Daily Archives: January 30, 2025

Tuesday, February 25, 2:00 pm – What’s Wrong With My Houseplant?

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The Garden Club of the Back Bay will hold its February meeting on February 25 at 2 pm at The Chilton Club, 152 Commonwealth Avenue, featuring Bonnie Power on the topic of houseplants. As with our outdoor gardens, many things can go wrong when you grow plants indoors. Learn the factors that make for happy houseplants, including light, water, and soil…and how to provide them. Common houseplant pests and diseases are also on the agenda, as well as how to treat them.

Bonnie Power has been a Massachusetts Master Gardener since 2016 (now a Lifetime MG) and member of the MMGA Speakers Bureau since 2018…and a serious outdoor/indoor gardener most of her life. Curious and research-oriented by nature, she has many horticultural interests and areas of expertise. Bonnie holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Zoology, which informs her perspective on the management of garden insects. She is a member of the MGA Soil pH Testing team and also volunteer guide at Garden in the Woods, a Native Plant Trust botanical garden in Framingham. She learned to grow vegetables as a child from her father, and flowers and houseplants from her mother. Early in her marriage her father-in-law provided her first lessons in organic gardening. At home in Marlborough, Bonnie grows a variety of vegetables and ornamentals (with a bias for natives).

This is a members only event but you can sign up for membership at https://gardenclubbackbay.org/

Wednesday, February 19, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Places to Play: Alton Towers, an Early Regency Theme Park

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Designed landscapes are typically defined as places laid out for artistic effect or aesthetic purposes, somewhere to contemplate and admire. Yet many people have a much more active relationship with outdoor spaces, engaging with them for jogging, cycling, ball games, playgrounds and carnival rides. They are places to play.

This Gardens Trust series will examine the relationship between historic designed landscapes and organized recreation. We’ll be exploring children’s outdoor play, a world-famous theme park set among a Grade 1 Regency landscape, a Premier League football stadium that was once a Victorian pleasure ground, an early 18th-century estate that is now a golf course, and a Victorian public park which was opposed by local workers despite its claimed recreational and health-giving benefits.

This ticket (register HERE) is for this individual session and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 or £26.25). 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 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards.

Week Two: Many people will have experienced the thrills and spills of a day out to Alton Towers with its famous attractions. But long before the gravity defying rides arrived, Alton Towers and its range of ‘pick and mix’ garden features and eclectic planting had already developed a reputation as a ‘Theme Park’ in its own right. Created by the 15th Earl of Shrewsbury between 1814 and 1827, Alton Towers became one of the most renowned gardens to visit in the Regency and Victorian age.

In this talk, Advolly will examine the history and development of a unique garden that survived quietly, and has now been fully restored, while all eyes were focused on the donkey rides and rollercoasters.

Advolly Richmond is a plants, gardens and social historian based in Shropshire. A Fellow of the Linnean Society, she is also a Champion for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She lectures and writes on a range of subjects and is currently teaching A Social and Cultural History of Italian Renaissance Gardens at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. Advolly’s new book A Short History of Flowers: The stories that make our gardens (Frances Lincoln) was published in March 2024. She also contributes garden history features on BBC`s Gardeners World and produces ‘The Garden History Podcast.’

©Advolly Richmond