The Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity, and Health was set up in 2021 by the wife-and-husband team of Sue and Tom Stuart-Smith. Based in an old orchard in Hertfordshire, England, the project draws on Sue’s work as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and Tom’s horticultural expertise as an internationally renowned landscape architect.
This Garden Conservancy online program on December 12 at 2 pm Eastern will explore how the idea for Serge Hill developed from an old orchard near their home into a not-for-profit initiative based on the understanding that working with nature can radically transform people’s health and well-being. They will explain how the programs and educational resources at Serge Hill are engaging those in the community who have the least opportunity to access the natural world.
$5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/
Longtime Open Days Garden Host Barbara Paul Robinson will discuss her new book, Creating Brush Hill, the love story of Barbara and her husband, Charlie, and the garden they created together over five decades.
Narrated by Barbara, it is the story of how two people of quite different temperaments and skills worked to create a place of great beauty. Brush Hill covers over ten acres of gardens, all created and tended by Barbara, as well as several garden features built by Charlie. Each year visitors and tour groups from near and far are welcome. Barbara makes clear that while they were busy creating this magical garden, the garden was working its magic on them. Full of wonders and frustrations of the garden, this delightful tale will appeal to serious gardeners, want-to-be-gardeners, and non-gardeners alike. Their ongoing love story offers inspiration, encouragement, honest and funny tales of garden mistakes and the demanding work that a garden entails, along with the garden’s many joys.
This Garden Conservancy online talk will take place November 14 at 2 pm Eastern. $5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar.
Please join the Garden Conservancy and Monacelli Press for an exclusive presentation, book signing, and reception celebrating the launch ofCharles J. Stick and his Gardens.
Charles J. Stick and his Gardensis a fascinating biographical monograph of Charles J. Stick, renowned Virginia-based landscape architect celebrated for his historically and culturally based gardens filled with luxuriant blooms. This new book is the first to explore and bring together four major estates by Stick—Crab Tree Farm on the North Shore of Chicago, Illinois; Mount Sharon near Charlottesville, Virginia; Waverley, in Somerset, Virginia; and of course Sleepy Cat Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut—offering new insights into the design process and the intimacy of his client relationships.
Sleepy Cat Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut is a spectacular garden—a thirteen-acre multi-faceted experience including a stroll garden through a woodland with its own grotto, a meadow with a sacred grove, a wetland with an elevated spirit walk through an iris garden, and several formal garden rooms with reflecting pools and koi ponds—and this event offers the special opportunity to hear directly from its visionary creators. Following the conversation will be a celebratory reception where light refreshments and bites will be served.
Purchase a copy of the book as part of your ticket to receive an exclusive Garden Conservancy discount. Additional copies will be available for purchase at full price at the event. $35 for Garden Conservancy members, $40 for nonmembers (talk only), or $75 for members, $80 for nonmembers (talk with book)
Photographer Claire Takacs and landscape architect and planting design expert Giacomo Guzzon will present their new book, Visionary: Gardens and Landscapes for Our Future. They will share stunning imagery and discuss key themes and findings, highlighting a selection of the book’s eighty gardens and public landscapes from around the world. These featured spaces showcase innovative, inspiring, and beautiful ways to work with our changing climate across diverse scales, climates, applications, and budgets. This Garden Conservancy online event takes place on October 31 at 2 pm.
$5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/education/
The Garden Conservancy presents three private gardens open to the public on October 19 from 10 – 4. Complete details are found at www.gardenconservancy.org
The Kinsey-Pope Garden in Amherst has been a work in progress since 1978. It is a landscape of many uncommon trees with strikingly beautiful bark and a wide variety of textures, flowers, berries, and great autumn color; many shrubs with more than one season of beauty; perennials flowering in three seasons; ground covers of unusual dramatic effect covering all beds during all seasons; and in winter offering a wide palette of interesting shapes, lovely bark, and many evergreen trees and shrubs. In addition, there are three bridges over a stone-lined swale, a hand-built screened gazebo and curved top arbor, a charming little pond, many benches and Japanese stone lanterns, large-stone walkways and stone walls, and a Japanese inspired fence surrounding all of the ½-acre garden. Please note this garden is open for two sessions, 10 – 1 and 1 – 5.
