Boston Flora

Category: Author Book Signing

  • Saturday, February 18, 2:00 pm – The World According to Dirr: Trees and Shrubs for the 21st Century

    Plan now for an important horticultural lecture in February. Noted author, educator and researcher Michael Dirr, Ph.D. will present The World According to Dirr: Trees and Shrubs for the 21st Century at the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s 2012 Annual Winter Lecture on Saturday, February 18, beginning at 2 pm.

    Dirr’s illustrated lecture will weave a tapestry rich in topics befitting an American icon of horticulture, complete with his signature humor and style. The endearing noble trees, trends in woody plants and the back story of the landscape industry, including plant breeding and development, are among the topics he will present.

    Dr. Dirr’s influence in horticulture is far reaching. A prolific author and exceptional hybridizer, he has dedicated his life to educating the public about the importance and use of woody plants in the landscape. In addition to his many well-known books, his newly published Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs continues to set the gold standard for horticultural reference. Known alternately as the modern father of woody plants and the hydrangea guru, his contributions to the world of horticulture are remarkable.

    Following the lecture, all are invited to a reception and book signing of Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs and the Manual of Woody Landscape Plants. Call the Garden today to reserve your advance copies!

    Lecture generously sponsored by Hunter Boot.  (Snow date: Sunday, February 19)  The event will take place at Monument Mountain Regional High School, Route 7 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  BBG member price $35, nonmembers $42, group rates available.  Call 413-298-3926 for more information, or email rparow@berkshirebotanical.org.

  • Thursday, January 26, 2:00 pm – Beacon Street: Its Buildings & Residents

    Join historian Robert E. Guarino on a nostalgic journey down a highway of history when he discusses his new book Beacon Street: Its Buildings & Residents, at the Boston Public Library’s Rabb Lecture Hall, 700 Boylston Street, on Thursday, January 26 at 2 pm. The grand mansions and the elegant attached row houses of Beacon Street are the homes of Boston’s elite and a backdrop for the city’s long history. The iconic street is crowned with Charles Bulfinch’s magnificent 1798 Massachusetts Statehouse overlooking the legendary Boston Common, where the British occupiers trained and cows once roamed freely. Historian Robert E. Guarino deftly narrates the development of the street, from its expansion as land from the top of Mount Vernon extended its length to Horace Gray’s efforts in 1837 to found the Public Garden. Join Guarino as he takes a fascinating and nostalgic journey down the historic and storied highway of Beacon Street.  Mr. Guarino, currently a resident of Vermont, is a trustee of the Vermont Historical Society.

  • Wednesday, January 18, 6:00 pm – Strange New Worlds: From Meteorites in Antarctica to the Search for Life Beyond Our Solar System

    Renowned astronomer Ray Jayawardhana, University of Toronto and current Radcliffe Institute fellow, will give a lively talk on cutting-edge science of today’s planet hunters, the prospects for discovering alien life, and the debate and controversies at the forefront of extrasolar-planet research, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, January 18, beginning at 6 pm.  Jayawardhana will also discuss his recent travels to the frigid ice of Antarctica where he went to look for meteorites—and found them. Following the talk, he will sign copies of his recent book, Strange New Worlds. Free and open to the public, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street. Free parking available in the 52 Oxford Street garage.  For directions, visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu.

  • Tuesday, December 13, 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm – Amateur Entomologists and Digital Photography

    The December meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club will be held Tuesday, December 13, from 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm and will feature Tom Murray, author of a new field guide entitled Insects of New England and New York, who will speak on Amateur Entomologists and Digital Photography.  CEC meetings are held the second Tuesday of the month from October through May. The evening schedule typically includes an informal dinner (6:15 to 7:15 PM) followed by our formal meeting (7:30 – 9:00 PM) in MCZ 101, 26 Oxford Street, Harvard University. The latter begins with club business and is followed by a 50 minute entomology related presentation. Membership is open to amateur and professional entomologists.  For more information, email CEC President Jessica Walden-Gray at jessisoutside@gmail.com.

  • Wednesday, December 7, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm – One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place

    Eudora Welty’s Mississippi garden ran riot with the camellias, roses, and daylilies that she tended as zealously as her prose. The novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for The Optimist’s Daughter, cultivated characters for her stories along with the flowers that she grew in her modest Jackson garden.

    A fine new book by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown looks at Welty’s enduring relationship with her garden, to which she turned as a respite from her travels and the pressures of making a living as a writer. The garden and house where Eudora Welty (1909-2001) lived and wrote is now a museum, and the garden has been restored to its heyday in the 1920s through the ’40s.

    Welty’s letters, published for the first time in this book, reveal witty and telling observations about not only gardening, but also fellow gardeners. She wrote to a friend, “The delphiniums I planted in my ignorance have all bloomed like everything and are getting ready to bloom for the second time and Mother says the ladies of the garden club come over each day to worship and grit their teeth.”

    On Wednesday, December 7, from 3 – 5, come hear Jane Roy Brown speak about Miss Welty’s garden and how its formation also offers a compelling look at the broader social trends of the time, including the flourishing of womens civic involvement through garden clubs and the development of streetcar suburbs. Brown serves as director of educational outreach at the Library of American Landscape History. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe as well as in national publications.

    Admission to the book talk is free but an RSVP is requested to mhorn@masshort.org. The event is co-sponsored by COGdesign (www.cogdesign.org) and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (www.masshort.org).  The event takes place at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society at Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street in Wellesley.

