Boston Flora

Category: Author Book Signing

Thursday, April 25, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm – Nonstop Plants: A Garden for 365 Days
Join The Massachusetts Horticultural Society on April 25 at the Gardens at Elm Bank for this special evening and book signing. Copies of Margaret Roach’s all-new version of her first award-winning book, A Way to Garden, are being published in spring 2019 by Timber Press, on its 21^st anniversary. Copies will be available for purchase and signing at this event (before it’s on shelves)!

The evening will also include an inspiring and informative presentation, The 365-Day Garden. Want to make a garden for all seasons? Margaret loves looking out her windows 365 days a year—not just in “garden season.” She has worked for more than 25 years to make her garden in the Hudson Valley-Berkshires area a visual treat every day of the year. Meet the plants and the philosophy that make it happen, delivered with a dose of “horticultural how-to and woo-woo.”

Come hear the story of her garden, including:
- the background of how she came to garden in rural Columbia County, NY—with a little “before and after” for perspective
- how and why she made a four-season garden—and the basic principles of garden design that she applied
- how to shop for plants with that goal in mind (with profiles of many of her garden-worthy favorites)
- what makes the garden so appealing to nearly 70 species of birds and other welcome wildlife
- how to go beyond “outdoor decorating” aimed at pure visual effect, and really engage with the garden through all your senses and emotions (that’s the “woo-woo” part!)
Cocktail hour begins at 6, presentation to begin at 7. $30 for Mass Hort members, $45 general admission. Register at www.masshort.org.
March 30, 2019
Friday, April 26 – Sunday, April 28 – 73rd Annual Garden Symposium at Colonial Williamsburg

The evolution of any garden happens naturally or at the whim of our own mind and hands. Whether you’re starting from scratch or renovating an existing garden that has lost its character, it’s almost always desirable to work with a plan. Even the most well-intentioned efforts result in disappointment when approached without a cohesive design strategy. Learn how to create harmonious gardens that sing with creativity, as well as those that reflect personal expression and reverence for design fundamentals. Guest speakers at the 73rd Annual Garden Symposium at Colonial Williamsburg on April 26 – 28 will discuss how to integrate existing elements, effectively combine plants and hardscape materials, and create features of distinctive landscape styles. If you are currently undecided about your own future gardens or simply ready for a refreshing renovation to existing ones, this symposium is for you!

This year’s theme of design recalls the title of Colonial Williamsburg’s magazine, Trend and Tradition, focusing our attention on how gardeners blend the old and the new to great effect in a variety of spaces. Gardens provide people with beautiful places of respite, and the art of designing and caring for them constantly evolves. While mixing tried-and-true traditions with new trends can make a space shine, it’s important to consider the latest innovations within the context of longstanding best practices, understanding why they have withstood the test of time. Experts with a breadth of knowledge in growing food, providing wildlife cover, making smart plant choices and cleverly utilizing small spaces are here to help.

Throughout the two-and-a-half-day Garden Symposium, nationally known experts on garden design and maintenance, including some of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s own landscape and nursery staff, will lead a wide variety of sessions. Guest speakers will discuss how to rehabilitate an old space, create a pet-friendly oasis for your four-legged friends and design the perfect garden to enhance its ecosystem and help the flora truly thrive. This symposium is perfect for those new to gardening or seasoned professionals—there’s something for everyone!

** Shuttle service will be provided between the property hotels, Lane Auditorium, First Street in Williamsburg, and Historic Area for those who do not wish to drive. Register at www.colonialwilliamsburg.com

March 8, 2019
Friday, April 12, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm, and Saturday, April 13, 8:00 am – 4:00 pm – The 15th Annual Great Gardens Symposium

The premier Great Gardens Symposium takes place on Friday, April 12 and Saturday, April 13, 2019, at the magnificent, world-class Woodstock Inn and Resort in Woodstock, Vermont. The symposium features:

Five info-packed lectures led by nationally and regionally renowned professionals in their fields

A Gardeners Marketplace with plant vendors, artisans, gardening gifts and products

An exquisite setting – The Inn is cherished for its preservation of New England history, heritage, and elegance as well as farm-fresh food and an emphasis on conservation

Terrific handouts, door prizes and garden gifts for everyone

Special overnight room rates for symposium attendees at The Woodstock Inn and Resort

An opportunity to connect with hundreds of gardeners from around the Northeast and beyond

