Stephanie Chace and Alea Stokes are two librarians interested in foodways. Because food and foodways are multifaceted, we will be reading and listening to material from many disciplines, such as the history and anthropology of food, environmentalism, food justice, artistic expression, sociology and more.
We will host discussions every six weeks and each meeting will focus on a different book. We will also share reading and listening material for additional understanding and enrichment of foodways.
Please join us on Monday, December 5th from 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM over Zoom as we discuss our first read for the Food Ways Book Club, Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva. Free.
Books can be picked up at the Central Library in Copley Square at 700 Boylston St, Boston, MA 02116, or at the Roxbury Branch at 146 Dudley Street, Roxbury, MA 02119. Additionally, copies are available electronically.
As Director of Conservation, Michael Piantedosi leads the Native Plant Trust’s internationally recognized Conservation Department, which focuses on saving imperiled plants, restoring habitat, and documenting the state of New England’s plants. Michael oversees a team of conservation staff and many of the 1,500 trained volunteers who work throughout New England each year to monitor and protect rare and endangered plants, collect and preserve seeds to ensure biological diversity, detect and control invasive species, and conduct research. Michael is active in the Center for Plant Conservation network where the Native Plant Trust acts as a Participating Institution (PI). He is also the point of contact for listing New England rare plants on the IUCN Red List (the international list of rare and endangered species). Prior to joining NPT, Michael was Curatorial Horticulturalist at the Museum of Science, Boston, and held positions at the Woodman Horticultural Research Farm and the Center for Freshwater Biology. He recently co-authored the landmark publication ‘Conserving Plant Diversity in New England,’ ” a collaboration of NPT and the Nature Conservancy. The Boston Committee of The Garden Club of America invites its members to the Fall Lecture and Luncheon on November 10 beginning with a reception at 10 am, the lecture at 10:30, and luncheon at 11:30, at The Country Club in Brookline. Club members will receive an invitation through Eventbrite. For more information visit https://bostoncommitteegca.org/
As gardeners, our work extends beyond the soil, rippling out to communities of every type. From our human neighbors, to pollinators and beyond, what and how we grow has an indelible effect on the world around us. This year, Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Rooted in Place symposium speakers will consider the impacts of the way we garden on the world around us. Both in person and online options will be available. The event takes place November 13 from 10 – 5 at the Duffin Theater in Lenox, or online. Registration ranges from $45 – $110. Visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/8th-annual-rooted-place-ecological-gardening-symposium-seeding-community-garden
Wambui Ippolito: Growing In Weeds: So many children grow up with sterile green spaces designed with their safety in mind — structured spaces that don’t allow for exploration, imagination and the sense of danger that fuels curiosity. How can landscape designers, gardeners, parents, and communities approach design and create new spaces that bring a new vitality into children’s green spaces? How do these spaces help our children to be emboldened explorers and better stewards of landscapes they inhabit?
Wambui Ippolito is a horticulturist and landscape designer and a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. She develops programming for museums, public gardens and parks exploring the broader context of horticulture, focusing on the intersections between migration, culture, history and science. She lectures both in the USA and internationally and is the principal designer of her New York-based landscape design firm. In her former career, Wambui worked as a Development & Democracy Consultant. She is multilingual, fluent in five languages. Wambui is the founder of the BIPOC Hort Group, a multicultural organization with membership from the African American, Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean public and private professional ornamental horticulture community.
Bringing Meadows into the Garden: With global warming and energy conservation in mind, let’s cut down on mowing and blowing and replace some of our lawns with higher grass. Page Dickey will discuss a wide range of examples showing how beautifully meadows — however small — and meadow plants can be incorporated into our gardens.
Page has been passionately gardening since her early 20s and writing about gardening, as well as designing gardens for others, for the last three decades. She has written eight books and edited another. Most of her books concentrate on aspects of garden design, such as creating gardens that reflect their settings (Gardens in the Spirit of Place and Breaking Ground) or planning gardens as extensions of our homes (Inside Out), in each case illustrated by exceptional examples around America. Duck Hill Journal and Embroidered Ground are about Duck Hill, where she lived for 34 years, about the process of making the garden there, and her thoughts on gardening in general. Page was the editor of the book Outstanding American Gardens, celebrating 25 years of the Garden Conservancy with photographs by Marion Brenner. Her new book, Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again, describes leaving a beloved garden of 34 years, finding a home in the northwest corner of Connecticut and falling in love with its land. Page lectures around the country about plants and garden design. She has written many articles over the years, including in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Horticulture, Elle Décor, Garden Design, and The New York Times. The garden at Duck Hill has been featured in a variety of periodicals. She is a director emeritus of the Garden Conservancy and is one of the two founders of its Open Days Program. She also serves on the boards of Stonecrop Garden, in Cold Spring, N.Y.; Hollister House Garden, in Washington, Conn.; and The Little Guild, in Cornwall, Conn. She and her husband, Bosco Schell, are both members of the Friends of Horticulture at Wave Hill. Page was recently elected as an Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America. In 2015, Page and her husband moved to Falls Village, Conn., to an old church with 17 acres of fields and woods and a view of the Berkshire foothills. They are off on a new gardening adventure.
