Boston Flora

Tag: Africa

  • Tuesday, May 4, 11:00 am – 12:00 noon – In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Food Legacy in the Atlantic World, Online

    Much of Professor Judith Carney’s groundbreaking research focuses on African contributions to New World agriculture and ecology. In this May 4 New York Botanical Garden talk at 11 am online, she shows how enslaved people established familiar foods from Africa, such as rice, okra, yams, black-eyed peas, and millet, as staples in their subsistence plots, what Carney calls the “botanical gardens of the dispossessed.”

    A professor of geography at UCLA, Judith Carney, Ph.D., conducts research in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America that examines gender, food systems, and agroecological change, as well as African contributions to New World environmental history. She is the author of numerous research articles and two award-winning books, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas and In the Shadow of Slavery.

    $18. Register HERE.

  • Thursday, September 19, 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm – Teeming with Trees: An Armchair Tour of an African Hotspot

    The Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany Hotspot in southern Africa’s eastern region holds the highest tree diversity of any of the world’s temperate forests, with nearly 600 tree species represented. In total, about 8,100 species of plants from 243 families occur within this hotspot, and nearly a quarter of these are found nowhere else [Conservation International]. Botanist, artist, author, and guide Elsa Pooley has spent years identifying, studying, painting, and cataloging the flora of this second richest floristic region in Africa and an important center of plant endemism. She will speak about some of the Hotspot’s most interesting habitats and the plants found there, with a primary focus on its trees, on Thursday, September 19 at 6:30 at the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum.  $10 for the general public, free to Arboretum members.  Register at https://my.arboretum.harvard.edu/SelectDate.aspx.

    http://www.eoearth.org/files/143901_144000/143963/miombo_woodlands.jpg

  • Sunday, March 20, 2:00 pm – Drawing and Observing Nature: From Cambridge to Africa and Back

    On Sunday, March 20, beginning at 2 pm, artist, author, and naturalist Clare Walker Leslie will talk about her travels to Africa, the Arctic, and other distant lands to draw wildlife in their natural habitats. Much of her preparation for these adventures begins with drawing specimens of those very same animals in the galleries at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, such as the polar bear, zebra, lion, sea birds, and whales. Her newest book, The Nature Connection: An Outdoor Workbook for Kids, Families, and Classrooms will be available for purchase and signing. Free with museum admission. Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu, 617-495-3045, hmnh@oeb.harvard.edu.