Wachusett Mountain Apple Fest is a popular fall festival celebration including craft exhibitors, a farmers’ market, kids entertainment, and peak fall foliage viewing from the SkyRide. Also enjoy live music, Apple Pie Baking, and Eating Contests, along with additional family entertainment. The 38th Annual event takes place at Wachusett Mountain in Princeton, Massachusetts, and is organized by the Wachusett Mountain Ski Area.
Celebrate fall color at the Arnold Arboretum! With species of maples and crabapples from around the world, the Arboretum’s autumnal palette is unrivaled. Join the festivities for a guided tour, children’s activities, and more. Full information may be found at https://arboretum.harvard.edu/events/
This online lecture with London Parks & Gardens on October 11 at 1 pm Eastern is about how the Inventory works and the ways it helps researchers to champion the protection of parks. Soon after its foundation in 1994, London Parks and Gardens started to research and put together a catalogue of Greater London’s parks, gardens, churchyards, cemeteries and myriad other green or open spaces of local historic interest into an Inventory documenting their history. This talk explores how this resource of over 2,600 sites is used and its key role in assisting the work the Trust does to protect and conserve London’s landscapes from inappropriate or damaging planning applications.
Sally Williams, Keeper of the Inventory, has been involved in the Inventory since 1999 and will talk about its origins, development and criteria. Helen Monger, Director, will address how the Inventory supports the work of the Planning and Conservation team championing the protection of parks for everyone. £5.00. Register HERE
Join Berkshire Botanical Garden for a tour of Mountaintop Arboretum in Tannersville N.Y on October 13 from 10 – noon. We will receive a private tour at the height of fall color. Not only will the trees be putting on a show, but fall asters will also be in their full glory. Transportation from Berkshire Botanical Garden is provided. Mountain Top Arboretum is a public garden in the Catskills dedicated to displaying and managing native plant communities of the Northeast, in addition to curating its collection of cold-hardy native and exotic trees. Its mountaintop elevation of 2,400 feet, overlooking the New York City watershed, creates a unique environment for education, research and pure enjoyment. The Arboretum trails and boardwalks connect 178 acres of plant collections, meadows, wetlands, forest and Devonian bedrock. BBG members $20, nonmembers $25. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/field-study-mountaintop-arboretum
For over 40 years Newton has celebrated the change of seasons and gathered as a community at the Harvest Fair in Newton Centre. On Sunday October 16th from 11am – 4pm, come by to share good food, shop for unique hand-crafted goods and learn about local businesses. Stop by the Green Newton Expo and discover ways to create an environment in better balance with the natural world. Enjoy some great food listening to live music on 2 stages. And of course, don’t miss seeing the delight of the kids enjoying the ever-popular caterpillar roller coaster at the Cushing Carnival! For more information contact Newton Cultural Development at pgannon@newtonma.gov. The event takes place on the Newton Centre Green, 1221 Centre Street in Newton Centre.
Explore some of the world’s most remote and beautiful caves with Ancient Caves, a new film designed for the IMAX® Dome screen. Science and adventure mix as the film shows scientists looking to better understand Earth’s climate history by studying ancient cave formations in the world’s most hidden realms. The film is on view now at the Museum of Science in Boston.
Meet paleoclimatologist Dr. Gina Moseley on a mission to unlock the secrets of the Earth’s climate in the most unlikely of places: caves. Until recently, scientists had no reliable way to accurately study the climate of Earth’s distant past. Moseley and her team of cave explorers travel the world exploring vast underground worlds in search of stalagmite samples — geologic “fingerprints”— that reveal clues about the planet’s climate history. Their quest leads them to some of the world’s most remote caves, both above and below the water, in France, Iceland, the Bahamas, the United States, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where they study how rapidly Earth’s climate can change, and how it has affected human civilization. Together, they go where very few humans will ever go, revealing the incredible lengths scientists will go to study the unknown.
Ancient Caves is directed by Emmy Award®-winning underwater cinematographer and New England native Jonathan Bird, and is narrated by Emmy Award®-winning actor Bryan Cranston.
Ancient Caves is an Oceanic Research Group Films production produced with support from the Giant Dome Theater Consortium and presented by MacGillivray Freeman Films. Oceanic Research Group, Inc. is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to the conservation of the oceans through education. It primarily produces educational content aimed at students and teachers. Founded in 1990 with a series of marine science films specifically for use in the classroom, the company has expanded into teacher education, scholarships and the Emmy Award®-winning marine science program Jonathan Bird’s Blue World, which began on public television and transitioned to YouTube in 2012. Ancient Caves is Bird’s first film for exhibition in IMAX®and giant screen theaters. www.oceanicresearch.orgwww.blueworldTV.com
Objects from Heritage Museums & Gardens’ permanent collection will be uniquely showcased in this special three-day Floral Design event, held in the Heald Center of the J.K. Lilly III Automobile Gallery. Dozens of floral designers from Cape Cod and the Southeastern Massachusetts area will delight visitors with top-quality floral interpretations of objects from Heritage’s own collection, chosen by each designer. Each floral design will be staged with a mounted photo of the artwork. Free with admission or membership. No advance registration required. Free for Heritage members, $21 Adult / $11 Youth / Free 2 & under for nonmembers. For more information visit www.heritagemuseumsandgardens.org
The City of Boston will hold two periodic leaf and yard waste drop off events on October 9 and October 23 from 10 – 2 at 500 American Legion Highway in Mattapan. For more information on what is or is not accepted, and for information on November dates, call 617-635-4900.
Leaf and yard waste tips
Common yard waste material includes leaves and grass clippings, branches, and yard brush.
Place leaves and yard debris in large paper bags. Do not use plastic bags.
Tie branches with string. The maximum size for branches is three feet with a one-inch diameter.
This year’s Harvard Graduate School of Design Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, delivered by Ethan Carr, is also the keynote lecture for the conference Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives, October 14-15, 2022. On Friday, the conference will run from 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM; the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture will take place from 5:30 – 7:00 PM that evening. The talk will take place in Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, and is free and open to the public, but registration required HERE
Olmsted designed his most complete and innovative park system in Boston, including a “large park” that contained his most ambitious pastoral landscape. Often grouped with Central Park (1858) and Prospect Park (1865) as one of his three greatest urban parks, Boston’s Franklin Park (1885) cost less than a third as much to develop. But the desire to “let it alone” was more than a pecuniary impulse. Achieving more by doing less culminated an evolution in his design practice. The landscape of upland pastures and hanging woods persisted as an amplified version of what it had been: a characteristic passage of “rural” New England scenery. For Olmsted, letting it alone both preserved and transformed the landscape into an ideal setting for “receptive” recreations that improved individual wellbeing and built a sense of community in the modern city.
When the problem of low visitation to Franklin Park was identified at the end of the nineteenth century, Boston responded with the construction of the Franklin Park Zoo (1912) and successfully activated the park. But in the mid-twentieth century, a decline in the condition of the park drew an opposite response—another and very different way of letting it alone. Buildings and structures were left to deteriorate and landscape maintenance all but disappeared. Institutional racism influenced official policy: once Franklin Park was perceived as a place for Black people, city government no longer considered it worth maintaining. This fact has been obscured by histories that emphasize a perceived obsolescence of the design or the conflict of “active” and “passive” recreation as causes of the park’s supposed demise. These interpretations suggest that the park should be considered an abandoned ruin awaiting redevelopment. But Franklin Park was never abandoned. For over fifty years people in the communities around it have enjoyed the park, organized programming, and performed maintenance. The official neglect of Franklin Park is nevertheless one of great inequities in the city’s history, and new investment and design must address it—perhaps by finding a right way, again, to let it alone.
To attend this keynote address, please register for Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives. Ethan Carr, PhD, FASLA, is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes. Three of his award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma(University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), and The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore (University of Georgia Press, 2019), describe the twentieth-century history of planning and design in the US national park system as a context for considering its future. Carr was the lead editor for The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890, Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (2013). Carr co-wrote Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea(Library Of American Landscape History, 2022) with Rolf Diamant, tracing the origins of the American park movement. His latest book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (2023) reconsiders the history of this landmark urban park. Carr consults with landscape architecture firms that are developing plans and designs for historic landscapes.
The story of the Spa at Dorton and its subsequent disappearance into the realms of the forgotten or the unknown is perhaps one of the saddest in spa history. The Chalybeate spa which opened in 1833 was the brainchild of Charles Ricketts. He had become the owner of the Dorton Estate upon his marriage into the Aubrey family. The existence of the spring had been known since the late medieval period; it was Ricketts who had the water analyzed, improved the access and employed James Hakewill, architect, to design the pump room. Dorton Spa was never going to compete with the likes of Cheltenham or Leamington, being situated in a wood in the rural vale of Aylesbury, and plans were scaled back, the pump room and lodge/ refreshment room being the only buildings, both now gone. However, a boating lake was created, and some planting installed, including an avenue to the entrance of the grounds. This October 11 lecture, presented by The Gardens Trust, is part of a five part series on British Spa Landscapes. The presenter is Claire de Carle.
Claire de Carle is a garden historian, with a keen interest in horticulture, art and social history and she is the chair and a trustee of Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2022. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Trust’s Research & Recording project in 2013 which has produced reports on around 100 locally important historic gardens. She enjoys researching and writing about little known historic landscape gardens and more recently she has set up two other projects: Artists and their Gardens and Public Parks in Buckinghamshire. She lectures to local groups about Buckinghamshire gardens and Maud Grieve, the herbalist who was the subject of her MA dissertation. Claire lives in Oakley a small village on the Bucks/Oxon border, in her spare time she works on her garden that she and her husband have created over the last seven years.www.bucksgardenstrust.org.uk
A ticket is for this individual session costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £20 via the link here. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.
