From neighborhood parks to campuses to entire communities, Olmsted’s work was always about shaping identity through landscape.
We can feel that in places like Central Park—where people don’t simply pass through, but use the space to form memories, gather, protest, celebrate, and see themselves as part of something larger. Over time, those experiences become part of how a community understands itself across generations.
Join Chris Kreussling and the Massachusetts Pollinator Network online on Tuesday, May 26 from 7 – 8:15 for a talk on Little Bugs in the Big City: Urban Pollinator Habitat Gardening.
With urban real estate at such a premium, how do our smallest neighbors – especially pollinating insects – make their way? What can we do to help them survive and thrive? In the concrete jungle, is it worth it to even try? Over two decades, the speaker has transformed a barren conventional landscape into a vibrant example of urban gardening for biodiversity. Using their garden as an example, they will review some typical challenges for urban gardeners, and explain how to find and create habitat opportunities in city gardens. If you plant it, they will come!
Chris Kreussling (Flatbush Gardener), a New York Master Naturalist and Certified Interpretive Guide, has gardened in NYC for 45 years. In their current small Brooklyn garden, they grow over 150 NYC-native plant species, and documented over 500 insect species. Their garden is also a registered wildlife and pollinator habitat, butterfly garden, and monarch way station. They’ve documented this ongoing transformation on their web site, Flatbush Gardener, and the garden’s biodiversity on iNaturalist.
Join The Garden Museum online on May 20 for an extraordinary evening with Kazuyuki Ishihara – the Japanese garden designer christened the “Magician of Greenery” by the late Queen Elizabeth II after she encountered his breathtaking work at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
This year, Ishihara will exhibit the Tokonoma Garden – Samumaya no Niwa, a nostalgic Japanese courtyard garden that invites visitors to reflect, connect, and appreciate traditional beauty.
Born in Nagasaki, Ishihara began his journey studying Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, before finding his singular vision: weaving traditional Japanese elements – stone gardens, bonsai, moss – into an internationally acclaimed design language. Since his Chelsea debut in 2004, he has amassed an extraordinary 12 gold medals, and in 2025 took home both Garden of the Year and the People’s Choice Award for his garden Cha No Niwa.
In this rare and intimate lecture, Ishihara will share the philosophy, craft and creative process behind his celebrated gardens. £10 Livestream. Register at www.gardenmuseum.org
As institutions of higher education accelerate climate commitments, campus landscapes are increasingly called upon to perform as living infrastructure. This Climate Week–themed webinar on May 7 at noon explores how green roofs can advance sustainability goals while enriching campus life, operations, and learning through three university case studies: Harvard Business School, Northeastern University, and North Shore Community College. Designed for campus sustainability directors and facilities managers, the session examines how green roofs deliver measurable benefits—from stormwater management and urban heat reduction to biodiversity, wellness, and experiential learning. Speakers will share design strategies, maintenance realities, and performance outcomes across diverse campus contexts, including how these projects support institutional reporting and benchmarking frameworks such as AASHE STARS.
Presented by Recover Green Roofs during Boston Climate Week, this webinar recognizes the unique role higher education leaders play in shaping not only resilient campuses, but also the next generation of environmental stewards—demonstrating how today’s infrastructure decisions can become tomorrow’s teaching tools.
Register at https://luma.com/azdr6lbj. Recover Green Roofs is a design-build firm specializing in the design, installation, and maintenance of green roofs, including rooftop gardens, farms, and amenity spaces. Recover has designed and built residential, commercial, and institutional buildings across New England and beyond for over a decade, emphasizing the stacking benefits that a green roof provides to its community, local ecosystems, and the environment at large. We strive to create long-lasting, thriving green roofs that aid in recovering nature in our built environment in order to support healthier communities and more resilient cities. For more information, visit www.recovergreenroofs.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
By registering for this event, you agree to share your registration information with the organizers of Boston Climate Week
The Penn Studio School of Art presents an online talk with Marta McDowell on May 2 at 10 am on Beatrix Potter. Beatrix Potter was an artist, author, gardener, landowner, sheep breeder, and conservationist.
Author, educator and lecturer Marta McDowell will explore how Potter developed her love of drawing, painting, and gardening and share how these passions came to be reflected in her beloved, classic children’s tales.Lecture is live and will be recorded, students do not have to be present. The recording will be available to students for 3 months after the live lecture, after 3 months the recording will be deleted.
Please check your email spam/junk folder for your Zoom invite. Our business hours are 10:00 AM through 5:00 PM. All lecture information and email correspondence will be sent during business hours. If students purchase the lecture outside business hours or during the weekend the lecture information will be sent the following business day.
