While this particular talk sponsored by Historic New England on March 22 at 7 may not strictly fit within the horticultural category, the topic is likely to be popular with our readership.
One morning in June 1914 the Codman family awoke at their country estate in rural Lincoln, Massachusetts, to discover their prized new Peerless motorcar — as well as their chauffeur — were missing. This mystery, full of colorful characters and misadventures at the edge of the law, winds its way from the Lincoln station to Rutland, Vermont, with detours across New England. Tickets are free; donations are encouraged. Please call 617-994-6690 for more information.
The link for the webinar will be included in the order confirmation for this program.
There are over 100 acres of gardens and pleasure grounds at Harewood, set within an ornamental parkland of over 1,000 acres created during the 18th century. The Gardens comprise various horticultural areas, each different in style, and containing a significant plant collection throughout. Trevor will give a brief history of the gardens before talking about the work of the gardens team over the past three decades and provide a glimpse into the future.
The Terrace – a Victorian, Italianate formal garden, complete with C19 parterre by Sir Charles Barry, with fountains, clipped yew and box, prominent mixed flower borders and a large scale sub-tropical planting scheme.
The Himalayan Garden – a naturalistic sunken garden with waterfall and stream, rock and bog gardens containing a thematic plant collection, including trees and shrubs, rhododendrons, and herbaceous plants from Asia.
The Walled Garden – a traditional utilitarian garden, built in the 1750’s and divided into two parts, with a productive kitchen garden, flower borders, apple orchard and meadow.
Trevor Nicholson has been Head Gardener at Harewood for 28 years. His horticulture career began in 1980 at Houghall College, Durham, where he trained in Horticulture and Arboriculture. At Harewood Trevor has worked continuously on the revival, conservation and development of the gardens: introducing bold new planting schemes in the formal terrace gardens, tree & shrub planting in the park, as well as the re-development of the 1930’s rock garden as a Himalayan Garden with a significant collection of Sino-Himalayan plants. Trevor also brought the Walled Garden back into production in the 1990s and is working with the executive team on its restoration and development. With the help of grants from the RHS Bursaries Committee, and support from Harewood House Trust, Trevor undertook two botanical study tours to Nepal, China and Bhutan – informing the development of the Himalayan Garden at Harewood.
This is the fourth in a series of talks in which the speakers will introduce a variety of landscapes, gardens and themes enjoyed by Yorkshire Gardens Trust members which portray the wide diversity of designed landscapes in the 3 Yorkshire counties and the interests of the membership. 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.£5 each or all 5 for £20 Register through Eventbrite HERE.
This March 25 Native Plants Trust program at Garden in the Woods in Framingham from 10:30 – 12:30 will discuss the sugar maple white ash forest communities that have such a remarkable diversity of native plants. The talk will cover the location of these communities in New England, their physical features, and, in detail, their flora. Threats to this community, such as invasive plans and the emerald ash borer will also be discussed. Ted Elliman leads the discussion. $30 for NPT members, $36 for nonmembers. Register at http://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/rich-mesic-forests/
Come take an armchair tour of the gardens at the Newport Mansions, Vanderbilt Estate, Vizcaya, Untermyer Gardens, Nemours, and more. The Southbridge Garden Club presents Jana Milbocker on March 21 at 6 pm at the Charlton Public Library, 40 main Street in Charlton. Jana Milbocker is the owner of Enchanted Gardens, a landscape design firm in the Boston area. She is the author of three garden travel guides, the latest being The Garden Tourist’s Florida. She is past President of the Holliston Garden Club, and an active member of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and GardenComm International. There is NO CHARGE to attend this meeting. To register visit https://charltonlibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/gardens-of-the-gilded-age-southbridge-garden-club/
Join the American Horticultural Society for a wonderful tour through southern England, June 26 – July 5, 2023. The brochure with detailed itinerary and travel reservation form with pricing are available now. With AHS Hosts Tracy Ward Violette, Lecturer Garden Historian Marion Mako and Tour Manager Verity Smith of Specialtours you will have memorable experiences including:
Out-of-hours visit to the historic Sissinghurst Castle Gardens accompanied by the Head Gardener
Tour of the Knepp Estate to learn about the rewilding project and see the new garden by Tom Stuart-Smith
A morning at Great Dixter with the Head Gardener, Fergus Garrett, and a private lunch in the Yoemans’ Hall
An exploration of the historic towns of Rye, Arundel and the city of Winchester
Hampton Court Garden Festival, on the Members’ Day, to see the high quality of show gardens and horticultural exhibitions
For more information and to make reservations, please contact our Development Department at (703) 768-5700 ext. 117, or email development@ahsgardening.org. Our fax number is (703) 768-8700.
The climate crisis poses the urgent challenge to make our urban environment more resilient in the face of unprecedented atmospheric changes such as rising temperatures, intensified rainfall, and longer droughts.
A city can be understood as a sequence of artificial microclimates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while streetscapes modify soil permeability, runoff, and solar radiation. For each man-made microclimate, a comparable natural condition can be studied. Research on habitats and on the survival strategies of the organisms living within them permits the introduction of plants into artificial urban environments that have similar climatic conditions.
Using the logic of nature, cities can be transformed into complex urban ecologies, blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. Science-based research allows the conception of solution-based projects, revealing our built environment as a network of microclimates in which plants combine the absorption of carbon dioxide with the production of evaporative cooling, simultaneously reducing the source of the problem and mitigating its effects.
The built environment thus becomes a hybrid living organism, lying at the interface between a changing meteorology and an underused geology. Biospheric Urbanism conceives the urban environment as the intersection connecting what lies above and what lies below, using the intelligence of plants.
