Boston Flora

Friday, October 7, 7:00 pm – Plants & Gardens Happy Hour: Tips and Secrets Webinar

The American Horticultural Society and GardenComm are partnering to offer virtual classes this fall. This magazine-style Webinar will feature a public garden, two topics, and a “What’s Making Us Smile” piece at the end. Learn from Andrea DeLong-Amaya with the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Horticulturist and Landscape Designer Claire Jones, Organic Materials Review Institute’s (OMRI) Jacob Mogler and all moderated by expert garden writer and speaker, Kathy Jentz. Register for the October 7th webinar today! All registered will receive a garden-based beverage recipe from Garden Comm mixologist Ellen Zachos, and will be entered to win gift certificates from Brent & Becky’s Bulbs. $15. AHS members free.

Wednesday, October 12, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Friends of the Public Garden Campaign Celebration and Members Reception

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.

Wednesday, October 5, 7:00 pm – Plant Life Book Talk, Live and Online

Rosetta S. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Plant Life exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social. This Arnold Arboretum sponsored talk will take place live and online on October 5 at 7 pm.

Using three supracontinental case studies—scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa’s Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory—Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social.

Plant Life ultimately reveals that afforestation cannot offset deforestation, an important distinction that sheds light on current environmental trends that suggest we can plant our way out of climate change. By radicalizing what conservation protects and by framing plants in their total aliveness, Elkin shows that there are many kinds of life—not just our own—to consider when advancing environmental policy.

Rosetta S. Elkin is associate professor and academic director of landscape architecture at Pratt Institute, principal of Practice Landscape, and research associate at the Harvard Arnold Arboretum. She is author of Tiny Taxonomy: Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture.

This event will also be presented in-person at the Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building at 1300 Centre Street, Boston, MA 02131. To sign up for the in-person event, click here. To sign up for the virtual presentation, click here.

Thursday, October 6, 5:00 am – The 19th Century Garden – Boating Lakes and Backhanders, Online

The Gardens Trust’s third series of lectures on Victorian gardens continues on October 6 with Ben Dark’s exploration of Boating Lakes and Backhanders: J.J. Sexby and the Politics of the Public Park.

Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Sexby, Chief Officer of the London County Council’s Parks Department, has been credited with creating the model for twentieth century public parks. To contemporaries it seemed that at a wave of his magic wand ‘bandstands blossom forth, lakes sparkle, shelters spring up, delightful refreshment rooms, not to mention drinking fountains, abound and playgrounds leap into joyful existence’. But these features were far from universally popular. Contemporary landscape architects accused Sexby of being ‘the merest amateur’ and advocates for naturalistic planting derided the Parks Department for their ‘ugly tea gardens’. Meanwhile, behind the Council’s rockeries and ‘Old English’ gardens lay a bitter soup of political infighting, official corruption and bureaucratic incompetence.

This talk will re-examine Sexby and the parks he created in the light of the economic, aesthetic and moral arguments that raged around him, and will argue that his true genius has long been misunderstood.

Ben Dark is an author, gardener and horticultural journalist with a particular interest in the history of plants and landscapes. His book The Grove: A Natural Odyssey in 19½ Front Gardens (Octopus, 2022) used the plants of a single street in South London to weave together stories of the city, its people and their flowers and was called ‘the best gardening book of 2022’ by the Daily Telegraph, as well as being praised by The Sunday Times, the New Statesman and The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside writing Ben also hosts the award-winning Garden Log podcast, providing a discursive look at the culture, literature and practice of gardening. He has a degree in history from Bristol University and an MA in garden and landscape history from the University of London, writing his dissertation on J. J. Sexby and London’s Municipal Public Parks, 1889-1910.

£5 each or all 6 for £30. Register at Eventbrite HERE. The recording will be available for a week following the Zoom lecture.