The second in The Gardens Trust’s online course celebrating the bicentenary of TheGardener’s Magazine.
It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’
In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.
Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realise how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.
Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. Register for the individual session with Eventbrite 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 until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.
The April 29 talk is led by Dr. David Marsh. Dr David Marsh was awarded his PhD in 2005 for a study of the ‘Gardens and Gardeners of Later-Stuart London’ and has been lecturing and supervising research in Garden History ever since. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and was co-course director for their MA in Garden History. A trustee of the Gardens Trust from 2016-2023, he helped set up and run the Trust’s online lecture program and is the author of a weekly blog about garden history.
Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower is the 200-year saga of finding, losing, and finding the wild plants collected on America’s first exploration west, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thomas Jefferson handpicked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, gather notable specimens along the way, and then write the journals, with one volume to include science-worthy descriptions and classifications of the plants that Lewis collected and pressed to preserve. Not a botanist, Lewis needed help to write this part of the journals. Ambition, deceit, theft, wealth, debt, alcoholism, loss, suicide, serendipity, and stubborn persistence cross the plants’ paths in Philadelphia, New York, and London. This is the first work detailing the places, practices, and times of a cavalcade of people who touched the plants. It’s a fascinating chronicle of an unexplored byway of the great American story.
ELIZABETH ADELMAN gardened on weekends and summer evenings while practicing law. Twenty-five years ago, she gave in and started Heritage Flower Farm, an award-winning nursery growing perennial flowers, now featured in botanic gardens, historic sites, and backyard gardens around the country. About a decade ago, a friend introduced her to the plants collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and she was hooked. She spent winters researching and writing about the people, times, places, and events creating the mysteries, losses, and rediscoveries of the plant specimens across two continents and 200 years.
You will receive the webinar link for the April 21 webinar directly from Zoom. 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. $5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/events/web26-chasing-lewis-s-monkeyflower
The first in The Gardens Trust online course celebrating the bicentenary of the Gardener’s Magazine begins April 22, from 1 – 2:30 Eastern.
It was exactly two hundred years ago that John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) started publishing The Gardener’s Magazine, the first periodical devoted solely to horticulture. As Loudon described it, the aims of the magazine were ‘to disseminate new and important information on all topics connected with horticulture, and to raise the intellect and the character of those engaged in this art.’
In celebration of this bicentenary, the Gardens Trust is hosting a six-part online series that explores the ideas and inventions of this extraordinary Scottish writer and designer, and his equally industrious and radical wife, Jane (?1807-1858). Jane has her own centenary celebrations this year: her novel The Mummy! is set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2126.
Between them, the Loudons were the driving force behind the rise of the amateur middle class gardener, and also the real professionalism of the 19th century head gardener. Their story is fascinating and will make you realise how much we owe to their non-stop work ethic and enthusiasm.
Series tickets are being offered at the special celebratory sum of £21 for all six sessions, a 50% reduction on our usual ticket price for a six-part series. The registration link through Eventbrite is www.eventbrite.co.uk 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 until 10 June) will be sent shortly afterwards.
The first session is Twelve Vignettes with Gin Warren.
Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and Beginnings is both a love letter to California and a literary tour de force that tells the story of resilience and reclamation through a relationship with plants, memory, myth, and indigenous knowledge. Author Myriam Gurba meditates on susto, a spiritual sickness specific to Latin America, and its culturally specific treatments such as herbalism, botanical spirits, and soil.
Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine ranked her true-crime memoir Mean as one of the “Best LGBTQ Books of All Time.” Her recent essay collection Creep: Accusations and Confessions was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism and won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review.
$15 for AHS members, $20 for nonmembers. Register with the American Horticultural Society HERE.
Marie Antoinette’s influence extended beyond fashion, shaping the interiors, decorative arts, musical tastes and even the gardens of her time. The queen made her mark on the palace of Versailles at the Petit Trianon, landscaping meandering English gardens and a rustic village hamlet that paid homage to the pleasures of the countryside.
The gardens influenced all aspects of her style, from the design of her gowns to her porcelain services. Whilst a true representation of Marie Antoinette’s personal style this retreat into a rural fantasy only fuelled public resentment, reinforcing perceptions of royal detachment.
This Gardens Museum talk, which will be livestreamed on April 14, will consider the creation of the queen’s greatest and most indelible legacy on the architecture of her time, one that has ensured her status as an early modern style icon. Hosted by Dr Sarah Grant, Senior Curator in the Department of Art, Architecture, Photography & Design at the V&A and curator of the current sold-out exhibition Marie Antoinette Style.
