Boston Flora

Tag: Judith B. Tankard

  • #Garden Preservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy

    For more than 30 years, the Garden Conservancy has been championing gardens and broadening the preservation narrative. This strategic, multidisciplinary approach to preserving gardens weaves together the practical and the intangible. The Conservancy facilitates on-the-ground restoration of historic gardens and also documents gardens, capturing their history and spirit through film, photography, interviews, and archives filled with plans and maps. It holds conservation easements that permanently protect “conservation values”—the most significant features of gardens, such as their plant collections, design, hardscape, and/or vistas. It advocates for gardens at risk, taking a public stand to raise awareness and encourage action. And, as preservation is not possible without education, it engages the community and provides professional development to garden leaders, board members, and staff, and provide mentorship and resources as well.

    #GardenPreservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy, published in June 2021, is an oversize, 64-page volume containing essays by experts in the field as well as short summaries of more than 100 preservation projects of the Garden Conservancy since 1989. Illustrated by Dana Scott Westring. Click here to view an animated PDF of the whole book. 

    Seven essays from leading voices in preservation, landscape architecture, garden history, conservation, and documentation—and one interview—present a range of perspectives on garden preservation:

    A User’s Guide to Preservation: One Contemporary Designer’s Perspective on History, by Thomas Woltz

    Preserving Traces and Remnants of a Gardening Past, by Brent Leggs and Lawana Holland-Moore

    I am here. by Shaun Spencer-Hester

    Interview with the Stewards of Rocky Hills, Barbara and Rick Romeo

    The Importance of Preserving Gardens, by Walter Hood

    An Accidental Preservationist, by Judith B. Tankard

    Preserving Gardens that Spring from the Soul, by Lucinda Brockway

    Landscape and Memory at Sylvester Manor, by Donnamarie Barnes

    The essays are followed by short profiles of more than 100 of the Garden Conservancy’s preservation projects and partners since 1989.

    Both the essays and profiles reveal the garden as a cultural bridge, a site for scientific study and ecological conservation, a path to equity and social justice, a catalyst for design innovation, and a stimulus for spiritual expansion.

    Order a copy of #GardenPreservation here.

  • Thursday, November 12, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm – Gardens of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Online

    Thursday, November 12, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm – Gardens of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Online

    Join the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, New England, on November 12 at 11 am for a Zoom webinar with Judith B. Tankard on Gardens of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Free with registration HERE.

    English gardens from the Arts & Crafts era are jewels of early 20th Century design. Part of the same design movement that flourished in Europe and North America between 1880 and 1920, these gardens emphasized medieval and romantic styles. Designed on an intimate scale, they blurred the distinction between indoors and outdoors, and emphasized the symbiotic nature of the house and garden as a unified landscape. Many contained a series of distinct outdoor ‘rooms’ often delineated by hedges and embellished with whimsical topiary. Most had lavish plantings of perennials, ornamental shrubs, bulbs, and annuals—all massed for color, textural effect, and seasonal impact. Small structures, such as pergolas, arbors, sundials, and other traditional ornaments produced storybook-like gardens that referenced Old English manor house surroundings of the 17th Century.


    In this illustrated lecture, Judith Tankard will give insight into the minds of the movement’s creative giants such as William Morris and Gertrude Jekyll, as well as lesser known designers such as Avray Tipping, Thomas Mawson, and Robert Lorimer. She will illustrate gorgeous National Trust gardens such as Hidcote, Standen, Snowshill Manor, Red House, and Kellie Castle, among others, and give visual tours of other stunning gardens, such as Hestercombe, Great Dixter, Gravetye Manor, and Munstead Wood. Tankard will show how these English models created a lasting impact on gardens across the pond, as American designers took inspiration from their British contemporaries.


    Judith B Tankard is a landscape historian, award-winning author, and preservation consultant. She is the author of 10 illustrated books, including Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, winner of the 2019 J. B. Jackson Book Award. Her book, Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, was named an Honor Book for the 2010 Historic New England Book Prize. She taught at the Landscape Institute of Harvard University for twenty years. Judith is a Garden Conservancy Fellow, a Heritage Circle member of The Royal Oak Foundation, and a Stewardship Council member of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. She lives in Boston, is a member of The Garden Club of the Back Bay, and gardens on Martha’s Vineyard. www.judithtankard.com

    For information on other upcoming ICAA New England Chapter tours and lectures, please visit: www.classicist-ne.org/calendar