Mondays, October 3, October 17, & November 7, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm – 24th Annual Landscape Design Portfolio Series, Online

Three innovative and much-honored landscape architects discuss their signature projects, unique working methods, and design philosophies-while sharing transformative stories of people and places. For these designers, a respect for history informs and inspires the creative process. This online New York Botanical Garden Series on October 3, October 17, & November 7, will be presented at 6:30 Eastern time on Zoom. $95 for the series. Register here at www.nybg.org

The first talk will be by Elizabeth Kennedy entitled At the Crossroads: Socially Just Landscapes. From her office in New York’s Brooklyn Naval Yard, Elizabeth Kennedy leads EKLA PLLC, a collaborative, interdisciplinary social justice practice noted for excellence in innovative landscape preservation, development, and management. For Kennedy, design inspiration can come from anywhere-even the quality of light and shade. Kennedy’s talk will illustrate how her projects-including the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, the Inwood Sacred Site, the Peninsula Live-Work Campus in the Bronx, and Buffalo’s Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor-exemplify landscape architecture’s potential to afford a broader understanding of place and identity.

The daughter of an architect, Elizabeth Kennedy, FASLA, knew at 14 that she wanted to be a landscape architect. She studied landscape architecture at Cornell University and founded her own firm in 1994, with the goal of collaborating with mission-driven non-profit organizations to serve communities. Much honored for her distinguished work in sustainability, Kennedy is an ASLA Fellow and the recipient of 2022’s prestigious Annual Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal.

On October 17, you will hear Julie Bargmann speak on Troubled Beauty: A Manifesto for Ugly Duckling Landscapes. Known for her innovative approaches to design and regeneration of toxic industrial sites and degraded urban landscapes, Julie Bargmann turns “ugly duckling” sites into swans. Her process begins with site forensics-finding the stories of place and then surmounting innumerable obstacles with her unique blend of fearlessness, experimentation, common sense and restraint in order to produce award-winning work. She will discuss a community-based reclamation project of an abandoned coal works; a corporate campus refashioned within an abandoned Navy yard; an obsolete water supply station reinterpreted for a small private garden; and a privately funded public park offered as a sign of optimism in a disinvested Detroit neighborhood.

Julie Bargmann is the Founder and Principal of D.I.R.T. Studio and a Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia Department of Landscape Architecture. She is the Inaugural Laureate of the 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Bargmann received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Carnegie Mellon and a MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

The final talk on November 7 will be by Roderick Wyllie and James A. Lord on Supergreen: Gardens, Placemaking, and Infrastructure. Roderick Wyllie and James A. Lord, founding partners of Surfacedesign, a San Francisco-based landscape architecture studio, challenge conventional approaches to design by asking novel questions and listening to a site and its users. By doing so, Wyllie and Lord focus on cultivating a sense of connection between the built and the natural world, inviting people to engage with the landscape in new ways. Together, the two landscape architects will present work that ranges in location and scale, from civic projects to intimate residential gardens, including Auckland International Airport in New Zealand; the 40-acre Expedia headquarters site on Seattle’s waterfront; Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco that includes a public park; and Uliveto, a private residence in Northern California.

Roderick Wyllie, FASLA, and James A. Lord, FASLA, along with partner Geoff di Girolamo, have established Surfacedesign as an international leader in landscape architecture, urban design, and sustainability. Alumni of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, both are ASLA Fellows. For the consistent excellence of their built designs, they were honored with the 2017 Cooper Hewitt Design Award.

Friday, October 14, 10:00 am – 7:00 pm, & Saturday October 15, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm – Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in partnership with the Arnold Arboretum, will host a two-day academic conference as part of the national Olmsted 200 celebration. While Olmsted was central to the conceptual formation of the degree program in landscape architecture at Harvard University and the design of the Arnold Arboretum, the interpretive ambitions of the conference are anything but parochial.

More details to come. Friday’s program will take place at the GSD, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, and Saturday’s program will take place at the Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway. Free and open to the public. Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

Sunday, October 2, 5:00 pm – The Parks That Made the Man Who Made Central Park: A Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, Online

John Phibbs will speak on Sunday, October 2 at 5 pm Eastern time on Zoom on the topic of Frederick Law Olmsted and the influence of his travels in England on his work. In its travels across the Atlantic the English idea of gardens was stripped down and reformed to make a new approach to landscape architecture, which was, in turn, shipped back to Britain in the 20th Century. The talk is sponsored by the National Association of Olmsted Parks and is free to all. Register at

https://olmsted200.org/events/the-parks-that-made-the-man-who-made-central-park/?mc_cid=4c61303777&mc_eid=24631ab4cc

Birkenhead Park, Liverpool, the first public park and Olmsted’s inspiration for public parks

Famously, Olmsted took from his travels not only the delight in nature that is so much a part of 18th Century English landscape, but also its didactic and philanthropic role in ameliorating the lives of ordinary people in the new industrical cities.

