Boston Flora

Tag: Martha Stewart

  • Sunday, October 7, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm – The Art and Science of Growing Giant Pumpkins

    Sunday, October 7, 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm – The Art and Science of Growing Giant Pumpkins

    On Sunday, October 7, at 2 pm at Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston, giant pumpkin grower Steve Connolly will discuss how he grew the state record holding 2075 lb. pumpkin in 2016. His free talk will focus on how 30+ years of selective breeding of an isolated species of Giant Pumpkins has led to fruits that are bigger and heavier than ever. The genetic bundle inside the seeds know what to do. Provide optimum conditions and monster pumpkins result!

    Steve Connolly grew the first 1000 pound pumpkin in New England in 2000 and currently holds the record for the largest pumpkin grown in Massachusetts at 2075 pounds (2016). In his 24 years of growing giant pumpkins, he has won numerous awards and has been featured on radio, television and in print, including the Today Show, NPR, Martha Stewart, David Letterman, National Geographic, Yankee Magazine, and more. He is an active Board member of the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers Club.

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  • Wednesday, September 16, 10:00 am – 12:00 noon – Hydrangeas

    The Garden Club of the Back Bay opens its 2015-2016 year on Wednesday, September 16, with an emphasis on Collectors and Collections, at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue, at 10:00 am, with speaker Gail Anderson on the topic of Hydrangeas.

    Endless Summer, Snow Queen, Pinky Winky, Incrediball – There has been an explosion of trademarked hydrangea cultivars with cute and quirky names. Gail Anderson will help demystify this immensely popular genus and will include tips for choosing the right hydrangea for your garden. You’ll enjoy an instructional look at the genus brought to popular attention by such disparate personalities as Martha Stewart and renowned plantsman Michael Dirr. Topics covered will include a primer of hydrangea species, cultivars commonly available for sale, flower shape and color, including soil pH, and how to plant and prune.

    Gail Anderson is a former teacher and magazine journalist. She earned a Certificate in Landscape Design and Maintenance from North Shore Community College and was certified as a Massachusetts Master Gardener. Gail worked for six years as a staff horticulturist for The Trustees of Reservations at Long Hill, an estate garden in Beverly, Massachusetts known for its woody plant collection. She has also served as a photography judge and jury member at the Boston Flower & Garden Show and has lectured at the Portland, Maine Flower Show. Gail is a member of the Ipswich Garden Club.

    GCBB members will receive written notification of the meeting.  If you are not a member but wish to attend, please email info@bostonflora.com.  Image of Pinky Winky from naturalmedicinefacts.info.

  • Friday, September 19 – Sunday, September 21 – Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival

    The 9th Annual Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival will take place September 19-21, 2014 at The Elms, Rosecliff & Marble House. Presenting Underwriter Food & Wine Magazine has enabled the Preservation Society of Newport County to welcome special guests Martha Stewart and Sara Moulton. Additional guest chefs and wine experts include Jonathan Cartwright, Dan Enos, Michael Ferraro, and Karsten Hart. Festival highlights: a two-day Grand Tasting with hundreds of wines on the lawn of Marble House, celebrity chef appearances and cooking demonstrations, seminars with leading wine experts, Wine & Rosecliff gala celebration, a collectible wine dinner, Newport After Dark party, a winemaker’s brunch, and auctions. Free parking and shuttle transportation are available. The event is held in one of the most spectacular settings in America, and this remarkable weekend experience is not to be missed. Advance price tickets are now available at https://tix.newportmansions.org/ecommerce/default.aspx. Individual event ticket prices  range from $75 to $450.

  • Friday, April 12 – Sunday, April 14 – The 10th Annual Great Gardens and Landscaping Symposium

    The 10th Annual Great Gardens and Landscaping Symposium will take place April 12 – 14 at the world-class Equinox Resort in Manchester, Vermont.  Day only rates are available, as well as overnight symposium packages.  On Friday, April 12, at 7 pm, Presenter Kerry Ann Mendez, garden designer, author and consultant, will welcome guests and speak on The Art of Shade Gardening: Seeing Your Way Out of the Dark.  On Saturday, from 9 – 4, the Gardener’s Marketplace will be open, and past Garden Club of the Back Bay speaker Rich Pomerantz will speak on Design Strategies for Great Gardens.  Jessica Walliser, horticulturist, author, teacher and radio show host, will speak on The Benefits of Beneficials  and Heather Poire of Bailey Nurseries will give a session on Sensational Flowering Shrubs for the Landscape.  After lunch, Ruth Rogers Clausen, former editor of Country Living Gardener, will speak on Successful Gardening in Deer Country.  Saturday winds up with another talk by Kerry Ann Mendez on The Dazzling New Perennial Line-Up for 2013. 

    Sunday will start with an Ask the Experts Panel at 9 am, followed by Jessica Walliser on Forgotten Garden Combinations and the Fabulous Beekman Boys, owners of the Beekman 1802 organic product line, speaking on The Heirloom Life.  Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell have a passion for organic gardening and ‘the simpler life’. They will talk about how the notion of history and permanence influences every aspect of Beekman 1802 from what they do in the garden to the products they produce. Dr. Brent is an Assistant Clinical Professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and was Vice President of Healthy Living at Martha Stewart Living Omni Media. He writes for The Huffington Post, and is now CEO of Beekman 1802. Josh is the New York Times bestselling author of “The Bucolic Plague”, “I Am Not Myself These Days”, and “Candy Everybody Wants”. Kilmer-Purcell is a monthly columnist for OUT magazine and a contributor to NPR.

    For complete registration information visit www.pyours.com/symposium.  To book online, go to www.equinoxresort.com.

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  • Saturday, March 2, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm – Two Lives, Two Books, and Some Common Themes

    Join two beloved authors, Katrina Kenison and Margaret Roach, on Saturday, March 2 at 1 pm at the Berkshire Botanical Garden for readings and conversation inspired by their much-anticipated new books, Magical Journey: an Apprenticeship in Contentment and The Backyard Parables: a Meditation on Gardening, and Life. Katrina has spent 25 years nurturing a marriage, raising two sons to adulthood and tending to the myriad demands of home and family life. Margaret has spent precisely the same amount of time nurturing countless plants in the garden—a generous plot that has proven to be as worthy and complicated a life partner as any human mate. Now, despite different paths and charges, they find themselves in much the same spot, asking “What next?”—even as they learn to let go of what was, clearing space for new growth. Come connect with two authors, two friends, two lives, two books—and some common themes for discussion by all.

    Margaret Roach is the author of A Way to Garden and the memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There. She has been an editor at The New York Times, fashion editor and garden editor at Newsday, the first garden editor for Martha Stewart Living and the editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Margaret is now a consultant and avid gardener, keeping fans up to date on her website, awaytogarden.com.

    Katrina Kenison is the author of The Gift of an Ordinary Day and Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry, and, with Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga. Her writing has appeared in O: the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Family Circle, Redbook, Woman’s Day and Health. From 1990 until 2006, Kenison was the series editor of The Best American Short Stories, published annually by Houghton Mifflin. She co-edited, with John Updike, The Best American Short Stories of the Century. A certified Reiki master and Kripalu yoga teacher, Katrina lives with her family in rural New Hampshire.

    Register on line at www.berkshirebotanical.org.  $15 for BBG members, $20 for nonmembers.

  • Saturday and Sunday, May 19 and 20 – Trade Secrets Garden Tour

    The Northeast’s most talked about annual garden event, Trade Secrets, a benefit for Women’s Support Services, a domestic violence program, is celebrating its 12th annual garden weekend in May. Trade Secrets begins on Saturday, May 19th at LionRock Farm in Sharon, CT with the antique and rare plant sale from 10am to 3pm, and, of course, for the early birds there are the early-buying tickets available that include admittance at 8am with an early-buyers breakfast available. On Sunday, May 20th you can tour four gardens including the tours signature garden of Trade Secrets’ founder Bunny Williams.

