Boston Flora

Saturday, September 24, 10:00 am – 11:30 am – Herbal Plant Meditation: The Magic of Burdock

Join The Trustees and herbalist Faith Johnson for a guided plant meditation on September 24 at the Leland Cooperative herb Garden, 4 Leland Street in Jamaica Plain, helping us to connect more deeply to our plant medicine. We’ll gather outdoors in an enchanting, tucked-away JP community garden to connect with the consciousness of the medicinal plant burdock and experience the herbal decoction. During the meditation, Faith will guide us through relaxing embodiment exercises and visualizations, followed by journaling, group reflection, and a sharing of the medicinal and energetic properties of the plant. These workshops are magical, contemplative, and leave participants not only with oral knowledge but experiential knowledge and a general feeling of well being and connection to themselves and the natural world.

Faith Johnson (she, her, hers) is a contemplative arts facilitator, herbalist, Reiki practitioner with experience working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and owner of Full Circle Arts. She is an internationally exhibiting multi-medium artist with an MFA from Tufts University specializing in collaborative and meditative art making. Faith created Full Circle Arts to bring together and share her knowledge and love of the natural world, creativity, healing arts, and the desire for individual and communal contemplative experiences that support well-being. Trustees members $12, nonmembers $20. Register at https://thetrustees.org/event/79982/

Saturday, October 1, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Meet & Greet with Charlesgate Alliance

The Charlesgate Alliance invites you to a Meet & Greet with neighbors from Back Bay, Kenmore, and Fenway with signature cocktails, wine, beer and hors d’oeuvre on Saturday, October 1 from 5:30 – 7:30 at Cornwall’s at 644 Beacon Street in Boston. Limited capacity so register early. $50. Purchase your tickets at https://www.emeraldnecklace.org/event/charlesgate-alliance-meet-greet/

Saturday, September 24, & Sunday, September 25, 10:00 am – 2:00 pm – Goddess Harvest Festival

Join in the fun as The Massachusetts Horticultural Society celebrates the three Roman goddesses that grace the Garden. They were originally installed on the façade of the 2nd Horticulture Hall in Boston. In 2020 these goddesses received a much needed cleaning and restoration. The tallest statue, standing at 13 feet tall, is Ceres—the goddess of agriculture. To her right is Pomona—goddess of fruit—holding a cornucopia full of fruits. On the left side stands Flora—the goddess of flowers—with a bouquet of flowers in her hand. This weekend we’ll be celebrating the harvest of the Garden with crafts, food tastings, games, and more!

Dress like a goddess and receive free admission to the Garden at Elm Bank. For more information visit www.masshort.org

Saturday, September 24, 10:00 am – 3:30 pm – Identifying Invasive Plants in the Landscape

This September 24 Berkshire Botanical Garden class will focus on the identification features, ecological impacts and population trends of many of the invasive trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous plants that grow in forests, fields and wetlands in Berkshire County. The class will include a morning presentation and an afternoon in the field investigating invasives in a variety of habitats. We will look at both widespread and less common species of invasives.

Ted Elliman worked for many years for Native Plant Trust as a staff botanist, invasive species program manager and as an instructor of botany, ecology and conservation. His book, The Wildflowers of New England, an identification guide to much of the region’s native flora, was published in 2016 by Timber Press. In the 1980s, Ted started and directed an environmental education and wilderness adventure center in the Berkshires. Since the mid-1990s, he periodically has led natural history tours to southwest China, where he worked for two years as a teacher and forest ecologist.

Saturday, October 1, 10:00 am – 11:30 am – Unearthing the Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden has inspired generations of readers to cultivate their own bits of earth. Author Marta McDowell still remembers the thrill of reading about Mary Lennox turning the key in the door to the locked garden for the first time. This engaging and illustrated lecture on October 1 at 10 at Hollister House Garden in Washington, Connecticut explores Burnett’s life, work, and the passion for flowers and gardening that inspired her book.

Marta McDowell teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and consults for private clients and public gardens. Her latest book is Unearthing The Secret Garden, about the inspiration for the classic children’s book. Timber Press also published Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, New York Times-bestselling All the Presidents’ Gardens, and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, now in its seventh printing. Marta’s new book about garden themes in murder mysteries, is due out from Timber Press in 2023. She was the 2019 recipient of the Garden Club of America’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal for outstanding literary achievement.

Advance reservation is suggested. Hollister House will follow all state and local guidelines for Covid-19 at our events.

HHG members $25 Non-members $35 Register HERE.

Saturday, September 24, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, and Sunday, September 26, 10:00 am – 4:00 pm – Begonia and Gesneriad Show

Discover splendid examples of a huge variety of Begonias and Gesneriads sporting a range of colors and textures in this judged show September 24 & 25 at The New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill. Enter your own plants for the exhibition.

