosive past, and are superimposed on deposits from the Cretaceous Sea, which once connected the Gulf of Mexico with the Arctic Ocean for more than 30 million years. The park includes the largest protected area of Chihuahuan desert ecology in the United States, protecting 1,200 plant species and 450 species of birds. The Rio Grande, which defines the park’s southern border, has carved impressive canyons through these Cretaceous Sea limestone deposits.
Southern New Mexico is home to these two iconic national parks, which oddly share a connection from the deep geologic past. Shimmering white dunes of gypsum sand define White Sands—the largest deposit of its kind on Earth—which hosts 45 endemic species living only in the park. The gypsum’s origin comes from limestone deposits preserved in the surrounding mountains, originally laid down by inland seas during the Late Paleozoic era. Approximately 260 million years ago, the seas’ coastlines were ringed by an extensive reef composed predominantly of sponges, bryozoans, and other microorganisms. Today at Carlsbad Caverns, this once deeply buried reef hosts a vast network of caves, passages, and spectacular speleothems, including the Big Room, the largest chamber in the United States.
A mile-thick package of sedimentary rocks from the Paleozoic Era is spectacularly exposed from the Grand Canyon’s rim to bottom. Each layer has a story to tell, revealing ancient oceans, rivers, and sand dunes that reflect drastically changing environments through geologic time. Kempter explores and interprets ancient Precambrian rocks now exposed in the inner gorge, along with a boundary known as the Great Unconformity, where more than a billion years of rock information is missing. When and how did the Colorado River carve the Grand Canyon? These questions, which are still being debated by geologists, are addressed in the program.
The package of three is $60 for Smithsonian Associates members, $75 for nonmembers. Register at www.smithsonianassociates.org
This is the first lecture in the Gardens Trust’s third series of 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. On January 10, Stephen Wass will discuss Stowe Landscape Gardens. Any property as vast as Stowe is will always have something going on that demands an archaeological eye keeping on it and the past twelve months have seen three major investigations that are reported on in this talk. Firstly having been postponed for the last couple of years work began on the refurbishment of Bell Gate Lodge. Two large scale projects involved works on the massive dam below the Eleven Acre Lake with a huge cut through the dam to insert a bypass pipe and the controlled partial dismantling of the cascade that took the overflow from the lake to create a secret waterfall hidden within a chasm lined by collapsing masonry. The lecture begins at 10 am Greenwich Mean Time, which is very early here in the US, but Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk, and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week. £5 through Eventbrite. Register HERE.
Since creating my platforms one year ago, Jason Williams managed to create a highly engaged online community and has been at the forefront of the balcony gardening niche. He rapidly found his own voice and proudly flies the flag for small space gardeners in a niche market. The talk will dive into the connection between small-space gardening, mental health, and biodiversity, and demonstrate how he has used social media and garden design to broadcast this message to a wider audience.
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 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 General Admission. 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.
Jason Williams is a multi-award-winning garden designer, and during the pandemic, he started gardening on his 18th-floor balcony & slowly found the therapeutic qualities of gardening. A year later, he decided to collate his lived-in knowledge and create his own brand, Cloud Gardener UK, to help others start their own well-being journey through small space gardens. The aim of Cloud Gardener UK is to inspire a new generation of urban gardeners and encourage more urban residents to maximize their unique growing spaces, like a patio, terrace, or balcony garden, in an accessible way. Through his work, he shows that urban small-space gardening not only has mental health benefits but also has a direct impact on urban wildlife and biodiversity.
Join the Mt. Cuba Center and ecological landscape designer Jeff Lorenz of Bala Cynwyd-based Refugia Design/Build for expert tips and insight on creating a native habitat that is immersive, functional, and resilient. In an effort to reimagine their landscapes, homeowners often seek plants that manage stormwater runoff. How can we get creative with design and materials to create a beautiful and multi-tasking outdoor space? Reducing lawn, establishing deep-rooted plantings and integrating permeable hardscaping is key to reducing neighborhood erosion, filtering pollutants, and absorbing dirty water before it enters our precious waterways.
Jeff Lorenz is the founder of Refugia Design, an ecological landscape design/build and stewardship firm, based out of Bala Cynwyd, PA. Since 2015, Refugia has been offering distinctive native landscape design for both residential and commercial green spaces throughout the Greater Philadelphia Area and Jersey Shore. Annual major exhibitor and award-winners at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Philadelphia Flower Show, Refugia is known for an immersive, naturalistic design aesthetic and meadow expertise at projects ranging in size from city yards to suburban estates. Refugia’s ground-breaking initiatives include mapping the impact of their 120+ native habitats via the Ecological Greenway Network, designed to promote connectivity for wildlife and restore ecosystem function to neighborhoods. Refugia added 47 ‘stepping stone’ gardens to the Greenway Network in 2021, developing an ecological corridor for native plants and wildlife that is made more powerful by the network’s growing interconnectedness.
Jeff resides in Narberth with his wife and young daughters and he is proud of Refugia’s impact in his community – 70+ properties within 5 miles of Narberth that manage stormwater sustainably, support biodiversity and replace lawn with native habitat that ‘put plants to work’; creating beautiful, functional and resilient landscapes for all.
Frederic Church (1826–1900) was America’s preeminent landscape artist of the 19th century, whose “great paintings”of the 1850s and 1860s (Niagara, Heart of the Andes, Icebergs) achieved international acclaim. Beginning in 1860, he spent the last 40 years creating Olana in Hudson, New York, a 250-acre designed landscape in which his family residence and farm are sited and whose panoramic views of the Hudson Valley and Catskills are integral elements.
Today, Olana is the most intact artist’s environment in the United States and a National Historic Landmark. Sean Sawyer, president of the Olana Partnership, provides an overview of Church’s creation and leads a virtual tour of the landscape and main house, with its rich collection of fine and decorative arts that reflect the global reach of Church’s travels and vision. He also shares the remarkable story of the saving of Olana, a landmark in American preservation history. This Smithsonian Associates program will be held on Zoom and is $25 for Smithsonian Associates members, $30 for nonmembers. Register at www.smithsonianassociates.org
On January 9, enjoy the first in the Gardens Trust series of talks by public historian Sheldon K. Goodman of the Cemetery Club. £5 each or £16 for all. Register through Eventbrite HERE. Sheldon has nearly ten years of guiding and interpreting these wonderful spaces and in this series, he will show you some lesser-known places of rest and the architecture, design and planting that makes them so wonderfully unique and beautiful. From death railways in Surrey and Sydney, architectural designers consulting on historic restorations and 18th century design, how cemeteries are presented and kept to each generation will be examined in this ideal set of talks! 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.
Abney Park is the best example of a garden cemetery in the U.K followed closely by its sisters such as Brompton and West Norwood. But these ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries were not the first to open using garden landscapes as an influence: examples in Liverpool and Glasgow opened beforehand.
So what are these necropoli and why did they open before the London ones did? What influences played a part in creating these bold new spaces and how were they received compared to the deplorable churchyards of the time? Sheldon will explain how classical design inspired a forty-year-old architect (who’d exhibited at the Royal Academy) in Liverpool’s premier valhalla and how park design helped change attitudes to spaces of remembrance, such as that of London Road Cemetery in Coventry.
The Cemetery Club 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, Sheldon 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.
The Garden Club of the Back Bay wishes everyone a very Happy New Year. The new Garden Club website will be launching soon – we will let you know the date as it approaches. The current site will continue as BostonFlora.com. Until the switch, visit here for all Garden Club events, and please bookmark this page so you can continue to be updated on all the garden and environmental events available locally and globally.
