Boston Flora

Monday, March 28, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – The Duc de Choiseul’s Chanteloup, Online

The late 1760s saw a number of French aristocrats remake their gardens ‘à la manière anglaise’, a naturalistic taste characterised by all the ‘bizarreness so dear to that nation’. The epidemic of Anglomanie that followed the Seven Years War produced some of the most extravagant landscapes of the age – meandering rivers, mysterious woods, rocky outcrops and cascades, false ruins, philosopher’s huts, all often confined within compact suburban sites. You may purchase a ticket for this March 28 Gardens Trust lecture, costing £5, by clicking HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior, and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after the session and will be available for 1 week.

On Christmas Eve 1770 France’s political order was upended when Louis XV exiled his de facto chief minister Choiseul and his ruling clique. The urbane and wily statesman was sent from Versailles to distant Touraine and his country estate of Chanteloup. Forbidden from politics and intrigue, the duc reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer, much to the bemusement of his allies and enemies. Chanteloup boasted ‘marble’ stables, a model farm and crop yields that were celebrated in the opposition press. In 1773, he liquidated his collections and Paris properties to build a garden in the new Anglo-Chinese taste. At its heart was a towering Sino-Doric pagoda, loosely modeled on that of Kew. An improbable survivor, this costly monument to factionalism is the only trace of Chanteloup to survive. The extensive correspondence of his allies and reports in the newsletter press, however, offer remarkable insights into this opposition domain.

Image: © ATR Louis Nicolas Van Blarenburghe, the Pagoda of Chanteloup, Musée du Louvre

Monday, May 16 – Thursday, May 19 – 2022 National Garden Club Convention

The 2022 National Garden Club Convention returns live to the Rosen Plaza Hotel, 9700 International Drive in Orlando, Florida, on May 16 – 19. Registration deadline is April 25. All details may be found at https://gardenclub.org/2022-ngc-convention-details, including booking instructions with the hotel. Danielle Flood of ECHO and Gabrielle Burns of CORAHealth are featured luncheon speakers, the Wednesday dinner will spotlight Bruce Crawford of Willowwood Arboretum in New Jersey, and the Banquet on Thursday night will welcome guest designers Kebbie Hollingsworth and J. Ross Railey. Tours to NASA at Cape Canaveral, the Daytona Speedway, and two post-convention tours to the Winter Garden/Bloom & Grow Garden Society and Wekiva State Camp-Springs/Sandhill Habitat are also on offer.

Thursday, April 21 – Friends of the Public Garden Annual Meeting: Save the Date

Join The Friends of the Pubic Garden for its 52nd Annual Meeting at the Omni Parker House Hotel on Thursday, April 21. The featured speaker will be Senator-Elect Lydia Edwards. All signs point to an in-person meeting; watch for details at http://friendsofthepublicgarden.org

Wednesday, April 6, 6:45 pm – 8:15 pm – Wild Wings: Fascinating Pollinators and Their Stories, Online

What do an annoying house fly, the nearly endangered Mexican long-tongued bat, and a poop-eating butterfly have in common? Each creature, respectively, is the reason we are able to enjoy a bite of chocolate, a nip of tequila, or the calming scent of lavender.

Liana Vitali, a naturalist and educator at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary in Maryland, tells fascinating stories about pollinators around the world during an immersive audio-visual survey. From bees to bats and everything in between, Vitali’s vignettes offer an entertaining, informative glimpse into the lives of these pollinating winged marvels—and how our lives depend to a great extent on their unique and wild ways.

This Smithsonian Associates online talk will take place April 6 beginning at 6:45 pm, and is $20 for Smithsonian members, $25 for nonmembers. Register at www.smithsonianassociates.org.

If you register multiple individuals, you will be asked to supply individual names and email addresses so they can receive a Zoom link email. Please note that if there is a change in program schedule or a cancellation, we will notify you via email, and it will be your responsibility to notify other registrants in your group. Unless otherwise noted, registration for streaming programs typically closes two hours prior to the start time on the date of the program. Once registered, patrons should receive an automatic email confirmation from CustomerService@SmithsonianAssociates.org. Separate Zoom link information will be emailed closer to the date of the program. If you do not receive your Zoom link information 24 hours prior to the start of the program, please email Customer Service for assistance.

Wednesday, April 6, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Landscape, Poetry, and Ecology: Romanticism at Innisfree, Online

Help Innisfree Garden celebrate National Poetry month on April 6 at6 1 pm with poet Paul Kane, who will discuss the convergence of poetry, nature, and ecology in Romantic ideology and how these ideas can be read in the Innisfree landscape. A professor of English and Environmental Studies at Vassar College, Paul is a scholar of both American and Australian literature. He writes primarily on the work of the Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also focuses on contemporary poetry and criticism. A recipient of NEH and Guggenheim fellowships, Paul has published numerous books, edited others, and has been included in various anthologies of poetry and critical essays. He has been bringing his students to Innisfree for many years. Free for Innisfree members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE. The talk will be on Zoom.