    From young to old, famous to not-so-famous, Trade Secrets is certainly the place where you find those rare garden plants and antiques for your home. For the past 12 years, Trade Secrets has brought garden-lovers from around the world to the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut to discover new plants, topiary, and antiques for their gardens. 2012 will be no exception with nearly 60 vendors and garden antiques dealers from around the northeast region readying their wares for the trip to the picturesque LionRock Farm (pictured below)  for this annual event.

    With their truckloads of rare garden plants and unusual accessories – those kind of unique treasures that you might search a lifetime for – vendors will descend upon LionRock to offer garden lovers a day of pure treasure hunting! Shoppers can find rare plant specimens from specialized growers and from some of the nation’s best known small nurseries, as well as furniture, antiques, cloches and garden statuary from the choicest purveyors of garden antiques, wrought-iron fencing, textiles from select antiques dealers, and so much more.

    A special treat this year will be a presentation by renowned owner, Marina Marchese of Red Bee Honey. Featured in Martha Stewart Living, this boutique honey bee farm is changing the way consumers taste and use honey! Committed to a sustainable lifestyle, Red Bee Honey boasts a spectacular edible garden, chickens and honeybees!

    Sunday’s garden tour will feature an opportunity to eavesdrop on Bunny Williams’ and John Rosselli’s affair with their house, as their garden is back for the 12th year by popular demand. Also back for a second time on the tour is Jack Hyland’s and Larry Wente’s eco-friendly, forty-one acre futuristic estate that is both outward-looking and inwardly conscientious. Two new gardens added this year are the Linden Hill Farm owned by Richard deBart and Debra Blair, owner of Debra Blair Associates in New York City, and Hawk Hill Farm owned by Robert & Jane Keiter.

    Tickets for the rare plant and garden antique sale on Saturday are $35 for regular admission from 10am to 3pm and $100 for “early buying” tickets. Ticekts for Sunday’s garden tours are $70 ($60 in advance). Tickets may be purchased on line at www.tradesecretsct.com.

  • Saturday, March 5, 2:00 pm – At Home in the 365-Day Garden

    On the last day of 2007, Margaret Roach made the life-altering decision to walk away from New York City and her job as EVP/Editorial Director of Martha Stewart, a career many would describe as highly successful. But she craved completely different rewards: solitude, a return to the personal creativity of writing, and a closer connection to nature and her first passion, the garden she had been making on weekends for 20 years. She moved to a rural New York State town of 300, began AWayToGarden.com (called “the best garden blog” by The New York Times and named for her prize-winning 1989 book), and wrote her dropout memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There. On Saturday, March 5, beginning at 2 pm, Ms. Roach will discuss how you can have a visually exciting landscape every day of the year – if you know what to plant, and also (just as important) how to “see”. As on her website, she’ll deliver both “horticultural how-to and woo-woo”, encouraging not only the smart use of great plants but also an intimate connection between the gardener and the garden, even in its most subtle moments. Copies of And I Shall Have Some Peace There will be available for purchase and signing after the lecture. The program will take place at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 11 French Drive in Boylston, and there is a $15 charge for THBG members, $20 for non-members. For more information, and to register, log on to www.towerhillbg.org.

  • Wednesday, October 7, 6 – 8 pm – Lynden Miller in Boston

    Lynden Miller, well known NYC public garden designer, will speak about designing, maintaining, and funding beautiful, four-season plantings for public places on Wednesday, October 7, from 6 – 8 pm. Her garden projects in NYC have become urban oases with economic benefits and the power to transform the way people behave and feel about their city.

    Lynden Miller’s life-long work is creating beautiful gardens in challenging locations. She has been featured on the Martha Stewart Show and in Fine Gardening, Horticulture, and House Beautiful magazines. Her message about the fundamental necessity of healthy green spaces is critical for today; her new book documents the ‘how to’ of her success. Learn more about Lynden Miller on her web site www.publicgardendesign.org .

    Lynden will sign her new book, Parks, Plants, and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape, after her presentation.  The lecture will take place at One Financial Center, overlooking the Boston Greenway, and there will be reduced on-site parking.  The catered event is sponsored by COG Design, advance tickets are $25 (seating limited to 250), and may be ordered on line at www.cogdesign.org.  You will receive a $5 credit towards the advance purchase of Parks, Plants, and People for signing.

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  • Sunday, September 20 – Monday, September 21 – Third Annual Garden Party at Basin Harbor Club

    Dreamy. Refreshing. Unparalleled. Basin Harbor Club (www.basinharbor.com) in Vergennes, VT (just south of Burlington, VT) is a majestic, 700-acre resort on Lake Champlain. It has charming cottages, a statuesque Main Lodge, great dining facilities, beautiful gardens, tennis courts, nature trails, heated outdoor pool, an 18-hole golf course, and more. The program kicks off Sunday afternoon, September 20th at 3:00 p.m. with a garden talk by the infamous garden designer, Sydney Eddison. This will be followed by a wine and cheese boat cruise. The garden program continues on Monday, September 21 until 3:00 p.m. Overnight and day-only rates are available.

    This year’s program will be hosted by Sydney Eddison, Anita Dafonte, and Kerry Ann Mendez. Sydney has written six award-winning gardening books and is currently writing her seventh masterpiece to be out in 2010. Based in Newtown, CT, Sydney travels around the country giving her infamous talks. Her gardens have been featured in Martha Stewart Living and on The Victory Garden. She has received the Connecticut Horticultural Society’s Gustav A.L. Melquist Award in 2002; the New England Wild Flower Society Kathryn S. Taylor Award in 2005 and 2006, and The Federated Garden Club of Connecticut’s Bronze Medal. Anita is the associate editor of People, Places & Plants magazine and has worked in national gardening sales for years. She’s an avid gardener and cook and was also the manager of a vintage-car race team!

    Sydney will present two dynamic talks. Her first on Sunday afternoon is titled The Rainbow Contained. This talk explores connections between color in art, nature and the garden and how you can create contrast and harmony to create beautiful compositions. On Monday Sydney will have
    you thinking outside the box with her presentation The Unsung Season, Gardens in
    Winter    . Kerry will lead two interactive garden talks. Putting Your Gardens to Bed for the
    Winter     will cover shortcuts and proven techniques for wintering over gardens including care
    for shrubs, roses, and vines. She’ll also cover tips for getting the best deals at fall garden
    center sales. Her second talk, Give New Life to Tired Gardens will feature a pro’s secrets for beautifying and revitalizing lackluster gardens, including some of her favorite, top performing plants. Anita will delight you with her popular talk Eggplants on Parade. The presentation will feature a slide show from her own gardens and how to make a vegetable garden both productive and beautiful.

    The one night package includes Sunday afternoon’s lecture by Sydney; the wine and cheese boat cruise; one night’s accommodations; breakfast and lunch buffets on Monday; four garden talks on Monday; handouts, colorful garden catalogs, and a garden gift. Package rates are $220 for a single and $335 for a double ($167.50 per person). Taxes and gratuity are additional. The Sunday and Monday day-only rate (includes all of the above except overnight accommodations) is $160 per person. The Monday only day rate is $110 and includes the garden program, handouts, morning coffee, lunch, and a garden gift. To see how incredible these resort rates are, check out the video tour on the Club’s web site. Please call Basin Harbor Club at (800) 622-4000 to reserve overnight packages. Day only reservations go through Perennially Yours. Please visit www.pyours.com/gardenclasses.html or call  (518) 885-3471.