Boston Flora

Tag: Norah Lindsay

  • Thursday, February 9, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – Norah Lindsay: The Life and Art of a Garden Designer, Online

    In the years between the world wars Norah Lindsay (1873-1948) greatly influenced the course of garden design and planting. Her commissions ranged from the gardens of quiet English manor houses to royal gardens across Europe. She designed the great English gardens at Hidcote with Lawrence Johnston, as well as his extraordinary Mediterranean garden, Serre de la Madone on the French Riviera. She designed gardens for Nancy Astor and Edward VIII, exchanged garden ideas with Vita Sackville-West, vacationed with Edith Wharton, and dined with Winston Churchill.

    This entertaining online Gardens Trust lecture on February 9 at 2 pm follows ten years of research traveling in the footsteps of Norah Lindsay. It chronicles the life of Norah Lindsay, including her circle of friends, the gardens that she designed, and her primary design principals. It is based on Ms. Hayward’s biography of Norah Lindsay, and includes many archival images, as well as information from private letters, diaries, and family scrapbooks.

    Allyson Hayward is a landscape historian, lecturer, and author who writes and lectures extensively on topics related to gardens and their history. For several years she served as Chairman of the New England Garden History Society. Allyson was awarded a Gold Medal by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for her work in promoting New England’s garden history. Allyson’s published works include the biography, Norah Lindsay: The Life and Art of a Garden Designer (Frances Lincoln, 2007) and Hill-Stead: The Country Place of Theodate Pope Riddle in Farmington, Connecticut(Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). She has also written articles for several periodicals and scholarly journals. Allyson lives in Palm Springs, California with her two beagles and a cat named Norah. She is a member of the Garden Club of Santa Barbara.

    Register (£5) on Eventbrite HERE. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

  • Tuesday, November 1, 5:00 am – 6:30 am – Garden Designs Around the French Riviera: Horticultural Friendships – Lawrence Johnston and Charles de Noailles, Online

    On November 1 enjoy the second in the Gardens Trust series on gardens of the French Riviera. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 4 sessions at a cost of £16 via the link here. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

    Famed for Hidcote Manor, from the 1920s Johnston spent his winters near Menton creating gardens at La Serre de la Madone (below) which he bought in 1924. He experimented with plantings of flower drifts in single colours to contrast with brightly coloured leaved shrubs that he introduced from around the world. Plants from South Africa and China were acclimatised here before being introduced to Hidcote. At its height he employed 12 gardeners for the 7ha of terraces. In 1948 he donated Hidcote Manor to the National Trust and spent his last ten years permanently at La Serre de la Madone. His long-standing friendships included the garden designer Norah Lindsay as well as Charles de Noailles whose Hyères gardens proved too dry, he acquired l’Ermitage de Saint Francois in Grasse, renaming it Villa Noailles. We will explore his plantsman’s garden through the seasons.

    Caroline Holmes is an experienced and accomplished lecturer working for a wide range of organizations including leading tour and cruise operators. She is an Accredited Lecturer of The Arts Society and is also a Course Director for the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. Her own gardens are open to the public and have featured in many magazine articles and on television in both Britain and Japan. Since the 1990s she has been researching, writing about and lecturing on the Riviera. Caroline is author of 12 books, her latest being Where the wildness pleases – the English garden celebrated (2021).

  • Tuesdays, February 22 – March 15, 5:00 am Eastern Time (but recording link will be sent to watch when you’re awake) – Gardens of Delight, Online

    The Gardens Trust is offering a series of four online talks exploring the history and evolution of Persian Gardens on Tuesdays beginning February 22. This ticket costs £16 for the entire course of 4 sessions or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5, through Eventbrite. The Persian Garden sits at the heart of the western horticultural tradition. Though its origins lie in the arid steppes of modern-day Iran, the Islamic conquerors of the sixth century added the spiritual dimension to the Persian prototype. Today its combination of exquisite beauty, sensory delight and spiritual consolation shape the Christian concept of Eden and the Islamic idea of Paradise. Through the centuries, as Islam spread from India, across North Africa, to Southern Europe, the Persian garden absorbed local horticultural traditions, evolving and adapting to accommodate different cultures and environments. Its inventive techniques enabled the greening of the desert, the creation of splendid gardens and the establishing of lush, productive orchards in the most inhospitable settings. From desert oases to dense urban settlements, from mosques, madrassas and royal palaces to intimate private courtyards, the Persian garden has provided an image of heaven on earth – reflecting the Islamic idea that our secular realm is a pale reflection of the celestial delights to come. Whether providing a simple refuge from harsh surroundings, a magnificent pleasure ground or a spiritual retreat, the modest materials and formal geometries of the Persian garden have informed our grandest gardens and inspired our most avant-garde designers. Gardens of Delight will explore the evolution, and legacy, of the Persian garden. While featuring the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the garden city of Isfahan and Morocco’s famous Agdal, it will also look at lesser-known gardens, and examine the legacy of the Persian tradition in the work of modern designers.

    Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register HERE.