Saturday and Sunday, March 26 & 27 – 46th Annual Gardeners’ Gathering Urban Gardening Conference, Online

Kick off the gardening season with the Trustees of Reservations’ annual Gardeners’ Gathering, now in it’s 46th year. The Gathering is free and open to all. This year’s virtual event will feature:

Garden workshops and storytelling
Special guest speaker Kristen Wyman on indigenous food sovereignty
The Annual Community Garden Awards

Program details will be linked here when available. Register and you’ll receive the program and Zoom links when they’re ready. If you’re able, please consider supporting this free event with an optional program fee when you register. You only need to register for one day to get the full program information for the two-day event.

Interested in sponsoring or otherwise supporting the Gathering? Please contact Boston Community Gardens Engagement Manager Michelle de Lima at mdelima@thetrustees.org.

Tuesday, March 29, 6:00 pm – Samuel Untermyer: Forgotten Hero, Online

Stephen Byrns, who many will have enjoyed in his recent talks on the Untermyer Gardens given to The Garden Club of the Back Bay, The Beacon Hill Garden Club, and the Cambridge Plant & Garden Club, returns for a new online presentation on March 29, The Untermyer Gardens Winter Lecture on Samuel Untermyer: Forgotten Hero. Stephen has taken time this winter to do more research on Samuel Untermyer—his origins, incredible success, progressive activism during the last 30 years of his life, and especially his role in the Jewish community. He will present these findings, accompanied by many historic images, at the annual Winter Lecture, which will be delivered virtually on March 29th. This promises to be an in-depth look at the Garden’s founder, who was involved in many historic and signature moments of his time. At the conclusion, he will show select before and after images from a new book, Forgotten No More: The Restoration of Untermyer Gardens, which was undertaken on the occasion of Untermyer Gardens’ tenth anniversary last year and will be published next month.

Ten Thousand Posts and Counting

We missed a celebration moment recently. The Garden Club of the Back Bay website passed the 10,000 featured posts mark. Since the website’s inception, we have notified the public, and especially our subscribers, of over ten thousand events, website recommendations, volunteer opportunities, benefits, classes, lectures, and more recently, in light of the pandemic, a wealth of online opportunities to continue to learn about plants, flowers, the environment, and design. Former member Mary Lou Abbruzzese created the website at a time when many of our members didn’t necessarily use email. Her forward thinking positioned us to be where we are in today. For those who don’t regularly visit the actual website page, here is a bit of a primer and a few suggestions.

On the home page, beneath the title and a symbol of a shopping cart, you will see three horizontal lines labeled Menu. This is commonly referred to as the “hamburger”. We recently learned some did not recognize this symbol, but if you click on it you will access the complete Page menu, including History, Membership information, Mission and Bylaws, Garden Club programs (as opposed to programs sponsored by other organizations). Online Store, etc. There is also a Membership Directory accessible only to current members with a password. (If you are a member and don’t have the password, email HERE.) Click on to any item and you automatically will be directed to the page in question.

On the very bottom of the page, another important box is the Search Posts box. Not only can you search by a specific name or organization (butterflies, bees, Native Plants Trust, Friends of the Public Garden) but by area (Berkshires, Cape and Islands, Rhode Island) or subject (flower arranging, landscape design, author book signing). Play around. Also at the bottom of the page is the Subscribe to Daily Digest box, which you may Unsubscribe to at any time. This is a service enabled by Google which sends each day’s new posts directly to your email. When you register, you will receive a confirmatory email which you must respond to in order to be on the list.

We believe the website serves a very important purpose, increasing awareness of area and virtual events of interest to our members and to garden loving people everywhere. We accept no advertising, so visiting the site is a relaxing experience. We hope you will visit. Happy Ten Thousand!

Friday, April 1, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm – Reimagining Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst Gardens

In this illustrated talk, Troy Scott Smith recounts his long tenure at Sissinghurst and his efforts to recapture the distinctive vision of its creators, the writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, in the 1930s, as a refuge dedicated to natural beauty. He studied not only Sackville-West’s and Nicolson’s gardening style, but also their characters, philosophy, and interests, while balancing the reality of hundreds of thousands of annual visitors and the effects of climate change. In the end, Troy shows how he settled on an approach that allowed past, present, and future to co-exist. The event, sponsored by The Garden Conservancy, will be held at Long Hill, 572 Essex Street, in Beverly, MA. This is an indoor event and masks and proof of vaccination will be required.