Agriculture as Conservation: Lessons for the Landscape: Our increasingly complex and dire environmental challenges can’t be met by wildland preservation alone. It has become abundantly clear that we must also radically change our approach to intensively human-managed landscapes. Since 2018, Stone Barns Center has been managing over 350 acres of former traditionally managed pasture land (now predominantly part of a state park preserve) using holistic regenerative methods focused around intensive, multi-species rotational livestock grazing. These efforts have been coupled with a comprehensive ecological monitoring program measuring responses in our soil health, plant biodiversity, bird biodiversity, insect biodiversity, and water quality. This presentation will share some of our preliminary discoveries from listening closely to the landscape and how those lessons could be applied by stewards of a variety of human-impacted landscapes, including the landscaping and gardening community.
Elijah Goodwin is the ecology and GIS manager at Stone Barns Center. He first joined the organization in 2019, monitoring bird populations on the pastured grasslands managed through the Conservation Action Plan with Rockefeller State Park Preserve. He previously conducted a four-year study on the wood thrush populations within the Park Preserve. Since starting an expanded role with the organization in 2020, he has been working to build out the ecological monitoring program and create and implement an ArcGIS-based database system to collect, manage, synthesize, and present the vast array of monitoring and management data collected from across the farm and the Center. Elijah has been working as a research scientist and/or science educator for over 25 years. While his primary training is as an ornithologist, he has experience working with soil, plant communities, and DNA technology . His scientific experience includes banding hawks and owls during migration in New Jersey; surveying beaver activity and bird populations in the Adirondacks; and studying bird song learning all over the Eastern Seaboard and Mexico. He holds a B.S. in wildlife biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an M.S.T in biology education from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology, also from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On the side: Elijah enjoys time spent in the outdoors with his wife, Katherine, and child, Spirit. He is an award-winning nature and night/light painting photographer and owns a small photography, education and ecological consulting business, Whimbrel Nature. He has served as president and a board member for the Color Camera Club of Westchester and is a science advisor for ⅔ For The Birds.
Ecosystem Approaches to Landscape Design: Building Resiliency Through Community: Today’s gardeners are faced with more challenges than ever before—a changing climate, more pressure from invasive plants and pests, and more decisions about what to put into and how to manage our landscapes. Annie White is striving to create a new culture of gardening where we move away from carefully curated gardens, work more with rather than against nature, and become better stewards of the ecosystems within and around our gardens. Annie will share her ecosystem approach to landscape design that helps build resiliency through community. Sharing case studies of her successes and failures, Annie’s talk will open your eyes to the myriad of naturally occurring processes in the landscapes and how we can steward these to create both beautiful and ecologically significant landscapes.
Annie White (below) is an Ecological Landscape Designer and the owner of Nectar Landscape Design Studio in Stowe, Vermont. She is also a full-time Lecturer of Sustainable Landscape Horticulture + Design at the University of Vermont. Annie earned an MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2005 and a PhD in Plant & Soil Science from The University of Vermont in 2016. She is passionate about designing cutting-edge and science-based ecological landscapes at all scales—from urban backyards to rural agricultural landscapes.
The mission of Speak For the Trees is to improve the size and health of the urban tree canopy in Boston, with a focus on under-resourced and under-canopied neighborhoods. They partner closely with community organizations to better understand and deeply engage residents in their work by raising awareness about the importance of trees and the role that every resident can take in planting and caring for trees.
David Meshoulam, Co-Founder and Executive Director, will speak to us about how we can advocate for municipal policies governing tree planting. He will also cover:
What they do at Speak For The Trees
Defining “tree equity”
Selecting sites and species
How they educate residents to care for their trees
Their collaboration with the City of Boston
David (pronounced Dah-veed) co-founded Speak for the Trees in 2018. Trained as a science educator, his work has focused on ways to increase understanding of the connections between science, culture, and history and to empower people to be change agents. He holds a PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a Senior Fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program, and is co-chair of the Urban Ecology Collaborative.
Night of Illumination is back and tickets are on sale now! All Native Plant Trust personal members are eligible to purchase tickets to our annual members-only fall event, Night of Illumination. Stroll along paths at Garden in the Woods lit by more than 1,000 luminaria on Thursday, October 27, 2022. There will be food for purchase brought to the Garden by Anzio’s Brick Oven Pizzeria food truck. Join us for this wonderful evening filled with intriguing sights and seasonal strolls.
