Daily Archives: February 7, 2023

Tuesday, March 14 – Friday, March 17 – The Great Gardens of Houston, Texas

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While Houston is often associated with oil and energy companies, big business, and NASA’s Houston Space Center,
it is also home to many cultural institutions. The Museum District comprises nineteen museums, galleries, and
community spaces – including the world-famous Rothko Chapel and Menil Collection. Participants in this Berkshire Botanical Garden tour, arranged by Classical Excursions, on March 14 – 17 will enjoy a three-night stay at The Lancaster Hotel, in the heart of the Theater District. This historic hotel from the 1920’s has been fully updated as a contemporary boutique hotel, and today is a member of Preferred Hotels.


The City of Houston was founded in 1837 after Augustus and John Allen had acquired land to establish a new town
at the junction of Buffalo and White Oak bayous in 1836. Houston served as the temporary capital of the Republic
of Texas. In 1912, the Rice Institute became the first institute of higher learning in the area. Also, by 1912, Houston
was home to twenty-five “tall buildings” ranging from six to sixteen stories. An interest in gardening swept the
country during the 1920s at the height of the “City Beautiful” movement, which promoted urban planning and
beautification. In accordance with this concept, 27 women formed a neighborhood garden club, whose objectives —
as described in a 1927 newspaper article — were “the study of flowers and their cultivation, beautification of
backyards, conservation of wildflowers, presentation of flower shows and competitive garden designs.” The most
famous residential section of town is River Oaks, where that garden club was founded. For complete itinerary visit www.berkshirebotanical.org

Thursday, February 23, 2:00 pm Eastern – Beauty of the Wild, Online

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For more than six decades, Darrel Morrison has drawn inspiration from the varied landscapes of his life—from the Iowa prairie, to Texas prickly pear scrub, to the maple-beech-hemlock forests of Door County, Wisconsin, to the banks of the Oconee River in Piedmont, Georgia. He has been guided as well by the teachings of Jens Jensen, who believed that we can not successfully copy nature but can get a theme from it and use key species to evoke that essential feeling. In native plant gardens at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Morrison has blended communities of native plants in distillations of prairie, woodland, and coastal meadow. At Storm King Art Center, his landscapes capture the essence of prairie grasslands and native meadows. These ever-evolving compositions were designed to reintroduce diversity, natural processes, and naturally occurring patterns—the “beauty of the wild”—into the landscape. Darrel will speak online with The Garden Conservancy on February 23 at 2 pm Eastern. $5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

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.

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.

Darrel Morrison, FASLA, is a renowned landscape designer and educator ecology-based approach has influenced generations of practitioners. He has taught landscape design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1969-1983) and University of Georgia (1983-2005). Morrison lived and worked in New York City from 2005 until 2015 and now lives in Madison, WI where he is an honorary Faculty Associate in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin.