Join Polly Hill Arboretum docent Nancy Weaver for a special tour to celebrate Polly Hill’s birthday. In memory of Polly Hill and her love of plants, Nancy will tell stories of Polly and highlight some of her favorite places around the Arboretum. Please meet at 10 am at the Visitor Center. The Polly Hill Arboretum is located in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard. Free for Arboretum members, $5 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American artist, born in Florence and trained in Paris, who spent most of his working life in London. He is best known as the portrait painter of the international elite, where his work captures the style, glamour and anxiety of a society on the cusp of change. These two Gardens Trust talks on January 30 and February 6 will concentrate not on Sargent’s portraiture, but on the studies of gardens and flowers he painted in the English countryside in the mid 1880s, his experiments with Impressionist light and brushwork, and a series of later works which express the beauty and melancholy he found in historic European gardens.
Elaine Kilmurray is Research Director of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonné, and co-author of the 9 published volumes of the catalogue (Yale University Press, 1998-2016). She has co-curated exhibitions of Sargent’s work in London, the United States and Italy, and has written and lectured internationally on the artist and related subjects.
This ticket link is for the course of 2 sessions. or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £8. [Gardens Trust members may purchase tickets at £10.50 for the series or £6 each talk]. The purchase is through Eventbrite. 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.
The first talk on January 30 is entitled In an English Country Garden. This talk will consider Sargent’s paintings done in the English countryside during the summers and early autumns of 1885 and 1886, concentrating on the creation of the most important work of those two painting campaigns, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Britain, London). It will include comparisons with gardens painted by Impressionist artists, and refer to the symbolism of the relevant flowers, to the motif of the garden and to aspects of contemporary garden design. The February 6 talk is entitled The Romance of European Gardens. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sargent traveled extensively in Europe, painting obsessively. The historic gardens of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Corfu were one of his favorite subjects. Their appeal lay in aesthetic beauty, in the dialogue between art and nature, sculpture and vegetation they represented, but also in the sense of time passing and continuity embodied in them. The talk will look at Sargent’s distinctive interpretations in oil and watercolor and the ways in which they reflect contemporary sensibility regarding gardens and garden architecture.
Image: Boboli Gardens, c.1906, Brooklyn Museum of Art, USA
The Athol Bird & Nature Club is excited to have Jim Morelly return to the Millers River Environmental Center, 100 Main Street in Athol, Massachusetts on January 28 for a presentation on Black Bears. Jim presented his “5,000 Miles Hiked with Jim Morelly” at our regular Monthly meeting last October and returns to MREC to show us in vivid pictures and wonderful anecdotes his experience observing and photographing Black Bears in the Quabbin Region. The Center opens at 1:00 PM and the presentation will begin at 1:30. Questions please contact Dave@atholbirdclub.org
The Massachusetts Horticultural Society hosts a talk and book signing in early February which you won’t want to miss. Plantsman, author and designer of Bressingham Garden, Adrian Bloom, is coming to the Garden at Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street in Wellesley, on February 3, 2023. Learn about his career, projects including Bressingham Garden at Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and his new book, Foggy Bottom, which will be available for purchase and signing at the event! Coffee and Pastries included with registration.
9:30 – Check-in and enjoy coffee/pastries
10am – Adrian Bloom, in conversation with James Hearsum, MHS Executive Director
11am – Book Signing, purchase a new copy of Foggy Bottom and have it signed, before it’s released in the U.S.!
MHS members $35, nonmembers $40. Register at https://www.masshort.org/adrian-bloom-230203
Not long after the California Gold Rush, a different frenzy captured Americans’ attention: A rivalry dubbed the Bone Wars emerged in the fledgling field of paleontology between two young scientists, Othniel Charles Cope (on right, below) and Edward Drinker Marsh (left). Originally amicable colleagues–they even named fossils after each other—they became rivals in a long and bitter turf war complete with theft, corruption, and sabotage. Cope and Marsh would go on to name over 130 species of dinosaurs between them, but each would die impoverished and with damaged reputations due to their relentless fight.
Hans Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History, discusses the struggle between Cope and Marsh, plus their contributions to the field of paleontology and to the Smithsonian. This Zoom program takes place Tuesday, January 23 at 7 pm Eastern. $25 Smithsonian Associates members, $30 nonmembers. Register at https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/bone-wars
Winter garden tours at The Gardens at Elm Bank are back. Bundle up and enjoy the garden in a different light. Join the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for a morning tour highlighting plants with winter interests, garden history, and things to keep an eye out for in the coming spring months. Preregistration is required as space is very limited. Tours are available on January 25, February 3, & February 7. Register at www.masshort.org $7 for Mass Hort members, $10 for nonmembers.
London today is one of the greenest cities in the world but was it always so? This London Parks & Gardens Trust online talk on February 5 at 1 pm will explore the origins and changing uses of the city’s gardens and green spaces - parks, churchyards, commercial gardens as well as private gardens – during the 16th to 18th centuries, to show they were not just places to hunt, grow food or bury the dead but places of elaborate displays of wealth and status for the rich, a source of pleasure and recreation for the less well-to-do, and a place of very hard work for the garden laborers who toiled in them.
Dr David Marsh researches, lectures and writes on any and all aspects of garden history, and helps organise the Garden History seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and is the founder and inspiration behind their extensive on-line lecture program. For the last ten years he has also written a weekly garden history blog for them which you can find at thegardenstrust.blog – he has written over 400 posts so far! £5.00 The ticket entitles you to attend the online lecture as well as accessing a recording of the event for a week after. Register at https://bookwhen.com/londongardenstrust#focus=ev-smpl-20240205180000
In this Berkshire Botanical Garden online class, learn about garden makeovers from Deborah Chud’s portfolio on January 27 from 10 to 11:30 a.m online. Following a brief discussion of the features of wild landscapes fundamental to naturalistic landscape design, she takes you inside her solutions to garden dilemmas. The specific dilemmas addressed in this class involve: replacement of traditional shrubs, integration of a valued backdrop and existing trees, and whether there can be too much of a good thing in a garden. $15 for BBG members, $20 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/reimagined-garden-online
Deborah Chud is a retired Massachusetts physician turned garden maker, consultant and educator. Her six years of research on New Perennial gardens, including those at New York City’s High Line, Chicago’s Lurie Garden, the Oudolf Meadow at Delaware Botanic Gardens, and Oudolf Garden Detroit, generated a comprehensive existing database of New Perennial plant combinations and led to the creation of her own highly unusual New Perennial garden. In the fall of 2020, she presented her work as part of “Piet Oudolf: How Does He Do It?”– an international event organized by Piet Oudolf’s co-author, Noel Kingsbury, under the aegis of Garden Masterclass (gardenmasterclass.org).
Dusk in January is a perfect time to look and listen for Great Horned Owls, often heard calling throughout the Arnold Arboretum’s collections. Join Horticulturist Brendan Keegan and Zoo New England’s Matthew Kamm to hear about the owls’ breeding and nesting behavior, learn how to go owling ethically, and possibly hear and see a few owls as well. The walk takes place on January 21 beginning at 4:30 pm. Meet at the Bussey Street Gate. Registration required at https://arboretum.harvard.edu/events/event-signup/?id=82531
Accessibility: Participants will walk over paved roads, woodchips paths, and mowed grass.
In the event of inclement weather, registrants will be notified via email. If you have questions, please email publicprograms@arnarb.harvard.edu or call the Visitor Center desk between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm at (617) 384-5209.
Join The Gibson House Museum for a three-part virtual lecture series investigating the fascinating world of 19th-century health care and its connections to the Gibson family. From hospitals run by and created for women, to medical collections and knowledge, to mental health and addiction, the Gibson family’s story is a window into how Bostonians experienced health care over the course of the century. Bonus: Each ticket comes with a 25% discount code for an “At Home with the Gibsons” tour! The first lecture will take place on January 16 from 6 – 7 pm. In 1891, Vincent Memorial Hospital was founded to care for working-class women; the early medical staff was comprised exclusively of women doctors. The Vincent Club was founded shortly thereafter, in part by the women of the Gibson family, in order to support the work of the hospital. Join Vincent Memorial Hospital Foundation historian William Baker, Jr. and the Gibson House’s Sarah Hagglund to explore this fascinating time in Boston’s medical history and the various roles women had in creating, staffing, and supporting women’s health care. $10. Register HERE
