Boston Flora

Tag: John Adams

  • Tuesday, May 6, 10:30 am – 12:00 noon – Peacefield – The New England Farm of John and Abigail Adams

    The Acton Garden Club will host landscape historian Ellen Pazzano on Tuesday, May 6, beginning at 10:30 am in Room 204, Acton Town Hall, 472 Main Street in Acton, for a slide presentation which explores and uncovers John and Abigail’s little known farm Peacefield.  For 30 years the Adams family called an ever expanding piece of land in Southeastern Massachusetts home.  The Garden Club of the Back Bay invited Ms. Pazzano to one of our meetings a year ago, to great acclaim, and we recommend this lecture highly.  For more information visit www.actongardenclub.org.

    http://images.travelpod.com/users/nanseaj/4.1256562104.john-quincy-adams-library-at-peacefield.jpg

  • Wednesday, November 7, 10:00 am – Peace field: The New England Farm of John and Abigail Adams

    For thirty years John and Abigail Adams called an ever-expanding piece of land in Southeastern Massachusetts home. Purchased in the autumn of 1787, the couple renovated and added to their newly named farm, Peace field, bit by bit, piece by piece until at its largest their farm encompassed over 600-acres of land throughout present day Quincy and Braintree. Removed from the Massachusetts landscape in the 1870s, John and Abigail’s working farm was replaced by urban city development and the late 19th century gentleman’s country estate of their grandson Charles Francis Adams. This Garden Club of the Back Bay presentation seeks to explore and uncover John and Abigail’s little known farm Peace field.

    Laurie Ellen Pazzano is a trained landscape historian specializing in Archival Research, Cultural Landscape and Landscape Assessment Reports, National Register filings and garden history lectures for individuals, non-profit institutions and state and federal agencies throughout the United States. A lifelong Massachusetts resident and avid gardener, Laurie completed an M.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a Landscape Design History Certificate from the Landscape Institute of Harvard University (now the Boston Architectural College) in 2011. Her Landscape Institute Independent Project Thesis, Peace field, 1788-1818: The New England Farm of John and Abigail Adams, received the 2011 Award for Professional Excellence from the New England Landscape Design and History Association alongside a special commendation from Landscape Institute faculty and staff. In 2010 she co-authored with the National Park Service’s Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, a Cultural Landscape Report for Peacefield, Adams National Historical Park in Quincy, MA.

    Garden Club of the Back Bay members will receive written notification of the November 7 meeting, which will take place at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue.  The public is invited, and a $5 donation is requested.  You may rsvp at info@bostonflora.com.

  • Thursday, May 26, 5:30 pm – Founding Gardeners: How the Revolutionary Generation Created an American Eden

    Andrea Wulf’s new book Founding Gardeners. How the Revolutionary Created an American Eden will be published in  late March 2011 by Knopf.  Ms. Wulf will travel to Boston and speak on Thursday, May 26, in a program co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  The talk will take place at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street in Boston, with a reception at 5:30 pm and the lecture at 6:00 pm. The program is free but registration is required :  log on to www.arboretum.harvard.edu for more information.

    The Founding Gardeners offers a fascinating look at the revolutionary generation from the unique and intimate perspective of their lives as gardeners, plantsmen and farmers.

    For the founding fathers, gardening, agriculture and botany were elemental passions, as deeply ingrained in their characters as their belief in liberty for the nation they were creating. Andrea Wulf reveals for the first time this aspect of the revolutionary generation. She describes how, even as British ships gathered off Staten Island, George Washington wrote his estate manager about the garden at Mount Vernon; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; how a trip to the great botanist John Bartram’s garden helped the delegates of the Constitutional Congress to break their deadlock; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. Taken together, these and other stories are a revelation of a guiding, but previously overlooked ideology of the American Revolution.

    The Founding Gardeners adds depth and nuance to our understanding of the American experiment, and provides us with a portrait of the founding fathers as they’ve never been seen before.

  • Sunday, October 25, 3:00 pm – Cider Hard & Sweet: History, Tradition & Making Your Own

    Meet author Ben Watson at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts on Sunday, October 25 at 3 pm.  He is a Yale alumnus, Slow Food proponent and farm activist living in Francestown, New Hampshire, and will speak about his new book, Cider Hard & Sweet: History, Tradition & Making Your Own.  Ben provides instruction, recipes and background on cider and cider-making in his work.  Localvores will delight in the idea of preserving apple essence for year-round consumption and historians will enjoy the thought of John Adams drinking hard cider for breakfast. Free with museum admission.  For directions and more information, log on to www.fruitlands.org.

    http://www.seasonalchef.com/watsonbook.jpg