Tuesday, October 11, 6:45 pm – 8:15 pm – Wild Wood: True Tales of Trees, Online

Soundless but sentient, trees were absent for all but the last 10% of Earth’s history yet are essential to all air-breathing life on the planet today. They are the longest-living organisms on Earth, can communicate to one another through intricate underground soil networks, and even thermoregulate, all while rarely ever dying from old age.

Join Liana Vitali, naturalist and educator at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary in Maryland (and self-proclaimed tree-hugger), for an immersive audio-visual journey into the fascinatingly complicated and connected life of trees—from their first tiny emergence through the topsoil as seedlings, to their lasting value to forest life as fallen logs.

Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, just 12 miles outside Washington, D.C., is the jewel of the Patuxent River. Its 1,700 acres of open water, tidal freshwater marshes, forested wetlands, upland and riparian forest, creeks, meadows, pine and sand barrens, and fields along the eastern shore of the Patuxent contain multitudes of welcoming habitats for a true diversity of wildlife.

The October 11 webinar, beginning at 6:45, is $20 for Smithsonian members, $25 for nonmembers. Register at https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/wild-wood

Tuesday, October 11, 1:00 pm – Garden Club of the Back Bay October Meeting – The Bonsai Collection at the Arnold Arboretum

The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s year continues on Tuesday, October 11 at 1:00 pm with a field trip to the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain and a presentation on the Arboretum’s bonsai collection by Tiffany Enzenbacker, head of plant production. The field trip is limited to just 20 members. Members have received notification of all details, but if you need the information resent, email HERE.

Tiffany works alongside the Arboretum’s plant propagator and greenhouse horticulturist to produce the next generation of accessions destined for the permanent collections, as well as to ensure the long-term survival of existing lineages through repropagation techniques, including cuttings and grafting. The department also shares propagules with partner institutions and distributes plant material for research purposes. Additionally, they work to produce plants for Arboretum events, such as the Arbor Day Seedling Mailing and Lilac Sunday. She also oversees the Bonsai Collection and is involved in projects throughout the organization, including plant collection expeditions for the Campaign for the Living Collections.

Tiffany obtained a BS in plant sciences from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a MS in plant pathology from Michigan State University. Prior to joining the Arnold Arboretum in 2014, she worked at the Chicago Botanic Garden, The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, IL, and in the Department of Biology at Boston College.

The Arnold Arboretum Bonsai & Penjing collection began with the donation of the Larz Anderson Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees in 1937, and has grown over time with additional specimens donated by a number of private collectors. Today, the collection comprises 36 masterfully curated trees representing a range of evergreen and deciduous species, including compact Hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Chabo-hiba’), Japanese white pine (Pinus parviflora), trident maple (Acer buergerianum var. trinerve), Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), and cedar elm (Ulmus crassifolia).

The Larz Anderson Collection of Japanese Dwarfed Trees at the Arnold Arboretum was originally imported into the United States by the Honorable Larz Anderson in 1913, upon his return from serving as ambassador to Japan. In April 1937, Isabel Anderson donated the majority of her late husband’s bonsai collection (30 plants) to the Arnold Arboretum, along with the funds necessary to build a shade house for their display. The rest of the Anderson bonsai came to the Arboretum following Isabel’s death in 1949.

The core of the collection consists of 5 large specimens of compact hinoki cypress—each between 150 and 275 years old—that Anderson purchased from the Yokohama Nursery Company. Additional bonsai have been acquired or added to the collection over time.

Thursday, October 6, 1:00 pm – 3:30 pm – Watercolor Mixed Media Floral Collage

Using watercolor paints, oil pastels, colored pencils, and decorative papers we will paint, tear, and collage an abstract floral painting. Design, composition, and color theory will be explored. The class will take place October 6 from 1 – 3:30 at NEBG at Tower Hill.

Suzanne Hauerstein is a professional teaching artist and the Coordinator of Volunteer & Intern Services at New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill. She has over 25 years of experience designing and facilitating art-based programs for informal learning environments. Suzanne is committed to creating programs that are accessible, positive, and enjoyable learning experiences for students of all ages and abilities.

$40 Member Adult; $55 Adult (Registration includes admission to the Garden) All materials will be provided for this workshop. Register at www.nebg.org