The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s February meeting will take place at The Chilton Club, 152 Commonwealth Avenue, at 10 am. The Club welcomes James Brayton Hall, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Garden Conservancy.
Gardening has been an important part of American history since even before the country’s founding. In this illustrated talk, Garden Conservancy President and CEO James Brayton Hall will look at both 18th and 19th century high points in American Garden design and theory, and discuss why he believes that in the post-pandemic age we are entering a third golden age of gardening in the United States.
James joined the Garden Conservancy as president and CEO on June 1, 2017. For the previous four years, he was deputy director of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he worked on the planning and design of the Norman Foster-designed museum expansion and sculpture gardens. From 2010 to 2013, he was executive director of the Providence Preservation Society in Rhode Island, overseeing all programming, fundraising, and relations with the board, donors, and community. From 2006 to 2010, James served as assistant director of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, after holding various other management and curatorial positions at the school since 1985. James earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and a master’s in landscape architecture from Rhode Island School of Design. In addition, he was awarded a Royal Oak Scholarship to attend the Attingham Trust Summer School in Architectural and Landscape History in London, and, separately, participated in the Victorian Society’s summer program in architectural history, also in London. In 2016, he completed Attingham’s Royal Collections Course. He has spoken widely on architectural and landscape design and has been a member of the graduate program faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Troy Scott Smith will guide you through the Garden Conservancy online course of a gardening year at Sissinghurst. Troy will share with you how the garden looks, which flowers are blooming at each season, and what the garden looked like when it was first created in the 1930s. He will uncover the secrets of pruning and propagation and the art of the English Garden. Each episode will be packed with information, all simply explained and illustrated, giving you techniques and confidence to put into practice in your own garden. The Winter episode will take place Thursday, December 7 at 2 pm Eastern. The bare blanket of earth that for many is the “winter garden,” need not be. If harnessed, the potency of the season can be as exhilarating as the heady explosion of summer. Pockets of evergreen planting, almost unnoticed in summer, are now an essential ingredient, exuding a presence and injecting solidity into the sparseness of the scene. Coatings of hoarfrost re-order the prominence of their outlines. Spring plants eager to steal a march on their competitor’s race to flower. There is nothing that disappoints about the winter garden, and in this final episode, Troy will share with you some of the possibilities to make winter in the garden a season to look forward to and enjoy.
Sissinghurst was created nearly a century ago by the writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson as a private home and as refuge dedicated to natural beauty. Today it is owned by the National Trust and visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Troy’s career has been devoted to the beauty and romance of gardening. Since joining the National Trust of England, Wales & Northern Ireland in 1990, Troy has led some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, among them the Courts (Wiltshire), Bodnant (Wales), and two stints at Sissinghurst (Kent), where he has led a remarkable transformation and restoration of the Vita Sackville-West gardens.
$5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
Based on Lindsey Taylor’s popular Wall Street Journal column “Flower School,” on its surface Art in Flower: Finding Inspiration in Art and Naturedemonstrates how Taylor creates stunning but achievable floral arrangements inspired by works of art. Riffing on works by a diversity of artists across mediums, periods, and styles, including Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julie Mehretu, Sheila Hicks, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, Salman Toor, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Kerry James Marshall, among others, Taylor inspires readers to interpret the palettes, compositions, brushstrokes, and mood of the art in flowers, and shares florists’ trade secrets for building beautiful arrangements. Through this meditative practice of looking intently at art and nature, readers learn, in the words of David Hockney, “to really look,” and to really see the world.
Lindsey will speak online November 30 at 2 pm Eastern in a live program sponsored by The Garden Conservancy. $5 for Conservancy members, $10 for general public. 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 www.gardenconservancy.org
The English Gardener’s Gardenspans seven centuries to spotlight more than 60 of England’s finest gardens. Adapted from Phaidon’s bestselling The Gardener’s Garden and organized geographically by country, the selection ranges from formal Renaissance gardens, herbaceous Arts and Crafts gardens of the 20th century, to artistic creations and healing gardens by contemporary designers. Each entry is illustrated with sumptuous photographs and features a concise text detailing the garden’s historical and stylistic importance and that of its designer, patron, or maker. A beautiful and easy-to-use introduction for garden designers and enthusiasts alike.
