Boston Flora

Thursday, August 17, 7:00 pm – Shaking Things Up: Historic American Women and Modern American Spirits

Toast to the women who broke the mold of history. Learn the rich story of the critical role women played by merging style and substance into social power in the 19th century. During this in-person event on August 17 at the Boston Harbor Distillery, 12R Ericsson Street in Boston, you will learn about many powerful women and how they impacted our nation, all while getting to taste the next revolution of handcrafted American Spirits.

Together with the Massachusetts Historical Society, we will delve into remarkable stories about women in the early 1800s breaking barriers and their “parlor politics.” Catherine Allgor, President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, will share her extensive knowledge of the early development of political society and how women in political families were able to utilize their relationships unofficially in order to assist in the creation of the United States of America.

As you immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the era, Founder of Boston Harbor Distillery, Rhonda Kallman, will take you through Boston Harbor Distillery’s history and sip along with you through their handcrafted American Spirits. As a pioneering woman in the spirits industry, Rhonda has worked hard in this male-dominated industry and garnered great satisfaction from helping Boston Harbor Distillery grow and become a significant part of Boston’s history.

Catherine and Rhonda both are taking strides to break their own barriers just like the women of the 1800s and look forward in celebrating with you and GBH the intersection of Women’s History and the Future of Women in Boston.

Get your tickets through GBH today. $27.

Your Ticket Includes:
– Tasting of 4 Boston Harbor Distillery Spirits
– Education from Catherine Allgor and Rhonda Kallman
– Opportunity to purchase Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government and signing by Catherine Allgor

Boston Harbor Distillery hand crafted cocktails will be available for additional purchase.

This event will be hosted and moderated by GBH News, Tori Bedford and GBH’s Curiosity Desk, Edgar B. Herwick III. This event will begin at 7pm Eastern Standard Time.

Sunday, August 28, 3:30 pm – 7:00 pm – By the Sea, By the Sea Marginal Way Preservation Fundraiser at the Beachmere Inn

Five gardens will be featured on August 28 at the By the Sea, By the Sea garden tour from 3:30 – 7 in beautiful Ogunquit, Maine, including a garden by Garden Club of the Back Bay member Louesa Gillespie. Your contributions are vital in order to preserve the Marginal Way, maintain pedestrian safety, and guarantee long-term safety and access to the Marginal Way. $150 per person, including wine and hors d’oeuvre and silent auction.

For Silent Auction items, Gallery Paintings, and more information on the Garden Tour please visit www.marginalwayfund.org

Parking available at the Baptist Church on Shore Road and at Jonathan’s overflow lot on Rt. 1. All guests for By the Sea, By the Sea, A Garden Tour on Sunday, August 28, are requested to park at Ogunquit Baptist Church, 157 Shore Rd in Ogunquit, as there will be no parking allowed at the Beachmere. A shuttle will be available to transport you between the parking lot and the Beachmere.

Louesa Gillespie’s garden on the Marginal Way access path is a 100 year old mature garden in an English country style with different areas on a ledge slope
19 Israel Head Rd

Paul Kapela and Russell Clevesy’s formal garden is a three tiered terrace designed to be color throughout the season consisting of 50% perennials and 50% annuals.
80 Israel Head Rd.

Joan and Norman Suslock’s garden on the Marginal Way path is a large eclectic colorful garden surrounding the property.
92 Israel Head Rd.

Joan and Peter Griswold’s garden on the Marginal Way path is a small gem of a seaside garden planted with native plants featured in several publications.
20 Briar Bank

Barbara and Richard O’Leary’s gardens by the sea feature colorful plantings ensconced in beautiful multi-level natural settings with several intimate seating areas.
51 Ontio Way

Purchase tickets through PayPal at https://www.marginalwayfund.org/garden-tour/

Thursday, August 10, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm – Libations for Preservation

The Young Advisors of the Boston Preservation Alliance present their 10th annual Libations for Preservation. This year it’s all about local artists! Come enjoy craft cocktails and snacks as you bid on beautiful artwork in a silent auction to benefit preservation advocacy in Boston. Our venue this year is the 1911 Roslindale Substation, 4228 Washington Street #102 in Boston, the recent restoration of which provides a beautiful gathering place for the surrounding community and earned a Preservation Achievement Award in 2020.