  • Saturday, December 3, 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm – Flora Novae Angliae

    The New England Wild Flower Society hosts a lecture and book signing with Arthur Haines at Garden in the Woods on Saturday, December 3, from 1:30 – 3:30.  Illustrators Elizabeth Farnsworth and Gordon Morrison will also attend. New England Wild Flower Society is thrilled to announce that after nine years of field, herbarium, and literature study Flora Novae Angliae, a Manual for the Identification of Native and Naturalized Higher Vascular Plants of New England, has been published by Yale University Press.

    This 1,008 page book is the definitive publication for the study and identification of the plants of New England. Join the author for a discussion of the underlying philosophies, a look at some of the research and novel finds on which the manual was written, and discussion of the many collaborators (and their exciting finds) who helped make the book possible. The lecture will present fascinating botanical information pertinent to each state in New England.

    This partly illustrated work presents the latest in nomenclatural, taxonomic, and distribution information for New England’s tracheophytes (i.e., higher vascular plants). The manual makes a departure from its predecessors in several respects. First, well-supported information was incorporated into the text, regardless of how unpopular it may have been viewed. Second, many thousands of herbarium specimens were reviewed to verify not only recent collections but the early ones as well. Third, identification keys were written, where possible, with focus on characteristics that do not display substantial phenotypic (i.e., environmental) variation. And fourth, all hybrid plants that could be verified as part of the New England flora were included (rather than just the well-known or named ones). These underlying philosophies have contributed to building a floristic manual with many substantial changes from earlier works covering the region.

    Arthur Haines stated, “The initial view of this manual may be one of greater complexity, but the goal was simply to write a manual that reflected, as accurately as plant taxonomists understood, our best understanding of the species growing on the New England landscape.”  After the lecture, the author will be joined by the two illustrators, Elizabeth Farnsworth and Gordon Morrison, for a book signing in the Garden Shop at Garden in the Woods.  Please RSVP if you plan to attend the December 3 lecture by calling the registrar at 508-877-7630, ext 3303.

  • Thursday, November 17, 10:00 am – 11:30 am – The Roses at the End of the Road

    With an illustrated lecture on Thursday, November 17, at 10:00 a. m., Pat Leuchtman will take us on a virtual stroll to see her country garden. The talk is part of the Mass Hort Library’s Author Series, and it is free and open to the public. The author of the new book, The Roses at the End of the Road, began planting her Rose Walk 30 years ago and will tell us about romantic old fashioned roses as well as hardy and disease resistant roses. For 30 years, she has written a column for The Recorder in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and other newspapers, which include The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Burlington Free Press. She has also written for magazines, including Horticulture and Organic Gardening. Her book is made up of lively essays about life among the roses and with the commonweeder.com blog. Books will be available for purchase.  Pre-registration is desirable but not required. To tell us that you are coming, please call Librarian Maureen Horn at 617-933-4912 or email her at mhorn@masshort.org.

  • Saturday, November 19, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm – The Organic Home Orchard

    Join holistic orchardist Michael Phillips at the Berkshire Botanical Garden on Saturday, November 19, from 1 – 4,  for an intensive program on growing all kinds of fruit in the back yard. Successfully growing fruit for your family becomes straightforward when you narrow the big picture down to getting the basics right. Harvesting sunlight through smart pruning is what renews fruit buds. Fungal disease becomes manageable with wise variety choices and enhanced soil biology. Even major insect challenges can be resolved safely when you perceive who, what, and when. All sorts of fruits—from apples and pears to peaches and cherries and onward to berries—make for a diverse home orchard planting. Confidence to integrate tree fruits into your landscape begins with embracing biodiversity and knowing how to steward system health. This program will be useful for both backyard growers as well as small-market fruit growers with a focus on growing healthy organic fruit. Michael’s new book The Holistic Orchard, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, will be hot off the press and available for sale at the lecture.

    Michael Phillips is known across the country for helping people grow healthy apples and understand the healing virtues of plant medicines. Information about the “community orchard movement” he helped found is available at www.GrowOrganicApples.com and provides a full immersion into the holistic approach to orcharding. His Lost Nation Orchard has two acres of trees and supplies local families with many varieties of organic apples. Michael was honored by Slow Food USA to receive the first Betsy Lydon Ark Award for his work promoting healthy ways to grow fruit.  The fee to attend is $45, and you may register online at www.berkshirebotanical.org.

  • Wednesday, November 30, 6:00 pm – Relics: Travels in Nature’s Time Machine

    In his newest book, Relics, world-renowned zoologist Piotr Naskrecki travels the globe to photograph “relics,” creatures or habitats that, while acted upon by evolution, remain remarkably similar to their earliest manifestations in the fossil record. From horseshoe crabs of the Atlantic to orchids of New Guinea, Naskrecki has created a time-lapse tour of life that has persisted nearly untouched for hundreds of millions of years.  This lecture and booksigning will be held on Wednesday, November 30, beginning at 6 pm. Free and open to the public, Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street.

  • Sunday, November 20, 4:00 pm – The Species Seekers

    Science writer/NPR commentator Richard Conniff tells the story of the bold and colorful adventurers who risked death to discover strange life-forms in the farthest corners of planet Earth. The lecture will take place Sunday, November 20, beginning at 4 pm at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge.  Mr. Conniff will sign copies of his most recent book,  The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.

    Learn about daredevil species seekers, ranging from the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linneaus, and Thomas Jefferson, who laid out mastodon bones on the White House floor, to the Harvard anatomist who helped introduce the world to the most spectacular species discovery of the nineteenth century. For more information, call 617-495-3045, or visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu.