Boston Flora

Thursday, November 4, 5:15 pm – 6:30 pm – The “Science” of Dry-Farming: The Emergence of a Concept in Global Perspective, Live or Online

This Massachusetts Historical Society presentation on November 4 by Elizabeth Williams, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, examines the emergence of dry farming as a new “scientific” agricultural method in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within broader global circulations of agricultural knowledge. Connecting the dry farming knowledge of American agronomists to that of French colonial officials working in North Africa who were themselves indebted to centuries of knowledge about dry farming techniques developed by farmers working in rainfed lands around the Mediterranean basin, it sheds light on the politics of expertise involved in the production of this “science.”

The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Please note, this is a hybrid event which may be attended either in person at the MHS or virtually on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information. Register for the in person event HERE or online HERE

Wednesday, November 3, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Eco-Answers with an ELA Eco-Pro: Specialty Gardens, Online

Do you have (or desire to have) a specialty garden but need a little help getting started?
Sometimes referred to as garden niches, there are many types of specialty gardens. They can include gardens with a particular aesthetic (like Japanese Gardens), focus on a particular type of plants (herb gardens), or be characterized by their size (small pocket gardens or large meadows).

Join ecological landscape specialist Pennington (Penn) Marchael to ask your questions about garden niches and get professional advice to help solve your problems or get your project started. During this 90-minute Zoom live forum, Penn will provide answers to some common questions and then focus on audience questions.

Penn will start the evening with brief opening remarks about a couple of specialty gardens and then jump right into your questions for the bulk of the Q&A session. Some topics that Penn can address are:

Building a biodiverse meadow
Creating gardens for winter interest
Sizing plants for a small courtyard
Leaving semi-wild garden areas
Designing a butterfly garden
Featuring texture in a shade garden
And more…

Please send your questions in advance so that Penn will know where to focus his attention. Also send photos of the plants in question to provide some reference and to add interest to the discussion. Email photos along with your questions to: penny@ecolandscaping.org.
If you don’t submit questions in advance, no problem, we will also be taking questions throughout the event.

Once you are registered for Eco-Answers with the ELA Eco-Pros, you will receive an email with the Zoom Webinar link. Pennington Marchael is a landscape contractor based in Brooklyn and Bedford Hills, New York. Throughout his career he has cultivated a deep understanding of horticulture and ecology, which he uses to execute successfully vibrant landscapes. Mr. Marchael has over ten years of experience in project management, landscape construction, and maintenance. In those ten years, he has installed and maintained meadows from Virginia to Northern New York with a total of over one hundred fifty acres installed and many more maintained and monitored. His present focus is growing his business, Pennington Grey, where he aspires to train a new generation of land managers who will lead the landscape industry away from traditional practices and toward a more sustainable and dynamic approach.

This webinar is free but open only to ELA members. Annual memberships start at $25. To join, visit https://www.ecolandscaping.org/membership/

Wednesday, November 3, 1:00 pm – Billion Dollar Bulbs: Tulips From the Ottoman Empire to Today, Online

From its humble origins in the Caucasus Mountains over 1,000 years ago, Context Learning will follow the Tulip’s path via the Ottoman Turkish tulipomania to Holland’s billion-dollar tulip industry today.Join an expert on November 3 at 1 pm Eastern to learn how the magical charm of the tulip has ruined the fortunes of sultans and bulb speculators while its beauty, color, and form have captured our gaze for centuries.

The tulip industry in Holland is an important part of the Dutch economy, bringing in huge revenues along with millions of visitors every spring who come to see the amazing colors of the flower fields. Together we will trace the origins of this mighty economic force, from the courts of Ottoman sultans to the bulb’s arrival in the Netherlands. We will follow the fame and fortune of this flower through the nineteenth century and see how painters, potters, and other artisans captured its delicate form.

We will delve into the flower industry of today, to learn about the new varieties of tulips on display each year at the Keukenhof Garden festival. Not open to visitors this year, we will take a look virtually at this special garden. We will see how new hybrids are developed each year yielding ever more beautiful exemplars of the millennial bud.

Led by an expert on garden history, Alette Fleischer, this interactive seminar will bring you closer to the tulip; the flower, and the bulb. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with increased knowledge about 1000 years of tulip history and the place of the tulip in our society today. $36.50. Register at https://www.contextlearning.com/collections/seminars/products/billion-dollar-bulbs

Wednesday, November 10, 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm – Biogeography Across Broken Continents and Sunken Islands, Online

Gonzalo Giribet, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; Curator of Invertebrate Zoology, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and Director, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, will speak online on November 10 at 6 pm as part of Harvard’s Evolution Matters Lecture Series, supported by a generous gift from Drs. Herman and Joan Suit. Free, but advance registration required at https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Nu9A1HZZQvKx8IgISFXtyw

The major continents of the Southern Hemisphere—Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica—as well as India and islands in the Pacific, were once part of Gondwana, an ancient supercontinent that began to break up about 180 million years ago. How did this breakup influence the evolution of ecosystems and organisms found on modern continents and islands? This is one of the questions that biogeography, the study of how organisms are distributed across space and time, seeks to answer. Gonzalo Giribet will discuss how he uses biogeography and tiny invertebrate species to understand the biological and geological history of New Zealand and New Caledonia, two islands that were once part of Gondwana.

Saturday, November 6, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm – Woodland Wreath, Online

Take inspiration from the woods as you create a rich, textural wreath for your home. Using a grapevine wreath as a base, you’ll add a variety of preserved botanical materials, including seed pods, mosses, flowers, fruits, and pine cones. This New York Botanical Garden workshop will take place online November 6 from 11 – 2. Registered students will receive log in instructions. Taught by Madeline Yanni, the fee is $95. Register at www.nybg.org.