Must be 21+ to attend. Members $50, nonmembers $60. Tickets available at https://www.bostonpreservation.org/libations/2023

Saturdays, August 12 & 19, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm Eastern – Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide, Online

Gather plants and urban detritus (like rust!) from the surrounding landscape to make beautiful dyes-bright magenta pokeweed, dark black walnut, and rich purple wild grape. In the first online New York Botanical Garden session on August 12, artist and founder of the Toronto Ink Company Jason Logan will teach you which organic and non-organic materials work best and where to look for them. In the second session, on August 19, you’ll mix, test, and transform what you’ve foraged into rich, vibrant inks using simple household ingredients.

Please note, this course requires the purchase of materials. Please refer to the Materials List linked HERE for more information. The two session course is $90 for NYBG members, $100 for nonmembers. Register at www.nybg.or g

Saturday, August 12, 9:30 am – 4:00 pm – The Summer Drawing Tour Through Historic New England: Hamilton House and Langdon House

Join the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art for this Summer Drawing Tour series through Historic New England, led by Architect, David Pearson. The program will be held August 12 from 9:30 – 4, at Hamilton House, 40 Vaughan’s Land in South Berwick, Maine, and at Governor John Langdon House, 143 Pleasant Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Sketching historic sites provides participants with practical knowledge of tradition as manifest in the architecture. The morning session will be at the 18th-century Hamilton House. Special attention will be made in drawing the house in the landscape. The afternoon session will be at Langdon House where the focus will be the study of Georgian details.

Participants follow in the great tradition of architects and artists who have learned from drawing in situ. One may take a thousand photos of a subject and may not know it…but if one spends some time drawing the same object …you will have it in your mind forever. To draw is to see. The program focuses on the enduring vitality and continuity of the classical tradition through the means of observational and analytical drawing.

Tickets $60; Please click here to register for this program.

Wednesday, August 23, 7:00 pm Eastern – Conversations with Great American Gardeners: Dr. Lucinda McDade, Online

Lucinda McDade joined Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (dba California Botanic Garden, CalBG) in 2006 as the Judith B. Friend Director of Research and chair of the Botany Department at Claremont Graduate University. Since 2012, she has also served as the Garden’s Executive Director. She also serves as the Chair of the Botany Department at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) which collaborates with CalBG to offer a graduate program in the plant sciences.

McDade’s research focuses on the large and charismatic plant family Acanthaceae, on the role of hybridization in plant evolutionary history and phylogeny reconstruction, and on plant reproductive biology. She has conducted extensive field work including throughout the Americas, South Africa, Namibia and Madagascar. She has also worked extensively in herbaria in western Europe and elsewhere. McDade’s work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fletcher Jones Foundation, and more. She has conducted numerous NSF-funded research projects, including curation and preservation of plant collections, understanding constraints on floral evolution, comparative biology in a phylogenetic age, and harnessing the power of herbaria to understand the changing flora of California. McDade has been an invited speaker at many venues including universities and professional conferences.

Before joining CalBG and CGU, McDade was professor and herbarium curator at the University of Arizona from 1992 to 2000, then served as associate curator and chair of botany at the Academy of Natural Sciences until 2006. McDade’s appointments and honors include recipient of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award from the American Horticultural Society; Merit Award honoree, Botanical Society of America (2013); recipient of the Asa Gray award, American Society of Plant Taxonomists (2019); president, American Society of Plant Taxonomists (2003–2004); Melinda F. Denton Memorial Lecturer, University of Washington (1998); president, Association for Tropical Biology (1995); and membership in Sigma Xi (1980). She served two terms, ending in 2022, as treasurer of the Botanical Society of America (BSA), the largest professional society of plant scientists in the United States. McDade serves on the Board of Trustees of the Center for Plant Conservation and has been a member of the Landscape Architecture Accreditation Board.

The August 23 webinar at 7 pm Eastern is hosted by the American Horticultural Society and Holly Shimizu, former executive director of the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. and an AHS board member, who will lead a lively and engaging conversation with speakers that will tap into their knowledge and experience. The interactive program format will allow audience members to ask questions of the guests.

Registration is free. RSVP is required. Visit www.ahsgardening.org to sign up.

Saturday, August 12, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Summer Tree Identification Walk

Come join local herbalist and arborist Alex Klein for a walk around the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill grounds on August 12 from 1- 3 to get to know our local trees in all their summertime glory. Compared to our other Tree ID walks, we’ll focus a little more on leaf structure this time around. We will also assess how trees are responding to their environmental conditions and how this affects the way they appear and other irregularities in form. As always, we will talk about natural history, ecology and cultural uses of our astounding local tree species. Come with lots of questions and ideas about what you’ve been seeing in the canopy over the summer.