The 2019 symposium is sure to be another sellout like past symposiums! Friday’s Pre-Symposium program from 1 – 4 with Kerry Ann Mendez is $55, and Saturday’s 8 – 4 day, with presenters Matthew Benson, Annie White, Warren Leach, and Kerry Ann Mendez, is $98. Full descriptions of the lectures and registration may be found at https://pyours.com/symposium/

February 28, 2019
Saturday, March 2, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – Cultivating the Designer’s Mind

Long in production, Cultivating the Designers Mind — Principles and Process of Coherent Landscape Design, is a culmination of sixty years of studying, teaching and practicing landscape design. While the book is intended for all land-related professions, landscape architects, architects, planners and engineers, it is both accessible to and useful for all audiences. By personal experience, its principles and processes are widely applicable to much of common life. Highly illustrated with real world examples, this book includes Walter’s compelling watercolor landscape paintings, and focuses on the thinking process at the various stages of a design project. It concludes with ten of the most pervasive and widely applicable design principles. This Berkshire Botanical Garden talk on March 2 from 10 – noon will share some of the sources of personal inspiration, discovered principles, and insights made in capturing on paper the elusive task called designing. There will be ample time for planned audience engagement and questions and answers in the one hour talk.

Walter Cudnohufsky, M.L.A., is a long-time dedicated teacher. Having founded and for 20 years directed the nationally acclaimed Conway (MA) School of Landscape Design, he has honed a reasoned approach to planning design. Currently his firm is engaged in many diverse and stimulating planning/design projects throughout the region. BBG members $10, nonmembers $15. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/cultivating-designer%E2%80%99s-mind

February 23, 2019
Tuesday, February 19, 6:30 pm – The Invention of Rivers

Separating land and water is not just an act of division; it is also an act of creation. It creates land and water from ubiquitous wetness, defining them on either side of a line. It is one of the first acts of design, setting out a ground of habitation with a line that has largely been naturalized in features such as the coastline, the riverbank, and the water’s edge. These features are subjected to artistic representations, scientific inquiry, infrastructural engineering, and landscape design with little awareness of the act that brought them into being. Today, however, with the increasing frequency of flood and, not unrelatedly, sea-level rise attributed to climate change, the line of separation has come into sharp focus with proposals for walls, levees, natural defenses, and land retirement schemes. These responses raise questions on where the line is drawn, but they also raise questions on the separation that this line facilitates. Is this separation found in nature or does nature follow from its assertion? Are there other beginnings to design and consequently, other possible natures and grounds of habitation?

Join the Harvard Graduate School of Design on February 19 at 6:30 pm at Gund Hall Piper Auditorium, Quincy Street, Cambridge, for a free public lecture on The Invention of Rivers by Dilip da Cunha.

Dilip da Cunha is an architect and planner based in Philadelphia and Bangalore. He is co-director of the Risk and Resilience program at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and Adjunct Professor at the GSAPP, Columbia University. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His new book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, was just published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15913.html). In 2017, da Cunha along with Anuradha Mathur received a Pew Fellowship Grant in recognition of their collaborative work. They are currently working on a multimedia exhibition titled The Ocean of Rain. http://www.mathurdacunha.com

Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

February 10, 2019
Thursday, February 7, 10:00 am – Ellen Shipman and the American Garden

Judith Tankard is a landscape historian, author, preservation consultant, and member of the Garden Club of the Back Bay. She received an M.A. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and taught at the Landscape Institute for over 20 years. Ms. Tankard has authored or co-authored ten books on landscape history, including her latest book Ellen Shipman and the American Garden. There will be copies available for purchase and signing at The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s February 7 meeting, beginning at 10 am at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. Garden Club members will receive notice of the meeting and optional lunch following the lecture. If you are not a member but are interested in attending, please email info@bostonflora.com.

January 20, 2019
Thursday, January 24, 7:00 pm – Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont

Going Up the Country is part oral history, part nostalgia-tinged narrative, and part clear-eyed analysis of the multifaceted phenomena collectively referred to as the counterculture movement in Vermont. This is the story of how young migrants, largely from the cities and suburbs of New York and Massachusetts, turned their backs on the establishment of the 1950s and moved to the backwoods of rural Vermont, spawning a revolution in lifestyle, politics, sexuality, and business practices that would have a profound impact on both the state and the nation. The movement brought hippies, back-to-the-landers, political radicals, sexual libertines, and utopians to a previously conservative state and led us to today’s farm to table way of life, environmental consciousness, and progressive politics as championed by Bernie Sanders.

