October 21, 2023 - Boston Flora

Thursday, November 2, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern – Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley, Online

October 21, 2023 by Boston Flora

Renowned as “the first family of American horticulture,” the du Ponts created magnificent landscapes and gardens that complement the verdant, rolling lands of the Brandywine Valley. Five of their estates—Hagley Museum and Library, Nemours Estate, Mt. Cuba Center, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and Longwood Gardens—are open to the public, each a showplace of formal plantings juxtaposed with carefully nurtured natural woodland. Collected in one beautiful new book, Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley offers an in-depth tour of the exuberant fountains and horticultural displays at Longwood, the naturalized woodland at Winterthur, the Beaux-Arts elegance of Nemours, the tantalizing fragments of the Crowninshield Garden at Hagley, and the native plant gardens and research center at Mt. Cuba. Throughout the book, Larry Lederman’s vivid photographs exquisitely capture the beauty and spirit of each place, moving through the seasons and the day from dawn to dusk. An impressive celebration of the du Pont contributions to American horticulture and landscape design, Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley is an important record that will be a must-have for garden lovers, landscape designers, and horticulturists everywhere.

DATE AND TIME
Thursday, November 2, 2023
2:00 p.m. Eastern

LOCATION
Live on Zoom

REGISTRATION
$5 for Members of The Garden Conservancy
$10 for General Admission

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. Register HERE The speakers:

Following a successful career in corporate law, Larry Lederman turned to photography as an avocation. From an initial focus on the forms and foliage of trees, Lederman now captures the beauty of gardens and landscapes through the seasons. He is the author of many books, including Magnificent Trees of the New York Botanical Garden, The Rockefeller Family Gardens: An American Legacy, and Garden Portraits: Experiencing Natural Beauty, all published by Monacelli, and he was the principal photographer for the 125th anniversary edition of The New York Botanical Garden (Abrams).

Jeff Downing is Executive Director of Mt. Cuba Center, a botanic garden in Hockessin, Delaware, that inspires an appreciation of the beauty and value of native plants, and a commitment to conserve the habitats that sustain them. Previously, he worked at The New York Botanical Garden leading education programs; he is also a member of the Delaware Native Species Commission and chaired a land preservation task force in 2019–20 for New Castle County, Delaware. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a master’s in Religion at Yale Divinity School.

Wednesday, November 8, 6:00 pm – Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City

October 21, 2023 by Boston Flora

Join The Emerald Necklace Conservancy on Wednesday, November 8 at 6:00 pm EST with Dr. Ethan Carr for a talk on his new book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), which details the history of Franklin Park from the time of peak popularity to the current era of park revival.

This talk will be held in person in Rabb Hall at the Central Library in Copley Square. Following the talk, there will be time for audience Q&A, and the program will conclude at 7:00 pm with a book signing.

Dr. Carr’s forthcoming book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), documents the design and history of Frederick Law Olmsted’s most mature expression of urban park design. In this comprehensive study, Carr affirms Franklin Park as one of great works of nineteenth-century American art. Since the 1980s, historians have described Franklin Park as unfinished, obsolete, or a casualty of changing trends in public recreation. Carr disagrees, offering a persuasive argument that the park’s decline was not a consequence of its design but of a lack of stewardship on the part of the city, an example of institutionalized racism.

Ethan Carr, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An international authority on America’s public landscapes and the author of many books, he is lead editor of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years and coauthor of Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (LALH 2022).