Tickets must be purchased online and in advance. There will be no on-site ticket sales on the night of the event.
The American Daffodil Society will host the 2022 Fall Forum and Fall Board Meeting (FBM) in Newport, Rhode Island at the The Newport Harbor Island Resort(formerly known as Gurney’s Newport Resort & Marina). The Fall Forum is an annual event that all ADS members and their guests are invited to attend with advance reservations. The event includes the ADS Fall Board Meeting, but it is intended to maximize the education and enjoyment of all members, at an affordable registration fee.
Registration deadline is this week (although it may be extended) but sign up today at https://daffodilusa.org/events-show-calendar/fall-symposiums/2022-fall-forum-fall-board-meeting/ The Friday speaker is Bettie Bearden Pardee, a long time friend of the Garden Club of the Back Bay. Bettie is an author, founder and editor of the luxury lifestyle website PrivateNewport.com, designer of the Parterre Bench and a national lecturer. As a Bon Appetit editor for eleven years, Bettie featured everyday sophisticates in “Entertaining in Style.” She was a host and creative producer of the PBS series, “The Presidential Palate: Entertaining in the White House.” She has also been featured for garden design in Flower Magazine and now for entertaining, for the third year in a row she is listed on “The Salonniere 100: America’s Best Party Hosts.”
Bettie’s design talents and love of landscape were put to use in the creation of her Newport retreat on Bellevue Avenue, as well as her new Parterre Bench. Her often toured gardens are documented in the Archive of American Gardens at the Smithsonian Institution and are featured in the Garden Club of America’s Gardens, Private and Personal. Her home in Newport is the inspiration for her most recent coffee table books on lifestyle and design, Private Newport: At Home and in the Garden and Living Newport: Houses, People, Style, which will be available for purchase.
Her lecture includes the newly restored “Blue Garden” whose unveiling in 1913 at the celebrated Bal Masque still resonates in the annals of Newport social and cultural history. Bettie’s lush images, played across the spectrum of stunning landscapes, captures the social pastimes, rituals and well-earned traditions of a fabled town, now celebrating its 375th anniversary.
Garden Club of the Back Bay member Nancy Cyr will demonstrate how to embellish mini pumpkins with succulents and dried flowers, in a workshop to be held October 17 from 3 – 5. The cost of $20 will include all materials, including the glue! RSVP no later than Friday, October 14 if you plan to attend, so she may purchase the correct number of pumpkins and accessories. The event will be held at 181 Marlborough St Unit 2. Please pay in advance at https://bostonflora.com/shop/
The first Cambridge Entomological Club meeting of the year will take place Tuesday, October 11th at 7:30 in the Gilbert Room of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and online on Zoom HERE. Mayra Vidal of UMass Boston’s Department of Zoology will speak on the Ecology and Evolution of Interactions Between Insect Herbivores and Plants. Nature can be seen as an ‘intertwined web of interactions’, where species directly or indirectly influence each other. Interactions between different species can drive the evolution of traits and potentially lead to the formation of new species, thus contributing to the diversity of organisms we have on Earth. Insect herbivores are one of the most diverse groups of organisms, and the interaction with their host plants is arguably a major driver of their diversification. In this talk, Mayra will explore how host plants and natural enemies influence the evolution of a generalist herbivore, and how global environmental changes affect the interaction between insect herbivores and their host plants.
For those able to attend in person, the Club will have an informal dinner at 5:45 pm at Cambridge Common Restaurant with the speaker, followed by our formal meeting (7:30 – 9:00 pm) in the Gilbert Room (there will be signs to help direct). The meeting will begin with club announcements, followed by a 60-minute presentation by the invited speaker and Q&A. Membership is open to amateur and professional entomologists.
The Massachusetts Butterfly Club is celebrating its 30th year, and its 2022 Fall meeting will be held virtually on October 8 at 6:30 pm on Zoom. The meeting is free but registration is required.
The Club is excited to host Robert Gallardo to speak on “Butterflies of Honduras”. Robert is building a nature reserve and working on a complete guide to Honduran butterflies, and has made several discoveries of new species in the process. We hope you will join us to learn about tropical butterflies and conservation efforts in Honduras. For more information, click here.
The meeting will also feature photographs by members and announcement of the officer election results.
Raise a glass to the Friends of the Public Garden’s 50th Anniversary Campaign with fellow Friends Members and celebrate all the ways that Members impact these beloved greenspaces. Enjoy drinks and appetizers overlooking the sunset in the three parks from the top floor of the UMass Club on Beacon Street. RSVP today to info@friendsofthepublicgarden.org. If you are not yet a member, join now.
