Join artist, landscape designer, and ecologist Thomas Berger on Saturday, July 25 from 10 – noon for an Ecological Landscape Alliance private tour of the Green Art Garden, 30 US Route 1 Bypass in Kittery, Maine. Over the span of several years, Thomas renovated the formerly neglected landscape, removing debris and clearing the impenetrable stands of multiflora rose, buckthorn, barberry, autumn olive and poison ivy. In the early years Thomas planted many trees, hedges, and display beds for use as a commercial nursery. Later these landscape elements became the framework for the formal gardens with mixed borders, a reflecting pool, a grapevine-covered greenhouse frame, a miniature garden, and a pollinator-planting. Throughout the garden, Thomas displays his nature-inspired stone sculptures.

Adjacent to the formal gardens are two woodland acres including mature red oak, white pine, and beech, and a wide variety of other species. With a keen interest in providing habitat, Thomas is now enriching this woodland with native plants, and has created a pond and other habitat elements to provide food and shelter for wildlife. Thomas is particularly concerned with insect habitat. There are many species of butterflies, dragonflies, solitary wasps, and bees, and new guests being attracted to the garden every year.

Thomas Berger grew up in a small rural town in Germany. During his childhood he was an avid collector of shells, bones, sea creatures, and fossils. He also gardened with his father and kept bees and sheep which led him to study agriculture. As an adult, Thomas worked on farms in Germany, France and Australia, and joined the German Volunteer Service in 1984, working in an agricultural project in Niger, West Africa. In 1994 he moved to the United States, where he started a landscape design and construction firm, Green Art, and received an award of excellence from the New Hampshire Landscape Association in 1998. Thomas is a regionally known stone sculptor, expressing his love of nature through his art. Thomas has won many awards and commissions and his sculpture is displayed at many public venues throughout the Northeast. – See more at: http://www.ecolandscaping.org/event/the-green-art-garden-a-garden-for-nature-and-a-space-for-art/#sthash.QksKgg99.dpuf Rain or shine event, $20 for ELA members, $30 for nonmembers.