Boston Flora

Tag: Innisfree

  • Thursdays, February 5, 12, 19, March 5 & 12, plus Wednesday, February 25, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Essential Skills for Sustainable Landscape Care, Online

    This Innisfree Garden intensive six-part virtual series is designed for gardeners and landscape stewards who want to go beyond surface-level advice and build durable skills for creating healthier, more resilient landscapes.

    Led by horticulturist Brad Roeller, each session combines structured teaching with generous time for Q&A—so participants can bring real site challenges, plant problems, and design questions into the conversation.

    Pick and choose the sessions you’d like to attend—or sign up for the complete series at a discounted price.

    Thursday, February 5 — Site Analysis & Plant Selection

    Thursday, February 12 — Planting and Maintaining Trees and Shrubs

    Thursday, February 19 — Creating and Maintaining a Perennial Garden
    Wednesday, February 25 — Pruning: Why, When, and How

    Thursday, March 5 — Integrated Pest Management and Plant Health Care

    Thursday, March 12 — Environmental Stewardship in Landscaping Choices

    $40 per session for Innisfree members, $45 for nonmembers; $200 for entire series for members, $250 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.innisfreegarden.org/essential-skills-for-sustainable-landscapes

  • Tuesday, February 4, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Eastern – Celebrate the Winter Garden with Warren Leach, Online

    The winter landscape may be quiet, but the garden doesn’t have to be bleak! With thoughtful planning you can celebrate winter’s unique beauty and enjoy brightly colored berries, twigs, stems, foliage, and even winter-blooming flowers that shrug off the snow and cold.

    Join Innisfree Gardens on February 4 at 1 pm Eastern online with award-winning landscape designer, horticulturist, nurseryman, and plant collector Warren Leach. Showcasing stunning gardens he has created, Warren will share inspired design ideas and plant choices that will help you create a more engaging and beautiful winter garden. Warren Leach’s new book, Plants for the Winter Garden, has already garnered tremendous praise, including during a recent interview with Margaret Roach. We are delighted to host him for this exclusive virtual lecture, the only online talk he will be giving in his busy 2025 speaking calendar. 

    Warren Leach has been sharing his expertise and passion for more than thirty-five years, designing private gardens and displays at major garden shows throughout New England as well as teaching and publishing widely. He has received the Massachusetts Horticultural Society Gold Medal, the Elizabeth and Roger Swain Award, multiple awards from the National Landscape Association, and many others. Warren and his wife own Tranquil Lake Nursery in Rehoboth, MA.

    There will be a Q&A session at the end of the lecture. A link to the recorded talk will be emailed to ticket-holders. $25 for Innisfree members, $35 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.innisfreegarden.org/2025calendar/wintergarden

  • Saturday, May 20 & Sunday, May 21 – Trade Secrets

    Project SAGE presents Trade Secrets, a beautiful gathering for a great cause. Garden tours and community events will take place Saturday, May 20, and on Sunday, May 21, there will be the famous Trade Secrets Rare Plants and Garden Antiques Sale at Lime Rock Park, 60 White Hollow Road in Lakeville, Connecticut.

    • Project SAGE (formerly Women’s Support Services), a non profit domestic violence agency serving Northwest Connecticut and the surrounding communities in New York and Massachusetts, delivered 194 educational programs to schools throughout the region and has 255 sessions scheduled for this school year
    • Project SAGE responded to more hotline calls and crisis requests than ever before – nearly 1,500 calls were answered last year.
    • Project SAGE has significantly expanded options to shelter families in crisis and assist with interim and long-term housing – including the shelter of beloved family pets.

    Garden tours include Michael Trapp’s West Cornwall Garden and Hollister House Garden. Bunny Williams and John Rosselli’s tour is currently sold out but to be added to a waitlist, please email tsassistant@project-sage.org In Millbrook, the gardens of Christopher Spitzmiller & Anthony Bellomo are featured, as well as Innisfree Garden. Complete details of these gardens, and a purchase link, may be found at https://www.tradesecretsct.com/garden-tours-community-events-1 Tickets to each garden range from $10 to $20.

  • Wednesday, April 20, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Romanticism at Innisfree, Online

    Those who know his work think of landscape architect Lester Collins as a modernist, even a minimalist. Those who know Innisfree think of its connections to the gardens of ancient China and Japan. Innisfree and Collins’ larger body of work nevertheless draw deeply on the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, celebrating nature and the deep, emotional connection between humans and the natural world. Using Innisfree as the nexus, landscape curator Kate Kerin will introduce these ideas as a continuum rooted in 18th century Europe, flowering in the 19th century Hudson Valley with the likes of Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, and artists of the Hudson River School, and very much alive today with growing interest in nature conservation, nature’s role in human health, and nature-based gardening strategies.

    Kate Kerin has spent her career studying, preserving, teaching about, and designing landscapes. She has a particular interest in garden history. Kate has been working with Innisfree since 2012.

    The Zoom lecture will take place April 20 at 1 pm Eastern, and is free to Innisfree members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE

  • Wednesday, March 23, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Painting the Romantic Landscape: Claude Lorrain to the Hudson River School, Online

    Innisfree Garden’s 2022 winter lecture series on Romanticism in the Garden continues March 23 at 1 pm Eastern with a talk by John McGiff.

    Join painter and art historian John McGiff to explore the evolution of Romantic ideas in art. In 17th century Europe, when formal baroque gardens like André Le Nôtre’s Vaux-le-Vicomte were being built that express the rational order and mathematical clarity of the Age of Reason, the fine arts began to look at nature differently. This led to the ideological revolution that is Romanticism. From Claude Lorrain’s carefully framed and idealized pastoral views, to J.M.W. Turner and Frederic Edwin Church’s emotionally charged landscape visions, and more contemporary site-specific works by James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy, the arts have taught us to see, appreciate, and even feel nature in all new ways.

    Innisfree member John McGiff taught art history and studio art for twenty-five years at St. Andrews School in Delaware. Now a Dutchess County resident, John found Innisfree when he began to paint in the garden several times each week. jcmcgiff.com

    Free for Innisfree members, $15 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

    Morning, Looking East Over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains, Frederic Edwin Church, 1848

  • Sunday, February 27, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm – Botanical Gardens World Tour: Innisfree and Fairchild Tropical Garden, Online

    Smithsonian Associates invites you to indulge in a colorful midwinter escape as horticultural experts lead a series of virtual visits that highlight the beauty of notable botanical gardens in settings as far-flung as Shanghai, the Hudson River Valley, and Australia. In vibrant visuals they explore how each garden has taken a unique approach to design and interpretation as they all celebrate plant collections, conservation, education, and the distinctive environments and landscapes in which they bloom. On February 27, the third and final installment will feature Innisfree and Fairchild Tropical Garden.

    Travel from the scenic Hudson River Valley to subtropical peninsular Florida to visit two diverse gardens. Developed between 1930 and 1960, Innisfree was the private garden of Walter and Marion Beck and drew its inspiration from scroll paintings of the 8th-century Chinese poet and painter Wang Wei. With the help of landscape architect Lester Collins from Harvard University, the garden journey was shaped to lead visitors through individual “cup” garden scenes inspired by the Chinese paintings, which meld seamlessly into one large cup around a glacial lake.

    Fairchild Tropical Garden in Coral Gables (below) melds a sublime subtropical landscape with important plant collections and horticultural excellence, as well as research, conservation, and education. Palms are a particular specialty, with an outstanding collection of over 400 species. An internationally important collection of more than 3,700 cycads is displayed in sweeping beds under spreading oaks. The conservatory features orchids, aroids, and bromeliads. The garden is set against a backdrop of lakes in a park-like setting.

    Presenter C. Colston Burrell is a lecturer, garden designer, and photographer. The author of 12 gardening books, he has twice won the American Horticulture Society Book Award.

    $25 for Smithsonian Associates members, $30 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

  • Thursday, February 10, 6:30 pm – Innisfree: An American Garden, Online

    Morven Museum & Garden’s exciting Grand Homes & Gardens Distinguished Speakers Series returns with another stellar lineup. This year we travel to the Roaring 20’s starting at Innisfree in New York, then south to Swan House in Georgia, down to Ca’ D’Zan on Florida’s west coast; finally arriving in Miami’s Vizcaya. Held live in Morven’s Stockton Education Center, adjacent to the Museum, and simulcast on Zoom, in February and March, this illustrated lecture series brightens winter up and down the coast.

    In person program includes light refreshments tailored to the theme of each week’s featured lecturer. Online virtual program includes recipes for make-at-home fare. SERIES TICKETS INCLUDE LIVE OR VIRTUAL TICKETS TO ALL 4 WEEKS OF PROGRAMMING. You may, however, sign up for individual sessions.

