The Esplanade Association Council presents The Ugly Sweater Party on Thursday, January 31, from 7 – 10 at The Foundation Room at the House of Blues Boston, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston. The $25 ticket purchase includes event admission, appetizers, a drink ticket, and more. Call 617-227-0365, ext. 103, to reserve, or visit www.esplanadeassociation.org. Hats are optional.
You are cordially invited to kick up your heels and have fun, all for the benefit of the beautiful Charles River Esplanade. Show your support for this historic and beloved Boston landmark by attending. Enjoy light bites, desserts, cocktails, DJ and dancing on the Esplanade Saturday, September 29, from 9 – midnight. Purchase tickets by August 31 and pay $175. After September 1 the price goes up to $200. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit www.esplanadeassociation.org/events-2/upcoming-events/moon-dance-gala-92912, or call Tani at 617-227-0365, ext. 106.
On June 13th, The Esplanade Association (TEA) will host its 11th Annual Meeting at The Hampshire House, 84 Beacon Street, Boston, and they hope you will join them. Edward M. Lambert, Jr., Commissioner, Department of Conservation and Recreation, will also address the audience. With the unveiling of Esplanade 2020: A Vision for the Future earlier this year, increased horticulture care, organizational growth, and more, there is much to update you on.
TEA is pleased to welcome Lawrence R. Hott as the Keynote Speaker. Mr. Hott will present a short clip of his new film on Olmsted which will set the stage for his talk,The Boss of Free Time: Olmsted and the Democratization of American Leisure. Lawrence R. Hott has been producing documentary films since 1978, when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the Erik Barnouw Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, Fourteen CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride, and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals.
Hott was the Fulbright Fellow in Film and Television in the United Kingdom in 1994. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Director’s Guild of America.
His recent films for national PBS broadcast include Through Deaf Eyes, American Masters John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature, Niagara Falls, The Return of the Cuyahoga, Imagining Robert and The War of 1812. He is now producing Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America and Rising Voices: The Revitalization of the Lakota Language. Edward M. Lambert, Jr., Commissioner, Department of Conservation and Recreation, will also be in attendance and has offered to say a few words to the audience.
TEA’s Annual Meeting is a member event. If you are not a member, but would like to attend, please join today!
For more information and to RSVP, visit www.esplanadeassociation.org.
The Annual Meeting of The Garden Club of the Back Bay, Inc. took place Monday, May 14, and $66,000 in grants and expenditures were unanimously approved by the membership. Co-President Jackie Blombach is pictured below announcing the grants to the attendees.
Thirty thousand dollars has been set aside for street tree care, including planting, pruning, and inoculating. In addition to this amount, the following organizations will benefit from our Club’s fund raising successes, including our holiday wreath project and our upcoming Twilight Garden Party:
$5,000 to The Friends of Copley Square, for treating with fertilizer and fungicide the diseased trees (the ones not being removed) for root stress due to canker stain and compacted ground conditions.
$5,000 to The Friends of the Public Garden, to continue the inoculation of elms against Dutch elm disease. The street trees to be treated are not on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, but are located on Commonwealth Avenue beyond Massachusetts Avenue.
$5,000 to The Esplanade Association, for the Eliot Memorial Demonstration Garden.
$5,000 to the Commonwealth Avenue Mall Committee, for its Historic Elm Preservation Project.
$3,000 to the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, to help pay for plant material for the completion of Mother’s Rest, at Boylston Street and The Fenway.
$3,000 to City Roots/Urban Ecology Institute, for plant materials (trees and shrubs) for a project underway in Allston/Brighton, which also includes a citizen science and education component.
$3,000 to the Boston Nature Center of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, supporting some level of scholarships to twenty children for the summer camp. The children range in age from 5 to 14 and are from the local neighborhoods of Mattapan, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain.
$2,000 to the Charles River Clean Up Boat, helping keep our beloved river trash free.
$500 to the Ellis Neighborhood Association, to inoculate an historic elm tree in the South End against Dutch elm disease. This contribution will cover half the expense of the treatment, with the other half being paid by the Ellis Neighborhood Association.
$500 to The Blossom Fund of The Boston Committee of The Garden Club of America, for our five year fund raising effort to be awarded next year to a project in or around The Rose Kennedy Greenway.
Additionally, we are purchasing four tree fences to be installed in the neighborhood, three in front of The First Lutheran Church on Berkeley Street, and one in front of The French Cultural Center of Boston, on Marlborough Street, at a total cost of $4,000.
We congratulate all our grant recipients, and thank our supporters for giving us the ability to beautify Boston.
The Esplanade Association (TEA) will hold a public meeting—“Esplanade 2020 Unveiledâ€â€”on Thursday, February 9, at 6:00 p.m. in the Rabb Auditorium of the Boston Public Library Central Branch to present a community vision for the Charles River Esplanade. An initiative of The Esplanade Association, Esplanade 2020 has brought together community members, public officials, and design professionals to craft a shared vision for the future of the Esplanade. The meeting will provide the public with an opportunity to hear and comment on the recommendations set forth in Esplanade 2020.
As part of the park’s centennial in 2010, TEA assembled a team of leading Boston design and planning specialists, the Esplanade 2020 Committee, to take a fresh look at every element of the park. Working closely with the Department of Conservation and Recreation, park users, and major stakeholders, this group of volunteers spent more than a year crafting a vision for the Esplanade. The committee held more than a dozen meetings with the general public and a variety of stakeholders to gather input, which helped the committee establish guiding principles, create a vision statement, and define objectives.
Esplanade 2020 illustrates ways in which these core principles, consistently applied, can transform Boston’s waterside park into one of the world’s great urban outdoor spaces.
