Boston Flora

Tag: Mount Holyoke College

  • Tuesday, March 26, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape

    Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us is also a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. Lauret Savoy’s Trace interweaves journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time to explore how this country’s still unfolding history has marked the land, this society, and her. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds to names on the land, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often-unvoiced presence of the past. Lauret will offer elements from this book and introduce her current project on the Chesapeake region. The new work braids histories of the land and of “race” using as a lens her search for ancestors, lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa, Indigenous America, and the Indian Ocean basin with immigrants from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their stories are entangled with the rise and fall of tobacco agriculture and the origin and growth of the capital city along the Potomac River. Lauret delves through fragmented histories—geological, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. She asks, what is your relationship with history, told and untold, on this land? Lauret will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 26 at 6:30 in the Gund Hall Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. Free and open to the public.

    Lauret Savoy‘s research and writing consider how the nation’s ever-unfolding history has marked the land and people. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape won the 2016 American Book Award; it was a finalist for PEN American and additional honors. Her other books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, named one of the “Five Best” science books in the Wall Street Journal. Lauret writes of the complex intertwinings of natural and cultural histories to understand the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Indigenous heritages, Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College.  Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University.  She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a pilot.

    This program is co-sponsored by the GSD, the Environment Forum at the Mahindra Humanities Center, and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

  • Tuesday, May 5, 6:00 pm – Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England

    Anyone who has spent time in New England will recognize the century-old buildings that Maureen Meister will discuss in a slide lecture on Tuesday, May 5 at The Gibson House Museum, 137 Beacon Street, that draws upon her new book, Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England (University Press of New England). Focusing on the 1890s through the 1920s, she will explain how a group of Boston architects and craftsmen were influenced by English Arts and Crafts theories to produce works that are now landmarks, admired for their exquisite ornament. At the same time, the buildings reflect a rich intellectual culture that flourished in New England one hundred years ago. A reception begins at 6, with the lecture at 7. For more information email info@thegibsonhouse.org.
    Maureen Meister is an art historian who writes about American art and architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of Architecture and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Boston: Harvard’s H. Langford Warren, 2003, and was volume editor of H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, 1999. She holds a doctorate from Brown University and an A.B. from Mount Holyoke College. Since 1998, she has taught at Tufts University.

  • Friday, April 11, 10:00 am – 2:30 pm – Merging Conservation and Agriculture in New England

    A series of lectures entitled Merging Conservation and Agriculture in New England will take place in the Harvard Forest Seminar Room, Harvard Forest, 324 N. Main Street, Petersham, on Friday, April 11 from 10 – 2:30. The day’s schedule is as follows:

    10:00 a.m. New England Food Vision with Brian Donahue of Brandeis University

    Find out more about the New England Food Vision: http://foodsolutionsne.org/new-england-food-vision. This vision is, in part, an extension of the Wildlands and Woodlands vision for New England: http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org/home.

    11:00 a.m. Exploring the Interactions between Nature and Farming

    Conrad Vispo, Claudia Knab-Vispo, Anna Duho, Kyle Bradford – Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program http://farmscapeecology.org/

    Looking for feedback we will outline our rationale and draft methods for an upcoming pilot project in the Hudson Valley to explore: 1) what nature can provide to farming (in terms of animal-mediated ecological ‘services’), 2) what farming can provide to nature (in terms of habitats for native plants and animals), and 3), what information is most useful for farmers and land trusts working with agricultural lands. See http://hawthornevalleyfarm.org/fep/
    12:00 p.m. Lunch and Discussion. Please bring your own lunch
    1:00 p.m. Walk Exploring Agriculture & Conservation Management with David Foster – Director, Harvard Forest
    This walk will meet in the Harvard Forest Common Room and carpool to the former Petersham Country Club and Bryant Farm, which have been purchased by the Harvard Forest and are one-half mile from Shaler Hall. Joined by ecologists Glenn Motzkin, Professor Martha Hoopes from Mount Holyoke College, the speakers, Harvard Forest staff including John Wisnewski and Audrey Barker Plotkin, and others we will walk the landscape to discuss Harvard Forest plans to graze the land with an objective of developing a series of conservation grasslands while studying and documenting the process.

    For additional information call David R. Foster, 978-724-3302.

    http://www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org/sites/default/files/zzr_Lily%20Piel_OldAckleyFarm_DSC7775%20-%20Copy_0.jpg

  • Monday, November 14, 4:30 pm – Wine: A Matter of Life and Death

    On Monday, November 14, beginning at 4:30 pm at the Wellesley College Botanic Garden, John Varriano will examine two aspects of the cultural history of wine – its central role in theories of medicine from ancient Greece to the present and its changing meaning over the ages in art and meditations on the afterlife. Recently retired from the faculty of Mount Holyoke College where he taught courses in European art and architecture since 1970, John Varriano’s special interest is the art and architecture of seventeenth century Rome. He is also the author of over three dozen specialized studies in his field including several books, the most recent being Wine: A Cultural History.  This is a free program, and you may call 781-283-3094 for more details.

  • Thursday, September 8, 7:00 pm – Massachusetts Horticultural Society 2011 Honorary Medals Dinner

    On September 8, Mass Hort will continue its almost century-long tradition of honoring superior achievements in horticulture when Elm Bank hosts the 2011 Honorary Medals Gala with Lynden B. Miller receiving the George Robert White Medal of Honor for her work as a designer of urban parks.

    Lynden B. Miller is a public garden designer in New York City and director of The Conservatory Garden in Central Park, which she rescued and restored beginning in 1982. Her work includes gardens for The Central Park Zoo, Bryant Park, The New York Botanical Garden, Madison Square Park, and Wagner Park in Battery Park City as well as many smaller projects in all five boroughs and beyond, including waterfront gardens in Red Hook, Brooklyn, improvements to Union Square Park and the 97th Street Park Avenue Mall, renovation of the “Gateway to Harlem” Broadway Mall at 135th Street, Loeb Plaza for Hunter College, and the 67th Street Armory.

    Other winners include Wesley R. Autio, professor of pomology at UMass Amherst, Richard Jaynes of Broken Hill Nursery, volunteer Joyce Bakshi, Theodore Landsmark of Boston Architectural College, Organic Gardening Magazine, author Ellen Ecker Ogden, Carrie Waterman, Russ Billings of Mount Holyoke College, and the Lyman Plant House of the Botanic Gardens at Smith College.

    Tickets are $150 per person to this event. There are also opportunities to either co-host or host a table.  To co-host or host a table, please call our reservation line at 617-933-4995. All proceeds from the dinner will be used to support maintenance and improvement of Mass Hort gardens.