In this January 29 AHS online talk, Dr. Lopez will focus on the history of botany in Mexico (including the southwestern United States that were previously part of Mexico), drawing from his new book, Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914. Rooted in Place traces historical transformations in the relationship between nature and imagined communities across three interlinked moments in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the late nineteenth century in Mexico. It is the first major study of the relationship between understandings of nature and the creation of structures of rule within Mexico. The book intentionally weaves between environmental history, history of science, visual culture, and political history.
Rick A. López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College.
Rooted in Place will take place on Sunday, November 9 from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Berkshire Waldorf High School in Stockbridge. This year the dynamic symposium invites nature lovers, gardeners, farmers, educators, and environmental stewards to explore the intersection of culture and biodiversity — and how stories, seeds and land connect us all. Lunch is included.
Keynote Speaker: Abra Lee — Cultivating the Untold Stories of Black Gardeners and Growers Horticulturalist, author, and storyteller Abra Lee will headline the symposium with a keynote address that brings to life the often-overlooked history of Black Americans in horticulture. Drawing on her forthcoming book, Conquer the Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers (Timber Press), Lee will share riveting narratives — from one of the first Black plant shop owners of the Roaring Twenties to a true tale of espionage with roots in the Harlem Renaissance. Lee, a Georgia native with a degree in ornamental horticulture from Auburn University, has made it her mission to unearth and amplify these hidden histories, connecting cultural heritage to ecological legacy.
Other featured speakers and presenters are K Greene of Hudson Valley Seed Company, Kevin West, whose latest book The Cook’s Garden (Knopf) celebrates the edible joys of homegrown abundance, Sandrine Harris of Emergent Nature, and a screening of Farming While Black,.
As gardeners, our work extends beyond the soil, rippling out to communities of every type. From our human neighbors, to pollinators and beyond, what and how we grow has an indelible effect on the world around us. This year, Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Rooted in Place symposium speakers will consider the impacts of the way we garden on the world around us. Both in person and online options will be available. The event takes place November 13 from 10 – 5 at the Duffin Theater in Lenox, or online. Registration ranges from $45 – $110. Visit https://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/8th-annual-rooted-place-ecological-gardening-symposium-seeding-community-garden
Wambui Ippolito: Growing In Weeds: So many children grow up with sterile green spaces designed with their safety in mind — structured spaces that don’t allow for exploration, imagination and the sense of danger that fuels curiosity. How can landscape designers, gardeners, parents, and communities approach design and create new spaces that bring a new vitality into children’s green spaces? How do these spaces help our children to be emboldened explorers and better stewards of landscapes they inhabit?
Wambui Ippolito is a horticulturist and landscape designer and a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. She develops programming for museums, public gardens and parks exploring the broader context of horticulture, focusing on the intersections between migration, culture, history and science. She lectures both in the USA and internationally and is the principal designer of her New York-based landscape design firm. In her former career, Wambui worked as a Development & Democracy Consultant. She is multilingual, fluent in five languages. Wambui is the founder of the BIPOC Hort Group, a multicultural organization with membership from the African American, Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean public and private professional ornamental horticulture community.
Bringing Meadows into the Garden: With global warming and energy conservation in mind, let’s cut down on mowing and blowing and replace some of our lawns with higher grass. Page Dickey will discuss a wide range of examples showing how beautifully meadows — however small — and meadow plants can be incorporated into our gardens.