Rock Valley Paradise is located in Holyoke. The garden is a sanctuary, and a happy place. Although the owner has flowers and herbs, her passion is food for the family. The spot includes a small orchard of fifteen fruit trees, apples, peaches, plums, pears, apricots, and cherries. Our berries include blueberries, goji berries, elderberries, and black, red, and champagne currants. The concord grapes provide us with lots of juice for the winter months. Seasonally she grows all five kinds of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, eggplant, and all the other “regular veggies.” Our homestead also boasts two dairy goats, a dozen chickens, and a hive of honey bees. This garden’s estimated size is ¼ acre.
The last garden on the tour is Swampfield, in Sunderland (below). The owner says: “When we moved here in 2015, the property was a blank slate. Since then, we have added 7,000 sq. feet of perennial border, in a mixture of sun and shade. Our sunny borders are filled with classic cottage garden plants and many natives. While there’s a playful exuberance, the color palette within each season is relatively limited—creating a sense of harmony and continuity as you explore the property. The two woodland gardens are lush, with towering actaeas and tiny primroses and everything in between. The garden crescendos in the fall as mums, asters, sedums, and more explode alongside scores of ornamental grasses and shrubs—just as their foliage begins to take on exciting hues. “Welcome to Swampfield! This garden’s estimated size is 7,000 sq. feet.
How did ordinary home gardeners in nineteenth-century America perceive their gardens as tied to the fates of the nation and the world? This rescheduled Garden Conservancy webinar event at 2 pm on October 3 explores how caring for plants brought these gardeners face-to-face with the greatest political issues of the day: colonialism, conquest, slavery, and democracy. It focuses on a selection of gardeners who were also famous writers—including Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Frederick Douglass—and shows how their homes and gardens were important places for broader environmental thinking. This talk draws on research from Mary Kuhn’s new book, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America.
$5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/education/
Four unique gardens will be on view with the Garden Conservancy on September 14 from 10 – 4.
The Garden at Power Street in Providence (below) is a new garden: the borders were built in 2017 and planting began in the fall of 2018. A city lot 70 × 70 feet, the garden is mostly filled with flowering perennials and features a summer house folly. Previously there was no garden, just a worn-out lawn. Laura Wilson designed the structure, and Kevin Bacon built the stone wall. The design pays homage to Colonial Revival gardens of 100 years ago.
Also in Providence is Sycamore Farm Community Garden. Sycamore Farm is an urban agriculture oasis in Providence’s historic West End neighborhood. Visitors will delight in touring a whimsical mix of organically grown vegetables, berries, herbs, and flowers in raised beds tended by nine neighboring families and the garden owner who lives on the property in a newly constructed home. A beehive dwells under the boughs of an old beech tree that takes up a full third of the farm. The perimeter fence and deck are made of tamarack that was hewn and milled in Rhode Island. A water feature wends through the garden, from downspouts to a little pond. This rock river solves two problems: drainage from the new house’s roof and what to do with the piles of newly excavated foundation stones and pebbles—the remains of two buildings that were buried decades ago on this double lot. Decades ago, a community garden grew up on the then vacant lot. The present owner, an urban agriculture advocate, purchased the lot when it fell into neglect. Still a work in progress, Sycamore Farm is once again happily flourishing and providing joy to all who garden within or who walk and drive by it.
The third Providence garden is a College Hill Urban Oasis. Designed by Andrew Grossman, this urban garden in the heart of College Hill near Brown University is a miniature paradise. Located at the intersection of two quiet streets in the Stimson Avenue historic district, it is enclosed by a tall board fence with lattice insets. The garden features a boisterous arrangement of hydrangea bushes and hydrangea trees accented by a contemporary fountain amid pots of tall grasses and flowers.
