Invasive plants threaten the delicate ecosystems within J.C. Phillips Nature Preserve, located at 779 Cabot Street in Beverly. A BioBlitz will help us show where the forest needs the most assistance. Join us for the kickoff! (Can’t attend the kick-off? You can still collect data all year long!) A BioBlitz is an event where attendees take photos and record sounds to catalog the animals and plants living in an area. The resulting data paints a picture of the ecosystem and what lives there- and what doesn’t! You don’t need experience, just the free iNaturalist app and a smart phone!
Grow Native Massachusetts concludes its 2026 free public lecture series on Wednesday, May 20 at 7 pm in person at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, 11 French Drive in Boylston, and also online. The Caterpillar Lab will present a photograph and video packed talk that explores the nighttime world of caterpillars, moths, and how to find them. Join us to learn how we can explore our own backyard habitats through the eyes of a moth, using UV and special light traps to uncover a whole new perspective. This special lecture will include time to meet a few special caterpillar specimens up close and, and chat with Caterpillar Lab educators about all things local caterpillar. In-person attendees will also get to try out blacklight flashlights!
The Caterpillar Lab is a non-profit based in New Hampshire that fosters greater appreciation and care for the complexity and beauty of natural history through live caterpillar educational programs, research initiatives, and photography and film projects. They believe that an increased awareness of one’s local environment is the foundation on which healthy and responsible attitudes towards the broader natural systems of this world are built.
A collaboration of gardeners, educators, designers and business leaders, the Nantucket Garden Festival highlights the unique and beautiful garden ecosystems on Nantucket and focuses on the importance of sustainability, conservation and gardening ethics for the long-term health of the island. 2026 marks the 17th anniversary of the Festival! Join us for a celebration of gardening through a host of educational workshops, exquisite garden tours, family activities and parties. View the schedule of events here: www.NantucketGardenFestival.org.
Nantucket Lighthouse School’s educational garden and greenhouse provide students with a living laboratory and a deeper connection to the natural world. Advised by the late Russell, Morash, Chair of Childhood Horticulture at Nantucket Lighthouse School, our weekly horticulture classes allow children to grow, experiment, observe, and learn—while also teaching them how to care for the environment.
Your support of the Nantucket Garden Festival, at any level, nurtures a year-round community of Nantucket Lighthouse School students who practice and model the spirit of sustainability every day.
To learn more about NGF26 sponsorship opportunities for individuals and businesses, please contact Nantucket Lighthouse School.
Boston Community Gardens will offer a garden tour and a master gardener question and answer once a month in a different community garden, sponsored by The Trustees of Reservations. The first will happen May 15 at the Forbes Street Community Garden in Jamaica Plain, followed on June 5 from 5:30 – 6:30 at the Chilcott Granada Community Garden in Roxbury, July 30 from 5:30 – 6:30 at the Lydon Way Community Garden in Dorchester, August 8 at 10 am at the Eagle Hill Community Garden in East Boston, September 26 at 10 am in the West Springfield Community Garden in the South End, and an October event, date to be announced, in the Woolson Community Garden in Mattapan. Free and open to all. For more information, visit https://thetrustess.org/seedsow
The Garden Club of the Back Bay invites you to its annual Twilight Garden Party, this year being held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Boston, on June 3 from 6 – 8. The party is a lavish kickoff to summer, and supports the meaningful work the Club performs for the trees and gardens of the Back Bay and around the City. Tickets are now available through Eventbrite HERE.
The Friends of the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway invite you to learn how East Boston’s abandoned rail corridor became the beautiful Greenway it is today, on Thursday, May 21 from 6:30 – 7:30 pm at the East Boston Branch Library of the Boston Public Library, 365 Bremen Street in East Boston. Special guest speaker Valerie Burns will speak. Valerie served as the president of Boston Natural Areas Network for the last quarter-century.
The fifth in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of The Gardener’s Magazine takes place May 20 at 1 pm Eastern.
It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’
In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.
Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realize how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.
Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. Tickets to the May 20 session may be purchased through Eventbrite HERE. 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 until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.
This talk reconsiders John Claudius Loudon as not only an eminent landscape gardener and encyclopaedist, but as a visionary urban thinker. Through analysis of his publications and his design for Gravesend Terrace Gardens, it will explore the meanings of the Gardenesque – a style which Loudon evolved and defined over the course of his career. The aesthetic and reformist ideals underpinning this unique approach to landscape design help frame his macro-scale response to the anxieties of the industrial city, which took the form of a radical plan in his 1829 Gardener’s Magazine. Loudon’s prescient proposal, which imagined London growing in alternating, concentric zones of town and country, arguably deserves a place in the lineage of Green Belt thinking. Gardenesque Urbanism, as presented here, perhaps represents an overlooked approach to the reconciliation of urban growth with the innate human affinity for open space.
Patrick Smith is an architectural designer at IID Architects – a Richmond-based practice which specializes in the education sector. He previously studied Sculpture at Central Saint Martins, and then Architecture at the University of Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge, he became interested in landscape theory and its intersection with urban design. For his research into the work of John Claudius Loudon, he was awarded the 2025 Mavis Batey Essay Prize by the Gardens Trust.
This summer the Urban Farming Institute is inviting a small cohort of youth to join us on the farm in our movement toward building a healthy community. Young Farmers Project is a program that will serve as a site of belonging and transformation for youth where we will combine hands-on land-based skills, art, collective leadership, civic engagement, and political education to develop a loving relationship with the land, ourselves, and each other.
Together we will…
Learn how to grow food through hands-on farming
Explore nature and our local ecosystems
Make art, share food, and move our bodies
Design a community action project based on the needs in our lives and community
Share what we learn with our community
Consider our passions, experiences, and skills in creating positive social change
Program Dates: July 6 – August 14 (6 weeks) This program will run from Monday – Friday (28 hours/week) 9:00 am – 3:00 pm (Wednesdays 9:00 am – 1:00 pm)
Location:
Urban Farming Institute 487 Norfolk Street Mattapan, MA 02186
This Berkshire Botanical Garden exhibition at the Leonhardt Gallery showcases Jenine Shereos’ ongoing dialogue with plants and the natural world. Visitors will encounter her dreamlike photographs of floral installations created in France, alongside textiles woven from yarn she hand-dyed using local plants and lichens. Also featured are her intricately crafted leaves stitched entirely with human hair. Shereos, who lives in the Berkshires, is Assistant Professor of Fibers at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Exhibition hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, daily. For more information visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/leonhardt-galleries-2026
Join The Sterling Garden Club on May 21 at 10:30 am for a free lecture from Elizabeth Barnes, MA Department of Agricultural Resources.
The signs and symptoms of invasive pests are often in plain sight but go unrecognized too late. These non- native organisms from insects to blights, impact a wide range of New England gardens, forests, meadows and roadsides. Elizabeth will explain how to find these pests and what to do if you discover them. Learn how to recognize and identify signs of several area pests and how you can help to reduce the pests’ impact and spread. The program will be held at American Legion Hall, 32 School Street in Sterling. Please pre-register by May 19 by emailing SterlingGardenClub1934@gmail.com