The Garden Conservancy will sponsor a webinar on November 16 at 2 pm Eastern live on Zoom. $5 for Conservancy members, $10 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.
Tom Stuart-Smith is a landscape architect and garden designer whose work combines naturalism with modernity and built forms with romantic planting. He read Zoology at the University of Cambridge before completing a postgraduate degree in Landscape Design. His projects include gardens at Chatsworth, a new public garden at the Hepworth Wakefield, and the masterplan for RHS Garden Bridgewater, one of the largest new garden projects in Europe. International projects include Le Jardin Secret in the heart of the medina in Marrakech, a garden located on the waterways near Kottayam in Kerala and show gardens for the international horticulture exhibition at IGA Berlin 2017, and the international garden expo Beijing 2019. Tom is a Vice President of the Royal Horticultural Society, a Trustee of the Garden Museum, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a Fellow of the Landscape Institute, and a Fellow of the Society of Garden Designers. Portrait by James Runcie.
Tania Compton spent twelve years (1993–2005) as Gardens Editor for British House & Garden before resuming work as a garden designer. In 2007, her book Dream Gardens, a collaboration with photographer Andrew Lawson, was published by Merrell. The Private Gardens of England(Constable, 2015) is in its 4th edition. Tania is Contributing Gardens Editor for The World of Interiors, and she gardens six acres of wild meadow in Wiltshire. Portrait by Sabine Rüber.
Dr. Toby Musgrave is an authority on gardens and plant history, a subject in which he has been widely published. He has presented on ITV and Channel 4 and is faculty lecturer at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad. He has authored Phaidon’s The Garden: Elements & Styles and Green Escapesand has contributed to several additional Phaidon Press titles, including The Garden Book andThe Gardener’s Garden.
Renowned as “the first family of American horticulture,” the du Ponts created magnificent landscapes and gardens that complement the verdant, rolling lands of the Brandywine Valley. Five of their estates—Hagley Museum and Library, Nemours Estate, Mt. Cuba Center, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and Longwood Gardens—are open to the public, each a showplace of formal plantings juxtaposed with carefully nurtured natural woodland. Collected in one beautiful new book, Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valleyoffers an in-depth tour of the exuberant fountains and horticultural displays at Longwood, the naturalized woodland at Winterthur, the Beaux-Arts elegance of Nemours, the tantalizing fragments of the Crowninshield Garden at Hagley, and the native plant gardens and research center at Mt. Cuba. Throughout the book, Larry Lederman’s vivid photographs exquisitely capture the beauty and spirit of each place, moving through the seasons and the day from dawn to dusk. An impressive celebration of the du Pont contributions to American horticulture and landscape design, Du Pont Gardens of the Brandywine Valley is an important record that will be a must-have for garden lovers, landscape designers, and horticulturists everywhere.
DATE AND TIME Thursday, November 2, 2023 2:00 p.m. Eastern
LOCATION Live on Zoom
REGISTRATION $5 for Members of The Garden Conservancy $10 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 HERE The speakers:
Following a successful career in corporate law, Larry Lederman turned to photography as an avocation. From an initial focus on the forms and foliage of trees, Lederman now captures the beauty of gardens and landscapes through the seasons. He is the author of many books, including Magnificent Trees of the New York Botanical Garden, The Rockefeller Family Gardens: An American Legacy, andGarden Portraits: Experiencing Natural Beauty, all published by Monacelli, and he was the principal photographer for the 125th anniversary edition of The New York Botanical Garden(Abrams).
Jeff Downing is Executive Director of Mt. Cuba Center, a botanic garden in Hockessin, Delaware, that inspires an appreciation of the beauty and value of native plants, and a commitment to conserve the habitats that sustain them. Previously, he worked at The New York Botanical Garden leading education programs; he is also a member of the Delaware Native Species Commission and chaired a land preservation task force in 2019–20 for New Castle County, Delaware. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a master’s in Religion at Yale Divinity School.