Finally, back in Seekonk, Massachusetts, is Andrew Grossman’s own garden. As he says “My 1-acre property, which borders the Martin Wildlife Refuge and the Runnins River, is home to a wide variety of perennials, grasses, shrubs, and flowering trees. In the spring of 2021 we completed work on a swimming pool garden, which is planted with a low maintenance assortment of predominantly summer-blooming favorites. The remainder of the property includes a blue-and-white garden with a rectangular lily pond, a hot-colored garden with a checkerboard thyme patio, a cottage garden planted with roses and other old-fashioned cultivars, and a rustic pond surrounded by bog plantings. There is also a cutting garden currently planted with David Austin roses, dinner plate dahlias, and sun flowers. The house and property has been featured in numerous national publications, including Design New England, Old House Journal, Garden Gate, Flower, Country Living Gardener, Country Home, and Fine Gardening. In 2016 the gardens were awarded first place in HGTV’s Gorgeous Gardens competition.”
Each garden entry is $5 for Conservancy members, $10 for nonmembers. Register in advance at www.gardenconservancy.org
Join The Garden Conservancy on September 21 for a delightful experience exploring the grounds of the Blithewood Estate on Bard College campus. This guided outdoor tour will provide an immersive experience of the landscape of Blithewood Garden. Learn about historic and current plantings, garden architecture and its current rehabilitation project, and what’s in bloom. Enjoy the natural splendor of the grand landscape overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains from a restored historic viewpoint. The Friends of Blithewood Garden will provide the tour. Blithewood Garden is located in Annondale-on-Hudson, New York. $30 for Garden Conservancy members, $40 for nonmembers. Register at www.gardenconservancy.org
All proceeds from this event will support the rehabilitation of Blithewood Garden.
In 2023, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation commissioned the integrated design practice at Sasaki to complete a new master plan of Taliesin West, the former home and studio of architect Frank Lloyd Wright in Scottsdale, AZ. In this conversation between Sasaki landscape architects and senior staff from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the history of the site will be discussed along with the impetus and aims of the project and broader lessons for everyone who cares about landscapes.
Taliesin West embodies Wright’s principles of organic architecture blending harmoniously with the surrounding landscape. The Sonoran Desert surrounding Taliesin West is an integral component of its design and plays a crucial role in the site’s development and sustainability; it is also one of the most biologically diverse deserts in the world, home to many distinct species of flora and fauna adapted to survive in its harsh and arid conditions. The buildings and landscapes face new challenges from climate change, invasive species, and development. The new master plan by Sasaki will respect the site’s heritage while considering contemporary developments in ecology and sustainability, allowing the site to remain a resilient and alluring destination for visitors seeking horticulture and culture alike.
Speakers include Susannah C. Drake,FASLA FAIA, a Principal at Sasaki and founder of DLANDstudio. She lectures globally about resilient urban design and has taught at leading design schools including Harvard, Cooper Union, and Illinois Institute of Technology. She received the 2020 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Climate Action and her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Stuart Graff began studying Frank Lloyd Wright’s work more than fifty years ago, sustaining a lifelong passion for the work of America’s greatest architect. Since 2016, as the President and CEO of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, he has stewarded one of the world’s great cultural legacies to ensure its relevance for our time and for the future: teaching us how to build and live better, as one with the world around us. Jennifer Gray,PhD is the Director of the Taliesin Institute at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. She is an architectural historian and curator with a focus on modern architecture, landscape, and social politics. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. Andrew Sellis a Senior Associate Ecologist and Landscape Architect at Sasaki specializing in landscape restoration and ecological design for a changing climate. Before joining Sasaki in 2017, Andy practiced environmental education and ecological restoration at Glacier National Park, Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum.
The Garden Conservancy will sponsor a webinar on September 12 at 2 pm Eastern $5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar.
In May, the Met Gala marked the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. In this 2 pm August 22 Garden Conservancy webinar, Dominic Leong, the founding partner of Leong Leong, the architectural firm behind the exhibition design, will present the exhibition design concept and process. The exhibition reawakens the Costume Institute’s archive through the senses and is united through the theme of nature. With a series of multi-sensory activations, the exhibition draws on the concepts of a garden and a scientific laboratory as two contrasting environments that shape our relationship to nature.
Leong Leong’s projects are situated at the intersection of art and living to build regenerative worlds. For this program, Dominic will also discuss notable projects including the Anita May Rosenstein LGBTQ Campus, Hancock Park House, and Hawai’i Nonlinear. These projects will demonstrate the firm’s approach to an expanded concept of the garden and their commitment to designing for regenerative ecosystems.
$5 for members of the Garden Conservancy $15 for General Admission