    On February 10 at 6:30, Katherine H. Kerin, Landscape Curator, will discuss Innisfree. While the making of Innisfree spanned about 70 years, its roots are in the 1920s when Walter Beck and his wife, avid gardener and heiress Marion Burt Beck, began work on their Millbrook, New York country residence. Decidedly American, Innisfree merges traditional Chinese and Japanese design with Romantic and Modernist ideals and ecological design principles. While the house is no longer standing, it was adapted from an Arts and Crafts building at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Wisley, and we will have a view into the Beck’s collection of Asian, primarily Chinese art, which filled it.

    Pricing is $15 – $90 for entire series. Register HERE.

  • Wednesday, February 2, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Between Wild and Cultivated: The Marginal Garden and its Care, Online

    The “marginal garden” explores the boundaries between the wild and the cultivated, particularly the interface of where native plant species meet naturalizing garden ones. Such places have ideally achieved a reasonably stable co-existence. Marginal gardens, including Innisfree, can be exciting and surprising, and can challenge our conceptions of both what ‘nature’ and ‘cultivation’ are.

    However, like any natural or semi-natural habitat they are never completely stable. Their creation and management requires the insights, knowledge and skills of both horticulture and ecology, and suggests strongly we need a new profession that brings these two areas, formerly separate, together. We also need to look critically and objectively at our management techniques, particularly for managing invasive species, and ask how these can be used to enhance the biodiverse marginal garden.

    Presenter Noel Kingsbury is a renowned planting-design consultant and writer on gardens and naturalistic planting, with over 20 books to his name. Noting that “few garden writers are as prolific or as influential,” Noel has been called ”the great chronicler of contemporary planting design…this generation’s Gertrude Stein.” His newest book, Wild: The Naturalistic Garden (Phaidon, March 2022) profiles gardens around the world including Innisfree. www.noelkingsbury.com

    This is the first in Innisfree Garden’s 2022 Lecture Series, Romanticism at Innisfree: Nature as Muse. The public programs will explore the wide-ranging cultural and artistic embodiments of Romantic ideals and their impact on Innisfree Garden. Held as a lunchtime virtual series on Wednesdays at 1 pm Eastern time, they are free to all Innisfree members, $15 for the general public, or $75 for the series (one free lecture) Register now.

  • Wednesday, July 14, 1:00 pm – Great American Gardens: Monticello, Biltmore, Naumkeag, and More, Online

    Join garden historian and author Dr. Toby Musgrave online on a ‘Grand Tour’ showcasing America’s great and inspiring gardens, revealing their diversity and richness, and exploring their contribution to global garden art.

    We’ll explore a variety of gardens in a variety of locations and climates around the United States, each of which is open to the public and can be visited and experienced in person. From the eastern seaboard to the west coast; the cold, high Rockies to the tropical southeast; balmy California to hot, dry deserts; the warm, wet Pacific northwest to the Prairies and the cool northeast create the full spectrum of garden design possibilities. Ranging across historical periods and styles, we will visit well known (and lesser well-known) gardens around the country to reveal in broad terms the evolution of American garden design over time. Beginning with early Colonial gardens on the East Coast and Mission gardens in California, we will move on to English Landscape-style gardens and French Baroque influenced antebellum plantation gardens. As we move chronologically ahead, we will also study the opulence of the Beaux-Arts-inspired Country Place Era and how it evolved into the innovative “homegrown” styles such as Prairie Gardens. We will conclude with a look at modern and contemporary American garden design.

    Gardens featured include: Colonial Williamsburg, San Diego Mission, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Middleton Place, Rosedown Plantation, Biltmore, Dumbarton Oaks, Filoli, Innisfree, Longwood, Naumkeag, the Huntington Library, Untermeyer, Wave Hill, Longue Vue, Casa del Herro, J Irwin House and Garden, El Novillero, Lotusland, Sunnylands, Chanticleer, Chase Garden, Getty Centre, Hollister House and Windcliff.

    Led by an expert on gardens and garden history, Dr Toby Musgrave, this Context interactive seminar will showcase and celebrate America’s great and inspiring gardens. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with an increased knowledge and understanding of America’s great garden heritage. $36.50. Register at www.contextlearning.com

    Dumbarton Oaks (Photo by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images)