Garden takes readers on a journey across continents and cultures to discover the endless ways artists and image-makers have found inspiration in gardens and horticulture throughout history. With more than 300 entries, this comprehensive and stunning visual survey showcases the diversity of the garden from all over the world—from the Garden of Eden and the grandeur of the English landscape garden to Japanese Zen gardens and the humble vegetable plot. Spanning a wide range of styles and media—from art, illustrations, and sculptures to photography, film stills, and textiles—Garden follows a visually arresting sequence, with works, regardless of period, thoughtfully paired to allow interesting and revealing juxtapositions between them.
The Garden Conservancy will present an online talk on October 19 at 2 pm Eastern with Matthew Biggs, Abra Lee, and Kristine Paulus. 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.
Matthew Biggs, a graduate of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is a well-known British gardener, broadcaster, and author of fifteen gardening and plant-related books. He is a panel member on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time and author of the children’s book A Home for Every Plant,also published by Phaidon.
Abra Lee is a storyteller and author of the forthcoming bookConquer the Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers. She has spent a “whole lotta time in the dirt” as a municipal arborist and airport landscape manager. Her work has been featured in publications that include the New York Times, Fine Gardening, and Veranda magazine. Lee is a graduate of Auburn University College of Agriculture and an alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows, a global network of public horticulture professionals. In January 2023 she joined Oakland Cemetery, a revered garden cemetery and vibrant park located downtown Atlanta, as Director of Horticulture.
Kristine Paulus is a writer, photographer, gardener, and librarian based in the Bronx. When she isn’t writing, photographing, growing, or reading about plants and gardens, she can frequently be found at The New York Botanical Garden, where she is the collection development librarian. Biking, birding, and botanizing are some of her favorite pastimes—she sometimes engages in all of them at the same time.
Troy Scott Smith will guide you through the Garden Conservancy online course of a gardening year at Sissinghurst. Troy will share with you how the garden looks, which flowers are blooming at each season, and what the garden looked like when it was first created in the 1930s. He will uncover the secrets of pruning and propagation and the art of the English Garden. Each episode will be packed with information, all simply explained and illustrated, giving you techniques and confidence to put into practice in your own garden. The Fall episode will take place Thursday, September 21 at 2 pm Eastern. Fall is a time for doing, for action, and productivity. The beauty of your garden next year relies on the things you do now. In this episode, Troy will be looking at lifting and dividing and how to make those edits for inspiring and flower-filled borders. Turf care, hedge cutting, propagation, and pruning are also essential tasks of autumn, and we will look at these too. Troy shall also not forget to enjoy and share with you, the beauty of the season.
Sissinghurst was created nearly a century ago by the writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson as a private home and as refuge dedicated to natural beauty. Today it is owned by the National Trust and visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. Troy’s career has been devoted to the beauty and romance of gardening. Since joining the National Trust of England, Wales & Northern Ireland in 1990, Troy has led some of the world’s most beautiful gardens, among them the Courts (Wiltshire), Bodnant (Wales), and two stints at Sissinghurst (Kent), where he has led a remarkable transformation and restoration of the Vita Sackville-West gardens.
$5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
The Garden Futures Summitis a two-day, in-person event that looks to sustain the remarkable passion and interest in gardening today by presenting a selection of the most exciting ideas shaping the future of gardens and society at large. The Summit, on September 29th and 30th, will focus on three essential topics within contemporary gardening: environment, community, and culture.
On the first day of the Summit, to be held at The New York Botanical Garden, more than a dozen influential speakers from across the gardening world will participate in sessions organized around the Summit topics. They will discuss the extraordinary potential of gardens and gardening to improve our physical, cultural, and emotional health and well-being.
On the second day of the Summit, attendees will be treated to exclusive experiences at both private and public gardens throughout New York City and the greater metropolitan area that embody the forward-thinking and transformative potential in gardens today. Tours will be announced later this summer.