Page has been passionately gardening since her early 20s and writing about gardening, as well as designing gardens for others, for the last three decades. She has written eight books and edited another. Most of her books concentrate on aspects of garden design, such as creating gardens that reflect their settings (Gardens in the Spirit of Place and Breaking Ground) or planning gardens as extensions of our homes (Inside Out), in each case illustrated by exceptional examples around America. Duck Hill Journal and Embroidered Ground are about Duck Hill, where she lived for 34 years, about the process of making the garden there, and her thoughts on gardening in general. Page was the editor of the book Outstanding American Gardens, celebrating 25 years of the Garden Conservancy with photographs by Marion Brenner. Her new book, Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again, describes leaving a beloved garden of 34 years, finding a home in the northwest corner of Connecticut and falling in love with its land. Page lectures around the country about plants and garden design. She has written many articles over the years, including in House and Garden, House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Horticulture, Elle Décor, Garden Design, and The New York Times. The garden at Duck Hill has been featured in a variety of periodicals. She is a director emeritus of the Garden Conservancy and is one of the two founders of its Open Days Program. She also serves on the boards of Stonecrop Garden, in Cold Spring, N.Y.; Hollister House Garden, in Washington, Conn.; and The Little Guild, in Cornwall, Conn. She and her husband, Bosco Schell, are both members of the Friends of Horticulture at Wave Hill. Page was recently elected as an Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America. In 2015, Page and her husband moved to Falls Village, Conn., to an old church with 17 acres of fields and woods and a view of the Berkshire foothills. They are off on a new gardening adventure.
Agriculture as Conservation: Lessons for the Landscape: Our increasingly complex and dire environmental challenges can’t be met by wildland preservation alone. It has become abundantly clear that we must also radically change our approach to intensively human-managed landscapes. Since 2018, Stone Barns Center has been managing over 350 acres of former traditionally managed pasture land (now predominantly part of a state park preserve) using holistic regenerative methods focused around intensive, multi-species rotational livestock grazing. These efforts have been coupled with a comprehensive ecological monitoring program measuring responses in our soil health, plant biodiversity, bird biodiversity, insect biodiversity, and water quality. This presentation will share some of our preliminary discoveries from listening closely to the landscape and how those lessons could be applied by stewards of a variety of human-impacted landscapes, including the landscaping and gardening community.
Elijah Goodwin is the ecology and GIS manager at Stone Barns Center. He first joined the organization in 2019, monitoring bird populations on the pastured grasslands managed through the Conservation Action Plan with Rockefeller State Park Preserve. He previously conducted a four-year study on the wood thrush populations within the Park Preserve. Since starting an expanded role with the organization in 2020, he has been working to build out the ecological monitoring program and create and implement an ArcGIS-based database system to collect, manage, synthesize, and present the vast array of monitoring and management data collected from across the farm and the Center. Elijah has been working as a research scientist and/or science educator for over 25 years. While his primary training is as an ornithologist, he has experience working with soil, plant communities, and DNA technology . His scientific experience includes banding hawks and owls during migration in New Jersey; surveying beaver activity and bird populations in the Adirondacks; and studying bird song learning all over the Eastern Seaboard and Mexico. He holds a B.S. in wildlife biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an M.S.T in biology education from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology, also from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. On the side: Elijah enjoys time spent in the outdoors with his wife, Katherine, and child, Spirit. He is an award-winning nature and night/light painting photographer and owns a small photography, education and ecological consulting business, Whimbrel Nature. He has served as president and a board member for the Color Camera Club of Westchester and is a science advisor for ⅔ For The Birds.
Ecosystem Approaches to Landscape Design: Building Resiliency Through Community: Today’s gardeners are faced with more challenges than ever before—a changing climate, more pressure from invasive plants and pests, and more decisions about what to put into and how to manage our landscapes. Annie White is striving to create a new culture of gardening where we move away from carefully curated gardens, work more with rather than against nature, and become better stewards of the ecosystems within and around our gardens. Annie will share her ecosystem approach to landscape design that helps build resiliency through community. Sharing case studies of her successes and failures, Annie’s talk will open your eyes to the myriad of naturally occurring processes in the landscapes and how we can steward these to create both beautiful and ecologically significant landscapes.
