Daily Archives: May 17, 2025

Sunday, May 25, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Natural History Exploration

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Join artist and journalist Will Close for this series of natural history explorations at the Millers River Environmental Center. In this Athol Bird & Nature Club workshop on May 25 you will get a chance to deepen your awareness and connection to the natural world through wildlife tracking and the use of nature journaling and field sketching. You will be guided through various foundational techniques designed to strengthen your observational skills. This workshop will be primarily held in the field. All experience levels are welcome.

Will Close is an artist, designer, educator, and wildlife tracker who specializes in the intersection of nature, art, design, and teaching. He holds a degree in Fine Art Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and studied wildlife track and sign under Dan Gardoqui and Daniel Hansche. Currently, Will resides in Concord, Massachusetts where he maintains an artistic studio practice and is an outdoor education instructor with the Carroll School located in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His passion for nature illustration, tracking and sharing it with others, has taken him from the spruce forests of Maine to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Most recently, he was the inaugural artist in residence with North Country Land Trust in North Central Massachusetts. For more information visit www.atholbirdclub.org

Tuesday, May 20, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – Avant Gardening in the Twilight of a Millennium, Online

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The Gardens Trust’s final series of A History of Gardens will consider developments of the recent past. Starting with the arrival of the sleek, functional style of Modernism after the first world war, the talks will move on to explore contemporary thinking on the challenges of conserving and restoring historic parks and gardens, the rise of ecological perennial planting, the reappearance of allusive gardens and how a garden’s ‘spirit of place’ can guide sustainable plans for the future.

Themes and exemplars in garden-making are more difficult to identify without the benefit of distance and time. But considering recent ideas and approaches is bound to bring a thought-provoking end to our History of Gardens. This ticket link is for the sixth series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 or you may purchase a ticket for individual talks, costing £8 via the links on the website. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25). Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards. Ticket sales close 4 hours before the first talk.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (if you do not receive this link please contact us) and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 2 weeks.

Talk 4 on May 20 is Avant Gardening in the Twilight of a Millennium, with Patrick Eyres. Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) coined the term Avant-Gardening, to evoke the process of synthesising art and horticulture at Little Sparta. In the centenary of Finlay’s birth, Little Sparta will be the focus. The allusion and association of Avant-Gardening provides common ground with four other contemporary gardens. Fragility is a parallel theme. Little Sparta (Ian and Sue Finlay), The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Charles and Maggie Jencks) and Prospect Cottage (Derek Jarman) have survived the death of their creators; the Garden of History (Jim Pierce) and the Driftwood Garden (Brian Yale) have not.

Dr Patrick Eyres is editor and publisher of the unique New Arcadian Journal, in which artists and writers explore the landscape garden. The 56th and penultimate edition is underway. He has also published in numerous other books and journals and taught in the School of Art and Design at Bradford Collage. He served on the boards of the Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust, Leeds Art Fund, Garden History Society and Little Sparta Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for the first ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History. He continues to advise on the conservation of Little Sparta.