Register today for this year’s Perennial Plant Symposium at The Hunnewell Carriage House, The Gardens at Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street, Wellesley. The program is a joint presentation by The Massachusetts Horticultural Society and the Perennial Plant Association. Featured speakers this year are Trevor Smith of Weston Nurseries, Holly Greenleaf of Greenleaf Design, LLC, Toshi Yano of the Perfect Earth Project, and Evan Abramson of Landscape Interactions. Register at https://www.masshort.org/perennial-plant-symposium-2024 Breakfast and lunch are included.
Distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener Sue Stuart-Smith believes our minds and our gardens interact in ways that can sustain our innermost selves. Her beautifully written UK bestseller, The Well-Gardened Mind, offers inspiring perspectives on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. For Stuart-Smith, a garden is much more than a beloved physical space. It is a mental space where you can hear your thoughts immersed in the primal awareness not only of nature’s beauty, but the eternal cycle of the seasons. Informed by literature, neuroscience and her experiences as therapist and gardener, she celebrates the joys of gardening, but also the life-affirming benefits of tending plants-physical, psychological and metaphorical.
Before practicing as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Sue Stuart-Smith received her degree in English literature at Cambridge. Over the past 30 years, she has worked with her husband, leading UK garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, on their wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.
This Garden Conservancy lecture will take place on March 3 from 6 – 7 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. To register, visit https://www.gardenconservancy.org/education/2023-speaker-series. The Spring 2023 National Speaking Tour is in partnership with Perfect Earth Project
This year the Garden Conservancy rolled out something entirely new for Open Days, the Nature-Friendly Gardens Nibbled Leaf category, and we want your opinions, input, and questions! Please join Page Dickey, Edwina von Gal and Open Days staff Horatio Joyce and Amy Murray for a Town Hall style Zoom. Find out what it’s all about: what we mean by nature friendly, what it takes to “qualify”, why it matters, how we have managed our own challenges, and whatever else is of interest to you. Here’s your chance to chime in. The event will begin at 1:30 Eastern time and is $5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers.
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar.
Members of the Frank & Anne Cabot Society for planned giving have complimentary access to Garden Conservancy webinars. All Cabot Society members will automatically be sent the link to participate on the morning of the webinar. For more information about the Cabot Society, please contact us at info@gardenconservancy.org or 845.424.6500.
More than thirty years ago, Page Dickey served on Frank Cabot’s advisory committee to help launch the Garden Conservancy and went on to cofound the Conservancy’s celebrated Open Days program. Beyond her service to our organization, Page is an unmatched voice in the realm of garden writing. The author of eight books, she has written of the material challenges and successes of creating her own gardens, Duck Hill and Church House, and of transcendent notions such as the spirit of place. She is both garden designer and philosopher, and her distinct perspective is an inspiration for so many passionate gardeners.
Principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, Edwina von Gal creates landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. Her work has been published in many major publications and her book “Fresh Cuts” won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing in 1998. She has served on boards and committees for a number of horticultural organizations and is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity. In 2013, Edwina founded the Perfect Earth Project to promote toxin-free landscapes for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. She is the 2017 recipient of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts. In 2018 she received the NY School of Interior Design’s Green Design Award and The Isamu Noguchi Award.
The reasons to remove toxic chemicals from our landscapes are many and many homeowners are seeking landscape professionals who can deliver healthier landscape options. However, too often clients give up on pesticide- and fertilizer-free landscapes because their expectations are not met, the results are not what they had in mind, or the process is confusing to them. How do landscape professionals educate, manage expectations, and keep a client’s trust during the transition?
Edwina von Gal from Perfect Earth Project will discuss solutions that are minimal in cost and aesthetically pleasing, in this Ecological Landscape Alliance webinar on Wednesday, January 17 from 4 – 5.. She will share her ideas on how to convince clients that a toxin-free landscape is worth pursuing, how to anticipate common problems, and how to communicate effectively.
Edwina von Gal, Principal of her landscape design firm on Long Island since 1984, Ms. von Gal has striven to integrate simplicity and sustainability into her design of landscapes for private and public clients around the world. Her work has been published in major publications and her book Fresh Cuts won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing in 1998. She has served on boards and committees for a number of horticultural organizations, and is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity. Ms. von Gal designed the park for the Biomuseo, a museum of biodiversity in Panama City and stayed on to found the Azuero Earth Project with like-minded friends and scientists. The process convinced her to extend the toxin-free message to the US and consequently, she launched Perfect Earth Project in 2013. Most recently, she was appointed as a Master Teacher at the Conway School for the 2015-2016 academic year. She is the Green Schools Alliance Site and Landscaping Expert.