Yvonne Daley is the author of five previous books and director of the Green Mountain Writers Conference. She will speak at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on January 24 beginning at 7 pm. If you ever dreamed of escaping to that farm in Vermont, be sure to hear Yvonne’s stories. More information may be found at https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/yvonne-daley-going-country

January 8, 2019
Thursday, January 10, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm – Miles of Portraits: Alaska

Join the Massachusetts Audubon Society at the Boston Nature Center, 500 Walk Hill Street in Boston on Thursday, January 10, from 6:30-8:30 pm for a special event hosted by REI Boston.

Come watch two episodes of the film Miles of Portraits: Alaska and hear about the many ways the bicycle brings people together. FREE general admission, or $49/ticket package. The ticket package includes: one general admission ticket, two signed magazines, and a poster.

Registration is managed by REI Boston. While tickets are free, registration is required to attend this event. Register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/miles-of-portraits-alaska-boston-nature-center-tickets-53228125757

When Annalisa and Erik ride their nearly 100-pound loaded bicycles, people ask them questions. A lot of questions. Across America and around Alaska, their bicycles have become the ultimate conversation starter and have introduced them to hundreds of people. Miles of Portraits is a magazine and film that captures their stories.

Come watch episodes of the film and hear Annalisa and Erik, both Type 1 diabetics, talk about these kind souls they met on their 1,000-mile bike trip around Alaska as well as their own story managing the disease out in the middle of nowhere.

January 3, 2019
Monday, January 14, 7:00 pm – Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism

Red-Green Revolution is an impassioned and informed confrontation with the planetary emergency brought about by accelerated ecological devastation in the last half-century.

Its author, distinguished political scientist Victor Wallis, argues that sound ecological policy requires a socialist framework, based on democratic participation and drawing on the historical lessons of earlier efforts. Wallis presents a relentless critique of the capitalist system that has put the human species into a race against time to salvage and restore what it can of the environmental conditions necessary for a healthy existence. He then looks to how we might turn things around, reconsidering the institutions, technologies, and social relationships that will determine our shared future, and discussing how a better framework can evolve through the convergence of popular struggles, as these have emerged under conditions of crisis.

This is an important book, both for its incisive account of how we got into the mess in which we find ourselves, and for its bold vision of how we might still go forward.

Victor Wallis is a professor of liberal arts at the Berklee College of Music. He was for twenty years the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy and has been writing on ecological issues since the early 1990s. His writings have appeared in journals such as Monthly Review and New Political Science, and have been translated into thirteen languages.

The talk and book signing will take place Monday, January 14 beginning at 7 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge. For more information visit https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/victor-wallis-red-green-revolution

December 30, 2018
Sunday, November 11, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape

Author Barbara Paul Robinson will speak at Tower Hill Botanic Garden on November 11 from 1 – 2 on her new book Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape. Here are the vibrant stories of eighteen contemporary heroes of horticulture – institution builders, plant explorers and garden creators who have all had a major impact on the American landscape. Three of them established The Garden Conservancy. Others worked to revitalize and establish botanical and other exceptional public gardens. Some intrepid plant explorers (one with a Tower Hill connection) have even traveled to remote parts of the globe to bring back and disseminate plants unknown in the West. Over the course of their careers, these heroes have worked to preserve and enhance our public spaces, setting new standards for aesthetics and encouraging wider public participation. Whether you work the soil or not, you’ll read their stories with a sense of wonder and admiration, and there’s a good chance you’ll derive some practical horticultural benefits from their passion, their lives and their work.

During a sabbatical from the leading international law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton where she was the first woman partner, Barbara Paul Robinson worked as a gardener for Rosemary Verey at Barnsley House. A hands-in-the-dirt gardener herself, she and her husband have created their own gardens at Brush Hill in northwestern Connecticut, featured in articles, books and television. Her first book was Rosemary Verey: The Life and Lessons of a Legendary Gardener (Godine 2012). A frequent speaker, Barbara has published articles in the New York Times, Horticulture, Fine Gardening and Hortus; she has also written a chapter in Rosemary Verey’s The Secret Garden.

$10 for Tower Hill members, $20 for nonmembers. Register at www.towerhillbg.org.

November 4, 2018