The objectives of Esplanade 2020 are to present recommendations for the continued restoration and enhancement of the Esplanade for the next 100 years. Some ideas are big and ambitious, others more readily implemented. These ideas can provide context for very specific restoration projects and can serve as an inspiration and as a road map for future improvements on the Esplanade.
For more information on the project, please visit www.esplanadeassociation.org. To offer your thoughts, please send an e-mail to info@esplanadeassociation.org (please put “Esplanade 2020 Unveiled†in the subject line) or write to The Esplanade Association, Attn: Esplanade 2020, 376 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116.
Please save the date, November 4, 2011 for The Esplanade Association’s 10th Anniversary Party with the TEA Council’s Night Owls, the young members group of The Esplanade Association. This will be one part of an organization-wide celebration happening that night at The Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, Massachusett.
More details on tickets, times, transportation, after party, and the committee are to come but get ready to celebrate The Charles River Esplanade on November 4th! Visit www.esplanadeassociation.org.
Thanks in no small part to the continued success of our recent Twilight Garden Party, The Garden Club of the Back Bay announces that the following organizations will receive a total of $20,000 in financial grants for 2011:
The Commonwealth Avenue Mall Committee – $5,000 to be credited to the Hereford Street to Massachusetts Avenue air spading project fund.
The Friends of the Public Garden – $4,000 to continue the inoculation of elms at risk for contracting Dutch elm disease.
The Esplanade Association – $2,500 for the Elliot Oval Landscape Restoration, planting new trees and treating trees already on site, near the newly restored Community Boating docks.
Emerald Necklace Conservancy – $2,500 for a planned meadow to be developed with native species and wildflowers.
Boston Nature Center/Massachusetts Audubon Society – $2,500 to support six full scholarships for its summer camp. The children attending the camp range in age from 5 to 14 and are from the local neighborhoods of Mattapan, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain.
Charles River Clean Up Boat – $2,000, to help continue the project of keeping the Charles River trash-free.
Urban Ecology Institute – $1,000 to help with its Grow Boston Greener tree planting initiative.
The Boston Committee of the Garden Club of America – $500 to the Blossom Fund, which is accumulating funds over a five year period to be awarded to a deserving project on or about the Rose Kennedy Greenway.
For more information on all these important organizations and to learn more about the work they do, visit their website links above. In addition to the above grants, The Garden Club of the Back Bay will spend an additional $20,000 on planting, pruning, and treating the street trees in our neighborhood over the coming year. Thank you to all our volunteers and contributors for making our horticultural endeavors happen!
The 12th Annual Earth Day Charles River Cleanup takes place at all sites along the Charles River and its tributaries on Saturday, April 16, from 9 am – noon. To volunteer on the Esplanade and the parkland up to the River Bridge, contact Jessica Blohm at The Esplanade Association by calling 617-227-0365, or contact the Charles River Watershed Association at 781-788-0007, ext. 303.
The Garden Club of the Back Bay provided two grants to The Esplanade Association in 2010 in support of its work with trees – updating the tree inventory and replacing storm damaged trees. We have received a note from Executive Director Sylvia Salas at The Esplanade Association which we’d like to share with our readers:
“1. Tree inventory: We have been working with Joyce Husseni from Nitsch Engineering and David Rines on this project. David has assessed the condition of every tree on the Esplanade and has input this data into an Excel spreadsheet for Joyce to import into a database. David also has re-plotted tree locations on the maps, as needed. The assessment and data update include approximately 90 new trees, including the Yoshino cherries. The updated inventory will prove very useful to DCR as well as TEA in identifying and prioritizing tree work. We hope next to re-tag the trees.
2. Replacement trees and tree care: The process of planting, even pruning, trees on the Esplanade is somewhat complicated because of oversight requirements by the Massachusetts Historic Commission and Boston Landmarks Commission, but we have managed to work through all of the DCR requirements to move forward with tree work. We are planting 10 willows at Otis Grove this spring and we intend to plant trees, as well as shrubs, ground cover and other plants at Eliot Plaza. The Eliot Plaza project is a significant one, encompassing a redesign of the plaza’s current landscape to convert it into the classic room within the park as intended by Arthur Shurcliff. We also have managed to get nearly 200 trees pruned around the Hatch Shell and are working with DCR to have as many as 300 trees pruned in the Otis Grove, Esplanade Café and Sherborn exercise areas this spring.
Please express our gratitude to the members of the garden club for their support of The Esplanade Association’s ongoing work to improve the health and care of the Esplanade.”
Why should you buy from us? Yes, we know you could order from local florists (at a significantly higher price, we might point out), or from the nurseries or groceries stores (at perhaps a slightly lower cost, with a corresponding drop in quality.) Purchasing our wreaths comes with the satisfaction of knowing you are supporting many wonderful local organizations, in addition to our own.
Each year we make grants to not for profit groups which are making a difference in our lives. In addition to the Friends of the Public Garden and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall Committee, we donate to the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, the Charles River Clean Up Boat, the Boston Nature Center of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Esplanade Association, COG, and to City Roots/The Urban Ecology Institute. This is by no means the complete list of beneficiaries (click on to our Projects page on the menu above for details) but we give approximately $20,000 annually to area groups accomplishing great works which we do not have the expertise or manpower to do ourselves. The dollar amount of these grants is dependent upon our earnings, so we urge you to be generous and allow us the opportunity to enhance your holiday environment with our fresh balsam wreaths. We also directly pay for the planting, pruning, and inoculation of the street trees in our neighborhood – another $20,000 annual expenditure, give or take a thousand. As Everett Dirkson used to say, and I paraphrase, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Click HERE for an order form.