Annie White (below) is an Ecological Landscape Designer and the owner of Nectar Landscape Design Studio in Stowe, Vermont. She is also a full-time Lecturer of Sustainable Landscape Horticulture + Design at the University of Vermont. Annie earned an MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2005 and a PhD in Plant & Soil Science from The University of Vermont in 2016. She is passionate about designing cutting-edge and science-based ecological landscapes at all scales—from urban backyards to rural agricultural landscapes.
How A Place-Based Garden Culture of Care Strengthens Places and Their People: This program will explore the philosophy of the Cultivating Place podcast that gardens/gardeners are powerful spaces and agents for potentially positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, resource use, habitat and biodiversity loss, cultural polarization/marginalization, and individual and communal health and being, as exemplified by the important guests on Jennifer Jewell’s podcasts and the innovative place-based gardens that celebrate specifically western landscapes in the book Under Western Skies. Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national, award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden. She is the author of award-winning The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press 2020), and Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press 2021). Her greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersections between our places, our cultures, and our gardens.
Lessons in Built Ecology Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85 acre, organic park in the middle of New York City, was created with ecology in mind. The park’s award-winning piers include top-notch recreation and entertainment — from opera to outdoor films, all of it beautifully designed. But the piers also contain native woodlands, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, and numerous meadows. These areas echo native ecosystems and are managed with an emphasis on wildlife habitat. This talk will encompass the many ecological strategies employed by the park’s designers, as well as the management techniques park staff have developed to cultivate biodiversity. Topics will include pragmatic strategies for encouraging ecologically beneficial landscapes.
Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically obsessed horticulturist. She is Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park where she oversees 85 acres of diverse parkland. These meadows, forests, salt marshes and freshwater wetlands are managed with the dual purposes of cultivating, beautifying and encouraging biodiversity, all within the largest city in the country. In her imaginary free time, Rebecca lectures, writes, and designs the occasional garden. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, the Landscape Institute, and the Ecological Landscape Alliance.
Sam Hoadley is the Horticultural Research Manager at Mt. Cuba Center. His work includes evaluating native plant species, old and new cultivars, as well as hybrids in Mt. Cuba’s Trial Garden. Using data collected and analyzed over a three-year period, a research report is published outlining top-performing plants for the Mid-Atlantic region. This information is designed to inform consumers and home gardeners as well as professionals in the horticultural and nursery industries about the ecological benefits and attributes of the native plants in our trials. His presentation will focus on knockout native species and cultivars researched at the Mt Cuba Center. Sam received a degree in Sustainable Landscape Horticulture from the University of Vermont.
Pete Grima is a Service Forester with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation covering northern Berkshire County, where he helps landowners make informed decisions about their forests. He is also an avid botanist responsible for many new and novel botanical discoveries in the Berkshires, and he is a co-author of the recently published Vascular Flora of Franklin County, Massachusetts. Using a recent landowner interaction from his Service Forestry work as a case study, Pete’s presentation will describe the process of envisioning a future forest to be planted in an old field, with a mind towards carbon storage and climate resilience.
This full-day program on November 11 at the Berkshire School in Sheffield focuses on managing the landscape sustainably, led by Neil Diboll, Jeff Lowenfels, Lee Buttala, and Dr. Robert J. Gegear. Please join us as we hear from the experts on topics relevant to all gardeners and growers.
Neil Diboll: The American Garden: A Life or Death Situation
Our gardens and landscapes are becoming increasingly important refuges for pollinators, birds, butterflies and other creatures as their former habitats disappear. Diboll will focus on the evolution of the American garden from solely a creation for enjoyment of the owners to becoming a biodiverse refuge for native plants and animals. He will share a step-by-step approach that will provide you with “tried and true” methods to convert a small area to a prairie garden or a large acreage to a beautiful meadow.
A pioneer in the native plant industry and recognized internationally as an expert in native plant community ecology, Neil Diboll has guided the growth of Prairie Nursery for 30 years. He has dedicated his life to the propagation of native plants and their promotion as uniquely beautiful, ecologically beneficial and sustainable solutions for landscapes and gardens. In 2013 Neil was the recipient of the Great American Gardeners Award from the American Horticultural Society.