The breadth of speakers at the Summit and the combination of talks and tours will be of interest to all gardeners, designers, architects, and students who are passionate about gardens and their enormous potential in society. The Keynote Address will be given by Lady Isabella Tree (pictured below) on The Book of Wilding – A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small. Isabella Tree is an award-winning journalist and author of five books. Her first best-selling book, Wilding, tells the story of the daring wildlife experiment she began in 2000: rewilding her and her husband Charlie Burrell’s 3,500 acres of unprofitable farmland at Knepp Estate in West Sussex, UK. In less than twenty years their degraded land has become a functioning ecosystem again, wildlife has rocketed, and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. What has happened at Knepp challenges conventional ideas about nature, wildlife, and how we manage and envisage our land. It reveals the potential for the landscapes of the future. Isabella also writes for The Guardian, National GeographicMagazine, and Granta.
Other speakers include Edwina von Gal, founder of The Perfect Earth Project. Edwina von Galis a leading voice in sustainable gardening and landscape design. She founded the Perfect Earth Project in 2013 to promote nature-based, toxic-free land care for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. As principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, Edwina creates landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. Joining her as session speakers will be Horatio Joyce of The Garden Conservancy, Vanessa Keith of StudioTEKA Design, Jeff Lorenz of Refugia Design, and Rebecca McMackin, horticulturist and garden designer.
You will also have the opportunity to hear Jennifer Jewell, Radio Host and Author of Cultivating Place. This year, Jewell was awarded the American Horticultural Society’s Great Gardener Morrison Award for outstanding horticultural communication. Her third book, What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seedswill be published in September. On the topic of Community, session speakers will include Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, and Sam Stewart-Halevy of New Affiliates, Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architects, Peter Lefkovits of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Nicole Thomas of Urban Health Lab.
In another thread, horticulture and culture are on a collision course—and that’s a good thing. Forgotten garden histories, the challenges of preserving mid-century landscapes, and the growing engagement of the visual arts with the natural environment are the animating topics in a session to be led by Melissa Chiu. She is director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern and contemporary art. Dr. Chiu’s current organizational focus is transforming the Hirshhorn into a 21st-century institution through the revitalization of the museum’s campus, including a new design for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden by artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. Joining Melissa will be Cindy Brockway of The Trustees of Reservations, David Godshall of Terremoto of LA, Abra Lee, horticulturist and historian, and Brent Leggs of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
The Wit Mckay Garden has one foot in the wild. Surrounded by forest which is preserved in conservation and framed by an undeveloped meadow to the east and a clear rock brook to the south, it sits on the shoulder of the Taconic ridge to the west, with distant views of the Green Mountains. The garden was built by the owner with no particular plan at the start, other than to hold back the jungle and to find interesting plants to thrive in particular spots. Masses of native ferns and a mature line of tall white pines mark the edge of the forest. Plantings around the house are anchored by peonies: herbaceous, Itoh intersectional, and tree peonies. Inset between two sections of the house is a large lily garden alongside perennial borders. The north side of the house is reliably moist as well as high shade, supporting a lovely early season garden, a mix of unusual native plants and exotic selections which must be cold hardy and shade tolerant. A semi maintained “pasture” garden flows downhill from the eastern porch and supports naturalizing garden varieties and wildflowers. Expanses of daffodils, Siberian iris, asters, and black-eyed Susans grow amid native grasses, wildflowers, and barely contained native interlopers. Paths are mown to lead down and around to a shaded hammock, picnic table, the bee yard, and very high (60 foot tall) swing. A screen of apple trees, masquerading as an orchard, delineate the edge of the garden from the wild meadow and are kept company by a grouping of blueberry bushes. At the bottom, by the road, is a cutting bed devoted to dahlias. In what passes for full sun is a pollinator garden, a part shade plot, and a charming hosta garden shaded by an old lilac and enormous sugar maple.