Thursday, November 18 – Saturday, November 20 – Fifth Holiday Showcase & Boutique: 400 Years of Holidays on Cape Cod

The Garden Club of Hyannis presents its Fifth Holiday Showcase and Boutique on November 18 – 20, from 9 – 5 at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, 307 Old Main Street in South Yarmouth. You will enjoy amazing room transformations, opulent floral arrangements, captivating tablescapes, and an extraordinary boutique with over 2,000 hand-crafted items. This event involves so much effort that the Garden Club hosts it only every three years. Because of COVID-19, the hiatus grew to four years, but the extra time meant extra effort on an event that is sure to impress. Buy tickets($20) now by clicking HERE. $25 at the door. Proceeds help fund the Garden Club of Hyannis’s many civic, charitable projects, including scholarships, and the Cultural Center of Cape Cod.

Saturday, November 6, 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm – Introduction to Essential Oils

This Tower Hill Botanic Garden lecture by Linda Patterson on November 6 from 1:30 – 3:00 will cover the health benefits of essential oils, how to work with them safely, and the importance of quality. We will discuss the safety hazards surrounding oils and their applications. Essential oils will be passed through the lecture hall to allow the audience to experience practitioner quality. Essential oils have grown in popularity over the past couple years.

Linda Patterson, M.A. founder and director of the Eclectic Institute of Aromatherapy and Herbal Studies has over thirty years of experience working with herbs and essential oils. Her love for plants inspired her to complete an education in the sciences at Smith College to better understand plants, their functions, and the challenges they now face in their ever changing environments. This love has led her to become a Master Gardener as well as a Flower Essences Practitioner. Linda teaches internationally as well as throughout the New England area. Her dynamic style of teaching encompasses a wide variety of healing modalities, which embrace a holistic approach to health and well-being.

$30 for Tower Hill members, $40 for nonmembers. Register at www.towerhillbg.org.

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Sunday, November 7, 10:30 am – 12:00 noon – Bonsai Wiring

One of the most misunderstood aspects of growing bonsai trees is the application of wire. Wiring a tree is a difficult skill to master, but with a little guidance it can be as simple as pruning or even watering. In this November 7 live Tower Hill Botanic Garden workshop, Joel Mullen will take you through the basic steps of wiring and shaping your bonsai tree. Bring your trees and any tools that you’d like to work with. Tools and aluminum wire will be provided for all attendees. You can bring as many trees as you’d like. We may not get to all of them but we can work on as many as you’d like for the duration of the class.

Joel Mullen is the President of the Kaikou Bonsai Study Group. He has been growing bonsai trees for over 10 years and has trained with artists all over New England. Joel is the Lead Tropical Grower and the Education Coordinator at New England Bonsai Gardens in Bellingham, MA.

$30 Member Adult; $40 Adult (Registration includes admission to the Garden) Register HERE

Thursday, November 4, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm – The Heirloom Gardener with John Forti, Online

This Tower Hill Botanic Garden November 4 online talk beginning at noon is offered in partnership with the Herb Society of America, New England Unit. You can find additional information at the NEUHSA website. These days, we all need some good news and a way to participate in meaningful change.

The Heirloom Gardener is a book for gardeners who want to deepen their knowledge and improve life for families, pollinators and wildlife in their own backyards. It’s a love poem to the earth; a map to the art of living intentionally and a guidepost for environmental gardeners and artisans. It unearths old-ways, storied plants and artisanal life-skills; like seed-saving, herbalism, foraging, distillation, ethnobotany and organics which contribute to a new 21st century arts and crafts movement. With woodcuts from Caldecott Medal artist Mary Azarian, The Heirloom Garden offers a dose of wild hope for a weary nation.

Signed copies of the book are available through Tower Hill’s Garden Shop. You can shop online or stop into the garden and grab it in person.

John Forti (www.jforti.com) is a garden historian and ethnobotanist who has directed gardens for Plimoth Plantation Museum, Strawbery Banke Museum, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and Bedrock Gardens. As a Slow Food USA Governor and biodiversity specialist, his preservation work has helped to restore countless native and heirloom plants and has brought traditional artisanal practices to modern thinking. He has won numerous awards for historic garden preservation, children’s garden design, herbal and historical education and the 2021 Award of Excellence from National Garden Clubs, the largest volunteer gardening organization in the world. This book was inspired by his posts as ‘The Heirloom Gardener – John Forti‘ which go out regularly to millions on Facebook that value his uniquely curated blend of history, horticulture, environmentalism, poetry, art, kitchen and garden craft. He gardens and lives along the banks of the Piscataqua River in Maine.

$10 THBG Member Adult; $15 Adult

Tuesday, November 2, 11:00 am – The Nature of Oaks, Online

In his latest book, The Nature of Oaks (Timber Press, March 2021), Doug Tallamy pays homage to a giant of the plant kingdom: the mighty oak tree. Oaks sustain a crucial and complex web of wildlife above ground, but are just as impressive underground, producing enormous root systems that make them champions of carbon sequestration, soil stabilization, and watershed management.

Join theNew York Botanical Garden for this November 2 webinar at 11 am, as Doug shares his signature how-to advice, including practical tips on how to plant and care for an oak, as well as information about the best oak species for your area. Doug Tallamy is Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware. Chief among his research goals is to better understand the many ways insects interact with plants and how such interactions determine the diversity of animal communities. Tallamy is a prolific researcher and the author of many books, including Bringing Nature Home, The Living Landscape, Nature’s Best Hope, and his latest The Nature of Oaks.

Please note that registration will end 24 hours prior to this webinar. $15 NYBG members, $18 non-members. Register HERE