Experience Berkshire Botanical Garden’s second annual Drawing on the Land design symposium at the breathtaking Rockland Farm, in Canaan, N.Y, on Saturday, June 13, from 1 to 5 p.m. (including a tour of the garden). Spend an afternoon immersed in landscape creativity as two distinguished designers share their perspectives, followed by an insightful panel discussion. The day concludes with a guided tour of the gardens at the height of their June beauty followed by a wine reception. Whether you’re a professional designer or an inspired enthusiast, this program will spark new ideas and deepen your connection to design in the natural world.
Featured speaker Preston Montague, PLA, ASLA, is a landscape architect and artist working to strengthen relationships between people and the natural world. His environmental design studio deploys art, horticulture and landscape architecture in the service of building places that have meaning and ecological depth. When not in studio, Preston enjoys teaching landscape architecture at North Carolina A&T State University and hiking the wilder places. https://www.prestonmontague.com. He will speak on Designing for the Experience: Composition in Practice. Choreographing experiences with designed plantings is a feat of art, science, and will. The old adage of “right plant, right place” applies to plant survivability of course, but can also apply to the way we arrange plants to encourage particular reactions from visitors. There’s an art to the design of an experience, and there are also simple tactics that can hasten decision-making and help organize a design process. For landscape architect Preston Montague, those tactics come from composition he learned from an earlier practice as an artist. Join Preston for an examination of planting design strategies he deploys in his studio that are rooted in principles of composition.
The next featured speaker is Tony Spencer, the Canadian writer, photographer, blogger, and planting designer behind The New Perennialist. He is recognized and published internationally in the world of naturalistic garden design. In 2024, Tony won his second top Landscape Design Award of Excellence from the U.S.-based Perennial Plant Association (PPA). He was also named PPA Garden Media Promoter of the year along with a 2024 Silver Medal for Social Media from GardenComm. Day to day, Tony is a puckish ringleader for the naturalistic movement with over 100,000 followers on his various social media channels. He travels extensively to gardens and symposiums in his primary role as a communicator, documenter and sharer of ideas for this movement. Tony is currently at work on an upcoming book for Timber Press with a publishing date of 2027. www.thenewperennialist.com
Tony’s presentation is Wildscaping: Explorations in Naturalistic Planting Design. In the post-wild countryside of Ontario, Canada, Tony Spencer is conducting a series of open experiments to combine naturalistic planting design with Blue-Green Infrastructure into a fluid ecological art form. Working on the local level, he cultivates his universal concept of Wildscaping. This is about using plant-driven landscape design to create and sustain dynamic garden spaces, filled with beauty and wildlife, to rekindle our relationship to the natural world. The focus of this talk is how to link home to landscape in a symbiotic loop to build new nature and adapt to the inevitable extremes of the new climate.
Fees: BBG and Hollister House members $170, nonmembers $200, students $100. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/drawing-land