The Barn gardens were designed by Gerard St. Hilaire, and the pond area gardens were designed by Ann McCallum. This is a hilly property gradually lowering to a pond with stone staircases on two sides. One staircase takes you past the waterfall and the other leads to a play area. The stone walls all around the property contain a profusion of annuals and an entertainment area with tall grasses as well as many regional flowering plants. Beyond that area is a beautiful view of Mt. Graylock which was our intentional focus. The grape arbor path leads to more beautiful and varied native grasses. The fields to either side of the pond are left in their natural states with paths cut through them for strolling or driving a farm type vehicle. The tree line at the bottom of the property leads to a stream.
Ilona’s Garden, surrounding an old carriage barn, is divided into rooms to resemble the English gardens loved by the owner/gardener/garden writer/English professor. The tour begins with a sunken, walled garden that leads to a formal pool with an island waterfall, water lilies, and goldfish. A rustic pergola connects the water garden to a trellised, ornamental kitchen garden. A white garden, surrounding clumps of native birch, pays homage to Sissinghurst. A folly, with broken stones and a dripping column, evokes ancient ruins, while an aged cedar window on an old marble base frames the folly, the long hot border, and the landscape beyond. Lushly planted pots, secluded seats, and carefully positioned ornamental trees and shrubs provide focal points that draw the eye from one garden room to the next. The large number of climbing structures covered with flowering vines and the wide variety of perennials and annuals, arranged in surprising combinations of color and texture, will make this densely planted garden equally interesting to plant lovers and aesthetes. Pictures and additional information can be found online by searching Ilona’s Garden at Smithsonian Archives.
Lastly, 328North is a half-acre farm specializing in Asiatic vegetables, fruit, and specialty cut flowers. By implementing natural plus regenerative practices, Tu and Matt demonstrate how intensive hand-scale farming on half an acre can be rewarding and productive. Farmer/designer/chef Tu Le uses the farm as his lab for his events. Farmer/artist Matt Bertles uses the farm to build sculptures and infrastructure to support his partner.
The Garden Conservancy will sponsor an open day tour of Braveboat Harbor Farm, 110 Raynes Neck Road in York, Maine, and a Cape Neddick Garden on Saturday, July 22 and Sunday, July 23, from 10 – 4.
This Braveboat Harbor Farm garden has been evolving over the last seventy-five years. It surrounds and complements a Georgian-style stone house. There are formal and informal borders, a vegetable garden, orchards, and collections of various flowering trees and shrubs. Apples and pears are espaliered on the house and along the walls of the formal front garden. Water features include a newly expanded pond in the woodland garden, a farm pond with rustic bridge, and the Atlantic Ocean. This treasure is protected by a sculpted arborvitae hedge on the northwest, a mature stand of hickory on the northeast, and an extensive screen of old lilacs on the south. New projects include expanding the collection of magnolias and rhododendrons, introducing hydrangeas, an espaliered pear fence, a woodland walk, and a summerhouse with views to the pond and the sea.
Directions: Located off Route 103 South and Braveboat Harbor Road to end of Raynes Neck Road. Please park in field below house.
In the Cape Neddick Garden, stroll down a curving, sylvan drive with wooded hills on the right and ferns or lower plants as an offset to the woods and a vernal pond area on the left. Take one of the foot trails to find a path along a marsh and the pond. Return to the drive and find rolling lawns and gardens. Then pass between the house and a lily pond on the way to a rocky Maine coast. Walk along the rocks or stay on the lawn in front of the house to pass through a gate onto a grassy walkway bordered by a stone wall, flowers, and shrubs. Ahead and on your right, you will discover a rock-rimmed swimming pool nestled in a grotto below a rocky promontory. Walk around the pool to climb some stairs, or meander up a grassy promenade toward the house, to find the drive once again. Leave the property the way you entered. (NOTE: this property is only open Saturday, July 22)
For tickets ($5 Garden Conservancy members, $10 nonmembers) and more information, visit www.gardenconservancy.org. Prior registration is required – tickets will not be sold at the properties.