Alex Klein is an herbalist in Boston, where he runs a humble practice offering sliding-scale consultations to help his neighbors feel better using plant medicine. He works with people on all sorts of health concerns, though given the impetus of our modern world, most often finds himself helping clients with mental health and sleep struggles, chronic illnesses and pain, and menstrual and digestive issues. He trained under 7Song at the Northeast School of Botanical Medicine and the Ithaca Free Clinic, and on occasion staffs herbal First Aid tents at primitive skill gatherings. He has also climbed trees up and down the East Coast as an arborist, getting to know well the goings on of the upper canopies, as well as the understory of the forest through his botanical expeditions as a wild-crafting herbalist. Alex sees himself as an intermediary between people and plants, helping connect clients and students to nature in a way that can bring enjoyment and ease to their lives.

$35 Member Adult; $50 Adult (includes admission to the Garden) Register at www.nebg.org

Monday, August 7, 7:00 pm – 8:15 pm Eastern – The Epic Story of Wildlife and People in America, Online

In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archaeologists determined that a band of humans had killed the animals 12,450 years ago. While this discovery expanded America’s known human history, it also showed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens has presented to North America’s evolutionary richness.

Historian Dan Flores chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the “wild new world” of North America—a place shaped by evolutionary forces and momentous arrivals of humans from Asia, Africa, and Europe. These arrivals precipitated a massive disruption of the teeming environment they found. In telling the story, Flores sees humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering a place that had never seen our like before.

He traces the origins of today’s sixth mass extinction to the spread of humans around the world; tells the history of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies were responsible for 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

Flores is a professor emeritus at the University of Montana. His book Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America (W.W. Norton & Company) is available for purchase. Smithsonian Associates is sponsoring a live Zoom on Monday, August 7 at 7 pm. $20 Smithsonian Associates members, $25 for nonmembers. Registration page will give details on book purchase option: www.smithsonianassociates.org

Saturday, August 5, and Saturday, September 2, 11:00 am – Tree Tour at Gore Place

We’ll leave no branch unturned in this tour of trees at Gore Place. Join us on August 5 or September 2 as we get to the root of both the science and history of individual trees and species on our grounds. Along the way, we’ll point out some of the most noticeable and iconic trees near our historic mansion and you’ll learn the basics of identifying trees. Hopefully, our educators won’t be stumped by any of your questions.

This tour will take place outdoors for an hour. We will be walking over a combination of gravel paths and potentially wet, gently rolling lawn. Please wear footwear you will be comfortable in and dress for the weather. The tour is designed for adults; however, we welcome youth aged six and up to join us. This program is rain or shine but we will cancel for extreme inclement weather.

Advance tickets are required. Ample free parking. $16 for adults, free for Gore Place members, $11 students aged 6 – 16. Additional sessions will take place October 7, November 4, and December 2. Get tickets at www.goreplace.org

Wednesday, August 16, 6:30 pm – Rotch-Jones-Duff Museum Reception & Tempest Preview

Rotch-Jones-Duff Museum Members are invited to enjoy refreshments on the porch of the New Bedford mansion, overlooking the garden. A special members-only preview of the Reverie Theatre Group’s production of The Tempest follows at 7:30pm, on the tented patio. RSVP to Hillary Fortin by Friday, August 11: HFortin@rjdmuseum.org / 508-997-1401. From August 17 – 27, RJD Museum, in partnership with Reverie Theatre Group, celebrates their fourth year of bringing the Bard’s most poignant plays to audiences of all ages and walks of life.

RTG will be producing a powerful and timely rendition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Experience the comic tale of Prospero, the overthrown duke of Milan, who maroons his betrayers on a magical island where he creates spells and enchantments that toy with the evildoers until they promise to return him to his throne. RTG’s Megan M. Ruggiero directs this story of romance, ambition, revenge, love, and ultimately, forgiveness. Donations of any amount are accepted in lieu of a fee.

This program is supported in part by grants from the Acushnet, Dartmouth, Mattapoisett, Fairhaven, and New Bedford Cultural Councils, local agencies, which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

This project also received a Wicked Cool Places grant, facilitated by New Bedford Creative and the NBEDC, and funded by the City of New Bedford’s Arts, Culture and Tourism Fund, with additional support from Bristol County Savings Bank, Barr Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, and MassDevelopment’s TDI Creative Cities Initiative.