Bas Smets (b. 1975) has a background in landscape architecture, civil engineering and architecture. He founded his firm in Brussels in 2007 and has since completed more than 50 projects in more than 12 countries with his team of 25 architects and landscape architects.
His projects include the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, the park of Thurn & Taxis in Brussels, the Mandrake Hotel in London, and the Himara Waterfront in Albania. In 2022 he won the international competition for public space around the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Each of these projects is part of an interrelated research into the possible role and ambition of landscape projects. The aim is to invent ‘Augmented Landscapes’ by using the logics of nature. These augmented landscapes produce a new microclimate while providing new atmospheres. The collaboration with artists and scientists takes a central role in this research.
A first monographic exhibition was presented in 2013 by deSingel International Arts Center in Antwerp and Arc-en-Reve centre for architecture in Bordeaux. Bas Smets has received numerous honours and awards, among which the Award for Urbanism and Public Space from the French Royal Academy of Architecture and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
This Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture, the Daniel Urban Kiley lecture, is free and open to the public on Thursday March 23 at 6:30 pm in Gund Hall of the Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. For more information and accessibility information, visit https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/bas-smets-biospheric-urbanism/
The stories of the individual plant hunters who operated between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century have often been told and told well. The aim of this online Gardens Trust series of lectures with Dr. Toby Musgrave, therefore, is to broaden the subject and to explore four complementary yet contrasting topics. It will also serve as an introduction to the whole topic of plant hunting, collecting and transfer round the world, which we are planning to cover in more depth in the autumn. The third lecture on March 20 is Victorian Excesses. The series ticket costs £16 for the course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5. To register through Eventbrite, and for more information, visit HERE, or visit The Gardens Trust events page, https://thegardenstrust.org/events-archive/?events=gardenstrust. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us). A link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.
The century before the outbreak of the First World War was the zenith of British domestic horticulture, a time when private gardens were a statement of conspicuous consumption and the plants cultivated often rare and expensive. This lecture will reveal some of the less well-known and sometimes barmy tales of horticultural excess.
This is the last in a series of talks in which the speakers will introduce a variety of landscapes, gardens and themes enjoyed by Yorkshire Gardens Trust members which portray the wide diversity of designed landscapes in the 3 Yorkshire counties and the interests of the membership. 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.£5 each or all 5 for £20 Register through Eventbrite HERE.
For most garden history enthusiasts, the name ‘Goddards’ probably suggests the Luytens and Jekyll collaboration in Surrey, created 1898-1900 for Frederick Mirrielees. There is another Goddards, however, in York – designed by Walter Brierley, built 1926-7 for Noel and Kathleen Terry, and now in the care of the National Trust. George Dillistone (1877-1957) who designed the garden is a neglected figure, despite the other gardens he planned, his contemporaries’ approval, his writing on garden design and planting, his support for the development of the British Iris Society, and his founding role in the Institute of Landscape Architects. This ‘other’ Goddards may be the only remaining Dillistone garden where he designed both hard landscaping and planting and that still exists in its entirety, attached to the house for which it was planned. The talk uses this late Arts and Crafts garden as a framework for exploring Dillistone’s life and work.
Gillian Parker says: Since retiring from a long career as a researcher in health and social care policy, I have been trying to turn myself into a garden historian. I completed a Post-graduate Diploma in Garden and Landscape History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London in 2020 and since 2021 have been a post-graduate research student in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield. My research topic is the Backhouse nursery of York, and my supervisor is Dr Jan Woudstra. My interest in George Dillistone started with my role as a volunteer in his garden at Goddards in York and has become something of an obsession since, as my fellow students in London and fellow volunteers in York would no doubt confirm.
Join Carolyn Ellis on Tuesday, March 28 at 1 pm at The First Lutheran Church of Boston, 299 Berkeley Street, to explore the role of texture in floral design. Create your own arrangement, following Carolyn’s step-by-step demonstration, or use workshop materials to create your own design. All materials, including container, flowers and tools will be provided but if you have favorite flower snips, feel free to bring them. There is a $65.00 non-refundable materials fee for this program.
Carolyn has been designing flowers at the Museum of Fine Arts as an MFA Associate for more than ten years. Her work includes flower arrangements for the visitor center and for special events, holiday demonstrations for museum members, and training for incoming floral designers. She has done many Art in Bloom Roadshow demonstrations. Carolyn loves to share the basics of floral design with flower lovers, and one of her teaching videos for LexMedia cable television received an award for excellence in 2021.
This program is for Garden Club of the Back Bay Members Only. For information on joining the Club to entitle you to participate, visit https://bostonflora.com/ Even counting the annual dues into the calculation, this class is good value. Plus, you are contributing to the beautification of the Back Bay and the Club’s commitment to urban tree care. Please rsvp by March 15 and pay the materials fee on Eventbrite by clicking HERE.
For questions about this program contact Nancy Cyr by clicking HERE. Nancy will keep a waiting list should spaces fill up. Out of respect for our fellow club members, please be sure to let her know if you cannot attend and need to cancel.
Tickets are non-refundable. If you cannot attend, we will consider your payment a contribution and you will receive an acknowledgment.
Noting the number of urban dwellers who want more plants in their lives but don’t have green thumbs yet, plant consultant and former elementary educator Maryah Greene stepped up to provide support so these new plant parents can create functional, long-term green spaces of their own. She’ll share how she turned an Instagram account full of plant care tips and tricks into Greene Piece, a Brooklyn-based business that provides individualized repotting workshops, plant problem diagnosis, full-service interior plant design, and more. Join the New York Botanical Garden online on March 23 at 6:30 pm to hear Greene’s success stories from the field that have been profiled in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Vogue, and more. $18. Register at www.nybg.org.