    Week One is entitled Gardens Beneath Which Rivers Flow: the Persian Garden Then and Now. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than four thousand years ago, describes the dwelling place of the gods as an ‘immortal garden’, in which ‘a tree stands (beside) a sacred fountain’. Here, in one of the oldest surviving human texts, we have the essence of the Persian garden: water and shade. Early on the Persians developed a system of underground channels to transport water from mountain aquifers into the arid plain. Walls, to protect from desert winds, created a sanctuary, while the characteristic four-part division was established by bisecting irrigation channels. As subsequent rulers recognized that the ability to make things grow conferred on them a god-like status, they embellished their gardens with sensuous fruit, beautiful flowers, exotic trees and elegant palace-pavilions. From Cyrus the Great’s legendary Pasargadae through Shah Abbas’ modest mountain refuge Bagh e Fin to the miraculous oasis of Shiraz, we will explore the legacy of Persian gardens in modern-day Iran, and beyond in the works of such international designers as Gabriel Guvrekian, Norah Lindsay, Marilyn Abbott and Vladimir Djurovic.

    Bagh e Fin, Kashan, Iran

  • Saturday, November 13, 9:00 am – 4:00 pm – A Horticultural History Tour

    The Massachusetts Horticultural Society is proud to announce a day-long series of lectures focused on the history of horticulture and landscape design in New England and beyond, to take place Saturday, November 13, from 9 – 4 at the Hunnewell Carriage House, Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street in Wellesley.

    The symposium will be hosted by John Furlong, FALA, emeritus director, Landscape Institute, Arnold Arboretum, faculty member of the Boston Architectural College, Distinguished Radcliffe Instructor, and recipientof the  Gold Medal and emeritus trustee, Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

    9:00 AM – Actor and interpreter Gerry Wright, as Frederick Law Olmsted, presents a biography of the landscape architect who was influenced by the natural landscapes of New England throughout his life. In 1850, at age 28, he traveled to England and was smitten with the countryside and a “democratic park” in Birkenhead. Olmsted’s two styles of landscape architecture were the creation of the “pastoral” and the “picturesque”. Beyond the creation for beauty, there was a sense of “service deeply rooted in his planning of public places.” New York City’s Central Park, Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum and the country estates on the Charles River in Wellesley and Dover are among the legacies of Olmsted and his firm.

    At 10:30, Allyson Hayward, garden historian, popular lecturer for The Garden Club of the Back Bay and author of Norah Lindsay: The Life and Art of a Garden Designer will deliver a new talk on two important New England estates, the Hunnewell estate, known as Wellesley, and Elm Bank, the Cheney/Baltzell estate which is now the home of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Today, these landscapes reveal a layering of New England’s garden history. Ms. Hayward will take you on an armchair tour of these exciting gardens with an illustrated lecture tracing the landscapes dating from 1850 to the present. You will revel in the beauty of the initial vision of Horatio Hollis Hunnewell and his Italian Garden and Pinetum at Wellesley. The lecture will continue with images of Elm Bank from its Victorian grandeur to its transformation into a 1920s grandiose playground for Boston society, complete with theme gardens that portrayed the owners’ sense of taste and style.

    11:30 AM – David Barnett, PhD., President and CEO of Mount Auburn Cemetery, will present Wilson’s China: A Century On, published by The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2009. Wilson was the Arnold Arboretum’s principal plant collector from 1906 and following Sargent’s death he was appointed the self-styled ‘Keep” of the Arboretum. In addition to introducing over 1,200 plants, Wilson was a popular author and lecturer and a MassHort Trustee. His remarkable achievements are a continuing inspiration to botanists, horticulturists and landscapers. The slides have been loaned to MassHort through the courtesy of the English authors, Tony Kirkham and Mark Flanagan, respectively Head of the Arboretum at Kew and Keeper of the Royal Gardens in Windsor Great Park.

    Following lunch, at 1:30 PM, you will hear Elizabeth S. Eustis, a garden historian and guest curator, former Trustee of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, past President of the New England Wild Flower Society and faculty member of The Landscape Institute. She will speak on Romanticism in the Landscape, the subject of a 2010 exhibition that she co-curated for the Morgan Library in New York, Romantic Gardens: Art, Nature and Garden Design, with a catalog published by David R. Godine. Following the transition from formal classicism to more naturalistic garden design, Romanticism added a new emphasis on emotional and spiritual response to the landscape. The pervasive influence of Romanticism inspired artificial ruins, garden cemeteries, wild gardens, and contributed powerfully to the public parks movement. This talk will be extensively illustrated by recent photographs and historic works of art.

    3:00 PM – Meg Muckenhoupf is the author of Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces, Union Park Press, 2010, which is a guide to the Arnold Arboretum, The Boston Public Garden, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, the Olmsted sites, Elm Bank and Boston’s historic and newer parks. Beautiful photos. You will discover delightful new spots to visit.

    Registration is $65 for MHS members, $75 for non-members, and the price includes lunch. You may register on-line at www.masshort.org/horticultural-history-tour or call 617-933-4995.