As gardeners, our work extends beyond the soil, rippling out to communities of every type. From our human neighbors, to pollinators and beyond, what and how we grow has an indelible effect on the world around us. This year, Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Rooted in Place symposium speakers will consider the impacts of the way we garden on the world around us. Both in person and online options will be available. The event takes place November 13 from 10 – 5 at the Duffin Theater in Lenox, or online. Registration ranges from $45 – $110. Visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/8th-annual-rooted-place-ecological-gardening-symposium-seeding-community-garden

Wambui Ippolito: Growing In Weeds: So many children grow up with sterile green spaces designed with their safety in mind — structured spaces that don’t allow for exploration, imagination and the sense of danger that fuels curiosity. How can landscape designers, gardeners, parents, and communities approach design and create new spaces that bring a new vitality into children’s green spaces? How do these spaces help our children to be emboldened explorers and better stewards of landscapes they inhabit? 

Wambui Ippolito is a horticulturist and landscape designer and a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. She develops programming for museums, public gardens and parks exploring the broader context of horticulture, focusing on the intersections between migration, culture, history and science. She lectures both in the USA and internationally and is the principal designer of her New York-based landscape design firm. In her former career, Wambui worked as a Development & Democracy Consultant. She is multilingual, fluent in five languages. Wambui is the founder of the BIPOC Hort Group, a multicultural organization with membership from the African American, Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean public and private professional ornamental horticulture community.

Bringing Meadows into the Garden: With global warming and energy conservation in mind, let’s cut down on mowing and blowing and replace some of our lawns with higher grass. Page Dickey will discuss a wide range of examples showing how beautifully meadows — however small — and meadow plants can be incorporated into our gardens.

Page has been passionately gardening since her early 20s and writing about gardening, as well as designing gardens for others, for the last three decades. She has written eight books and edited another. Most of her books concentrate on aspects of garden design, such as creating gardens that reflect their settings (Gardens in the Spirit of Place and Breaking Ground) or planning gardens as extensions of our homes (Inside Out), in each case illustrated by exceptional examples around America. Duck Hill Journal and Embroidered Ground are about Duck Hill, where she lived for 34 years, about the process of making the garden there, and her thoughts on gardening in general. Page was the editor of the book Outstanding American Gardens, celebrating 25 years of the Garden Conservancy with photographs by Marion Brenner. Her new book, Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again, describes leaving a beloved garden of 34 years, finding a home in the northwest corner of Connecticut and falling in love with its land. Page lectures around the country about plants and garden design. She has written many articles over the years, including in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Horticulture, Elle Décor, Garden Design, and The New York Times. The garden at Duck Hill has been featured in a variety of periodicals. She is a director emeritus of the Garden Conservancy and is one of the two founders of its Open Days Program. She also serves on the boards of Stonecrop Garden, in Cold Spring, N.Y.; Hollister House Garden, in Washington, Conn.; and The Little Guild, in Cornwall, Conn. She and her husband, Bosco Schell, are both members of the Friends of Horticulture at Wave Hill. Page was recently elected as an Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America. In 2015, Page and her husband moved to Falls Village, Conn., to an old church with 17 acres of fields and woods and a view of the Berkshire foothills. They are off on a new gardening adventure.

Agriculture as Conservation: Lessons for the Landscape: Our increasingly complex and dire environmental challenges can’t be met by wildland preservation alone. It has become abundantly clear that we must also radically change our approach to intensively human-managed landscapes. Since 2018, Stone Barns Center has been managing over 350 acres of former traditionally managed pasture land (now predominantly part of a state park preserve) using holistic regenerative methods focused around intensive, multi-species rotational livestock grazing. These efforts have been coupled with a comprehensive ecological monitoring program measuring responses in our soil health, plant biodiversity, bird biodiversity, insect biodiversity, and water quality. This presentation will share some of our preliminary discoveries from listening closely to the landscape and how those lessons could be applied by stewards of a variety of human-impacted landscapes, including the landscaping and gardening community.

Elijah Goodwin is the ecology and GIS manager at Stone Barns Center. He first joined the organization in 2019, monitoring bird populations on the pastured grasslands managed through the Conservation Action Plan with Rockefeller State Park Preserve. He previously conducted a four-year study on the wood thrush populations within the Park Preserve. Since starting an expanded role with the organization in 2020, he has been working to build out the ecological monitoring program and create and implement an ArcGIS-based database system to collect, manage, synthesize, and present the vast array of monitoring and management data collected from across the farm and the Center. Elijah has been working as a research scientist and/or science educator for over 25 years. While his primary training is as an ornithologist, he has experience working with soil, plant communities, and DNA technology . His scientific experience includes banding hawks and owls during migration in New Jersey; surveying beaver activity and bird populations in the Adirondacks; and studying bird song learning all over the Eastern Seaboard and Mexico. He holds a B.S. in wildlife biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an M.S.T in biology education from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology, also from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On the side: Elijah enjoys time spent in the outdoors with his wife, Katherine, and child, Spirit. He is an award-winning nature and night/light painting photographer and owns a small photography, education and ecological consulting business, Whimbrel Nature. He has served as president and a board member for the Color Camera Club of Westchester and is a science advisor for ⅔ For The Birds.

Ecosystem Approaches to Landscape Design: Building Resiliency Through Community: Today’s gardeners are faced with more challenges than ever before—a changing climate, more pressure from invasive plants and pests, and more decisions about what to put into and how to manage our landscapes. Annie White is striving to create a new culture of gardening where we move away from carefully curated gardens, work more with rather than against nature, and become better stewards of the ecosystems within and around our gardens. Annie will share her ecosystem approach to landscape design that helps build resiliency through community. Sharing case studies of her successes and failures, Annie’s talk will open your eyes to the myriad of naturally occurring processes in the landscapes and how we can steward these to create both beautiful and ecologically significant landscapes. 

Annie White (below) is an Ecological Landscape Designer and the owner of Nectar Landscape Design Studio in Stowe, Vermont. She is also a full-time Lecturer of Sustainable Landscape Horticulture + Design at the University of Vermont.  Annie earned an MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2005 and a PhD in Plant & Soil Science from The University of Vermont in 2016. She is passionate about designing cutting-edge and science-based ecological landscapes at all scales—from urban backyards to rural agricultural landscapes.