Get tips for growing these favorite houseplants, attend a lecture on Begonia Propagation with Tovah Martin, and shop for rare and unusual plants. Free with admission. Sponsored by N.E. Chapter, The Gesneriad Society and Buxton Branch, American Begonia Society. For times and more detail, visit www.nebg.org

Saturday, September 24, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm – Fallscaping

Add beauty to your garden in the sweet, golden days of autumn with flowers, shrubs, trees, and vines that shine during this season. Discover plants with colorful blooms, rich foliage and dramatic seed heads, and learn strategies that will guide you in designing a vibrant fall garden. This Berkshire Botanical Garden class will take place September 24 from 1 – 2:30 pm, and is $20 for members, $25 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/fallscaping

Jana Milbocker is the principal of Enchanted Gardens, a lecturer and author. She combines horticulture, design and travel tips to educate, inspire and delight both new and seasoned gardeners. Jana loves to visit gardens and historic sites in the U.S. and abroad and to share her trips through her books, photos and blog. She published The Garden Tourist: 120 Destination Gardens and Nurseries in the Northeast in 2018, The Garden Tourist’s New England in 2020, and The Garden Tourist’s Florida in 2021. The two-acre garden surrounding her Victorian home features more than 140 varieties of trees and shrubs, perennial gardens, peony and rose beds, water features and shady retreats. Trained as a graphic designer, Jana brings years of critical design thinking, clarity and cohesiveness to her landscape solutions. Her professional experience includes 25 years as an art director and designer. Jana holds a BFA from Syracuse University, an MBA from Boston College and coursework in horticulture and landscape design.

Saturday, September 24, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – The Art of Planting Bulbs

For many gardeners, nothing is more fulfilling than planting bulbs in the fall for spring bloom. In this Berkshire Botanical Garden class on September 24 from 10 – noon, garden writer and horticulturist Lee Buttala plumbs the depths of the geophyte kingdom, highlighting major and minor bulbs, from snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils to species tulips, hyacinths and fritillaria, that bring the spring garden into full focus. This class explores not only the classic techniques for using bulbs in the garden, but it also shows new approaches that pair bulbs with perennials and other plantings that complement them or that take the main stage as the bulb show comes to an end. This class will explore planting methods, post-bloom care for bulbs and how to select varieties best suited to naturalizing.

Lee Buttala is the former executive director of Seed Savers Exchange, an heirloom vegetable genebank that is the only non-governmental organization storing seed at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. He has also worked for BBG and the Garden Conservancy, and currently serves as chair of the Historic Landscapes Committee of the APGA. Lee won an Emmy award for his role as a garden television producer for “Martha Stewart Living” and was the creator of PBS’s “Cultivating Life.” He is the editor of the award-winning book The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Saving Seed, writes a weekly garden column for The Berkshire Edge and serves on the board of Hollister House Garden in Washington, Conn. Lee studied garden design at the Chelsea Physic Garden, the New York Botanical Garden and the Kyoto School of Art and Design. He lives in Ashley Falls, Mass.

Sunday, September 25, 10:30 am – 12:00 noon – Urban Wilds: Roslindale

Join the Native Plant Trust and landscape architects from award-winning Crowley Cottrell, LLC on September 25 for a landscape study of the recent improvements to the Roslindale Wetlands Urban Wild. Over the past two years, Crowley Cottrell has worked with the Boston Parks and Recreation Department to design and administer habitat restoration and new trail work. The project aims to improve visitor experience through a completed loop trail and renovated entrances and to support native habitat through invasive species management and selective earthwork. Learn about partnering with municipalities on capital improvement projects to support the long-term investment and management of the land by the city and community members. $23 for NPT members, $27 for nonmembers. Instructors are Michelle Crowley and Anna Curtis-Heald. Register at http://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/urban-wilds-roslindale/

Thursday, September 22, 5:00 am – The 19th Century Garden: The Global Garden, Online

The Gardens Trust’s third set of lectures on the C19th garden takes us towards its heyday. As Britain’s empire expanded plant hunters scoured the world to bring home plants to fill the gardens and greenhouses not just of the rich but an ever-growing middle class. Gardening became a hobby, and indeed a passion for many in the working class too. As a result, gardening books and magazines flourished, and horticulture became big business. Garden design, like architecture became more and more eclectic. Labour was cheap so extravagance and display became commonplace in the private realm while public parks, often on a grand scale, were created all over the country, but especially in urban areas. Inevitably however there was a reaction against such artifice and excess, with a call for the return to more natural styles, and by the end of the century the cottage garden was vying with the lush herbaceous border to be the defining feature of the late Victorian garden.

On Thursday, September 22, David Marsh will speak on The Global Garden. The Victorian garden was a truly global space. The growth of empire went hand in hand with changes in technology and the development of commercial nurseries and plant hunting. This lecture will show how grand gardens such as Biddulph Grange and Alton Towers were designed around the arrival of a vast array of exotic plants, but also exotic architecture. Eclectism ruled… while Italianate and Gothic continued to be the predominant styles you could find Egyptian temples and Swiss chalets, as well as Himalayan valleys and American forests, while inside conservatories and glasshouses you could explore the flora of every corner of the world. And it wasn’t long before that was true of the gardens of suburban villas and terraced cottages as well.

After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, Dr David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account. He was awarded a PhD in 2005 and now lectures about garden history anywhere that will listen to him. Recently appointed an honorary Senior Research Fellow by the University of Buckingham, he is a trustee of the Gardens Trust and chairs their Education Committee. He oversees their on-line program and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at https://thegardenstrust.blog. £5 each or all 6 for £30. Register HERE.