$45 Garden Conservancy and the Trustees of Reservations members
$55 General admission

One of Britain’s best-known head gardeners, Troy Scott Smith has devoted his career to the beauty and romance of gardening. Since joining the National Trust of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, in 1990, Troy has led some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, among them the Courts (Wiltshire), Bodnant (Wales), and two stints at Sissinghurst (Kent), where he has led a remarkable transformation and restoration of the Vita Sackville-West gardens.

After spearheading a multi-year plan as head gardener at Sissinghurst, which included the recreation of a Mediterranean-style garden from the Greek Island of Delos, Troy left to assume leadership of the award- winning Iford Manor Garden in Wiltshire, near Bath, where he set in motion a ten-year master plan. After two years, Troy returned to his spiritual home of Sissinghurst.

Tuesdays, March 22 – April 12, Very Early in the Morning (but recorded sessions available for one week) – Forgotten Women Gardeners, Series Two, Online

This Gardens Trust series of four online talks introduces more unsung women gardeners, on Tuesdays from March 22 – April 12, at 10 am Greenwich Mean Time, which means 6 am Eastern. However, a link to the recorded session will be sent and available for one week should you choose not to get up that early. This ticket costs £16 for the entire course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions for £5 each through Eventbrite. The first series was completely engaging – we highly recommend.

Week one covers Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe, with David Marsh. Within a few months of marrying Otway Wheeler-Cuffe, a military engineer, Charlotte Williams found herself in a tiny colonial outpost in the far north of newly conquered Burma. A keen gardener and painter, she was soon bored of the usual pastimes of imperial wives and took up plant-hunting in the largely unexplored mountains and forests around the base. This was to lead to her becoming the key player in the founding of the National Botanic Garden of Burma – the last botanic garden to be founded in the empire and one done by a group of private individuals.

After a career as a head teacher in Inner London, David Marsh took very early retirement (the best thing he ever did) and returned to education on his own account and did an MA and then a PhD in garden history. Now he lectures on garden history anywhere that will listen to him and helps organize the Garden History Seminar at London University’s Institute of Historical Research. He is co-chair of the Education and Events Committee of The Gardens Trust, for whom he organizes courses and writes a weekly garden history blog which you can find at The Gardens Trust Blog.

Week two’s talk is The Well-Connected Gardener, Alicia Amherst, Founder of Garden History, with Sun Minter. Alicia Amherst was a woman of remarkable gifts and energy. Not only was she passionate about plants and gardens, being both an observant botanist and a very practical gardener, she was active in politics, becoming prominent in the British Women’s Emigration Association and, after World War I, in the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. Her seminal book, A History of Gardening in England, was enormously influential in its time whilst London Parks and Gardens (1907) and Historic Gardens of England (1938) are important historical records, the first of which has never really been superseded in the comprehensive treatment of its subject. She was the recipient of many honours during her lifetime, but the one which gave her the greatest pleasure was being given the freedom of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners in 1896.

Week three is The Amazing Life of Taki Handa, with Jill Raggett.

This talk will tell the story of several unconventional women who stepped outside their social norms to go on adventures overseas but in particular focuses on the Japanese teacher and horticulturist Handa Taki (1871-1956). It will uncover the research process used to understand how it came to be that in the early 1900s there was a Japanese woman with the relevant skills in Britain to act as garden designer for Ella Christie and ‘wave a magic wand’ over the garden at Cowden, Scotland, but that was only the start of Handa’s fascinating life.

Jill Raggett is a long-time member of the Japanese Garden Society and has studied historic Japanese-style gardens in Britain and Ireland for the last 30 years. She is an Emeritus Reader in Gardens and Designed Landscapes and is a tutor and assessor for the Royal Horticultural Society’s Master of Horticulture qualification. Jill is normally to be found in her garden trying to find a place for one more plant.

The final talk, on April 12, is From Hairy Leaves to a White Cat: Lady Anne Monson (1726 – 1776) and Lady Mary Coke (1727 – 1811) with Dr. Catherine Horwood.

This talk examines the lives of Lady Anne Monson (1726-1776) and Lady Mary Coke (1727-1811), one a plantswoman, the other a gardener, and explores the way in which society scandals and horticultural friendships shaped these women’s experiences in the long 18th century.

Dr Catherine Horwood is an experienced speaker and the author of many books on social history including Gardening Women. Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (Virago, 2010) and Potted History – How Houseplants Took Over Our Homes (Pimpernel Press, 2020). Her biography Beth Chatto: A Life with Plants (Pimpernel Press, 2019) was selected as the European Garden Book of the Year in 2020.