Jeff Lowenfels: Teaming With Microbes and Fungi: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web
No one ever fertilizes the Redwoods. How did these trees live over 500 years and grow to 380 feet without Miracle-Gro or other chemicals? In an extremely humorous and entertaining presentation, Jeff Lowenfels will tell you and show you how to successfully use the very same natural principles to maintain your yard and grow your gardens. No more chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other nasty chemicals and a lot less work as Jeff shows you how to team with the microbes in your soil! After just one extremely painless and entertaining hour even the ‘reluctant spouse’ will never use chemicals again. As more and more professionals in all aspects of horticulture are learning about the benefits of mycorrhizal fungi, these symbiotic fungi are becoming readily available to the public as a whole. All gardeners and growers need to learn about mycorrhizal fungi and how to use them as they make a huge, beneficial difference in so many ways. This talk gives you all you need to know, plus a few laughs. Jeff Lowenfels is the author of a trilogy of award winning books on plants and soil, and he is the longest running garden columnist in North America. Lowenfels is a national lecturer as well as a fellow, hall of fame member, and former president of the Garden Writers of America.
Lee Buttala: The Return of the Species
In a horticultural and agricultural universe where hybrids and vegetative propagation have become commonplace, the biodiversity of many species is being bottlenecked even by those with the best of intentions. In this talk about how to maintain the genetic breadth of species and varieties that allow them to adapt and evolve to local conditions and weather change, Lee Buttala advocates for the importance and ease of growing many of these plants from open-pollinated seed. Citing examples he has learned from writing about seed saving in relation to his work on the preservation of heirloom vegetables at Seed Savers Exchange, Buttala sets forward a simple approach to how we can all contribute to biodiversity in our own backyards, whether we are growing natives, vegetables or ornamental plants, in a manner which is economically and environmentally sound and satisfying, not to mention cost-effective and fun. Learn to preserve the biodiversity of the plant kingdom, one seed at a time.
Lee Buttala is the Executive Director of Seed Savers Exchange, a seed bank dedicated to the sharing and saving of seeds that define America’s food and garden heritage, and the only non-governmental organization storing seed at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Formerly the director of marketing communications for BBG and the Preservation Manager for the Garden Conservancy, he is also the Chair of the Historic Landscapes Committee of the APGA. He was the Emmy-Award winning garden television producer for Martha Stewart Living, the creator of PBS’s Cultivating Life and editor of the award-winning book: The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Saving Seed. He also writes a weekly garden column for the Berkshire Edge and sits on the board of Hollister House Garden in Washington, CT. He studied garden design at the Chelsea Physick Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Kyoto School of Art and Design.
Dr. Robert J. Gegear: Humming a Different Tune: An Ecological Approach to Native Pollinator Conservation
Pollinators are declining at an unprecedented rate worldwide due to human-induced rapid environmental change. These declines pose a significant threat to our food supply and consequently, there has been major focus on the development and implementation of conservation strategies to maintain pollination services to crop plants. However, the overwhelming majority of current strategies do not consider the keystone role that pollinators play in natural ecosystems, making them an ineffective tool for maintaining and restoring biodiversity. Dr. Robert Gegear of WPI Department of Biology and Biotechnology, and Director of the New England Bee-cology Project, researches and presents on the importance of developing an ecologically-focused approach to developing and maintaining your garden, citing examples from his ongoing field research in Massachusetts. Dr. Robert J. Gegear is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology and Biotechnology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Director of the New England Bee-cology Project. Dr. Gegear’s current research focuses on Pollinator neuroecology and conservation, with particular focus on bumblebees native to Massachusetts.
Sponsored by the Berkshire Botanical Garden, Red Lion Inn, Berkshire School, and the Seed Savers Exchange
Tuition ($95 for BBG members, $105 for nonmembers) includes lunch. Register at www.berkshirebotanical.org.
