The Garden Club of the Back Bay

The Massachusetts Audubon Society will hold its 20th Annual Birders Meeting on Saturday, March 3, from 8 – 4 at The LaCava Center, Bentley University in Waltham. Registration fee, which includes lunch, is $63 for Mass Audubon members, $70 for non-members, and you may register online at www.massaudubon.org.  Sessions will include talks by Stephen Kress on Restoring Endangered Seabirds: Lessons from Puffins and Terns, Dave Wiley on Foraging Behavior of Humpback Whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Debi Shearwater on 35 Years of California Seabirding, and Shawn Carey and Jim Grady on Epic Journeys: Tracking the Migrations of Shorebirds in the Western Hemisphere. Additional breakout presentations will be given by Anne-Marie Runfola, Julie C. Ellis, Brian Harrington, and Joan Walsh.

The University of Massachusetts Extension, Massachusetts Department of Conservation, and the USDA Forest Service, will sponsor the 2012 Community Tree Conference on Tuesday, March 13, from 9 – 4 at Stockbridge Hall, UMass Amherst, 80 Campus Center Way, Amherst, Massachusetts.  This Conference is for arborists, foresters, tree wardens, sugar bush owners, and anyone who loves trees.  The conference will cover topics such  as New Research, New Insects (newly discovered, at any rate) & Diseases, A New Safety Standard, and A Reality Check.  The cost is $65 per person for first registration and $40 per person for each additional registration from the same organization.  Coffee break and a parking pass are included in the registration fee, but lunch is on your own.  For a registration form, or to register online, go to http://umassgreeninfo.org/.

This year’s Garden Club of the Back Bay Annual Member Tea will take place under the dome at The Lenox Hotel, 61 Exeter Street in Boston, on Wednesday, February 29, from 3 – 5.  The menu will include smoked salmon finger sandwiches with shaved cucumber and dilled cheese on dark rye, shaved prosciutto di Parma with roasted red pepper aioli and smoked mozzarella on a baguette, a garden vegetable sandwich with alfalfa sprouts, bibb lettuce, cherry tomato, balsamic mayonnaise, and roasted portabello mushroom, and sliced rosemary chicken breast with watercress and  red grapes in a curry vinaigrette.  Assorted scones (blueberry, lemon, plain and pumpkin) and a rich cheese assortment (manchego, gruyere, brie, chedder, chevre and pecorino) will be followed by a variety of freshly baked cookies.  Members will receive written notice of the event.  Guests are welcome.  The price per person is $40 for our members, $50 for guests.  If you are not a member but are interested in attending, please email info@gardenclubbackbay.org. The photo below was taken at a wedding in the Dome Room by Lisa Rigby Photography.

The Third Rhode Island Compost Conference and Trade Show, organized by the Environment Council of Rhode Island’s Compost Initiative and the Greater Providence Urban Agriculture Task Force, will take place Monday, February 27, from 9 – 3 at Hope Artiste Village on Main Street in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.  For more information visit www.ECORI.org.

SAVE THE DATE for the next Garden Conservancy Preservation Weekend conference for September 27 – 30, 2012, at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois.

Preservation Weekend 2012 is devoted to professional development. It will consist of workshops and presentations by public garden professionals, Garden Conservancy staff, and volunteers and staff from gardens with which the Garden Conservancy is working. There will also be tours of some local gardens, including the Chicago Botanic Garden and Millennium Park. Pearl Fryar will give the keynote address. Since the early 1980s, Pearl Fryar has been creating fantastic topiary at his garden in Bishopville, South Carolina. Living sculptures, Pearl’s topiary are astounding feats of artistry and horticulture. Many of the plants in Pearl’s garden were rescued from the compost pile at local nurseries. With Pearl’s patience and skilled hands, these “throw aways” have thrived and have been transformed into wonderful abstract shapes. Pearl Fryar and his garden are now internationally recognized and have been the subject of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, television shows, and even a documentary, A Man Named Pearl. Today, the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden draws visitors from around the globe.

As in the previous Garden Conservancy Preservation Weekends, the Conservancy hopes to have representatives from each of its project gardens as well as other gardens and organizations dedicated to garden preservation across the country.  For more information, visit www.gardenconservancy.org, or email info@gardenconservancy.org and ask to be put on the mailing list when registration material is prepared.

The Esplanade Association (TEA) will hold a public meeting—“Esplanade 2020 Unveiled”—on Thursday, February 9, at 6:00 p.m. in the Rabb Auditorium of the Boston Public Library Central Branch to present a community vision for the Charles River Esplanade. An initiative of The Esplanade Association, Esplanade 2020 has brought together community members, public officials, and design professionals to craft a shared vision for the future of the Esplanade. The meeting will provide the public with an opportunity to hear and comment on the recommendations set forth in Esplanade 2020.

As part of the park’s centennial in 2010, TEA assembled a team of leading Boston design and planning specialists, the Esplanade 2020 Committee, to take a fresh look at every element of the park. Working closely with the Department of Conservation and Recreation, park users, and major stakeholders, this group of volunteers spent more than a year crafting a vision for the Esplanade. The committee held more than a dozen meetings with the general public and a variety of stakeholders to gather input, which helped the committee establish guiding principles, create a vision statement, and define objectives.

Esplanade 2020 illustrates ways in which these core principles, consistently applied, can transform Boston’s waterside park into one of the world’s great urban outdoor spaces.

The objectives of Esplanade 2020 are to present recommendations for the continued restoration and enhancement of the Esplanade for the next 100 years. Some ideas are big and ambitious, others more readily implemented. These ideas can provide context for very specific restoration projects and can serve as an inspiration and as a road map for future improvements on the Esplanade.

For more information on the project, please visit www.esplanadeassociation.org. To offer your thoughts, please send an e-mail to info@esplanadeassociation.org (please put “Esplanade 2020 Unveiled” in the subject line) or write to The Esplanade Association, Attn: Esplanade 2020, 376 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116.

The 2012 New England Rose Society Convention will take place Friday, March 23 through Sunday, March 25 at the Best Western Mainstay Inn in Newport, Rhode Island.  This year’s convention will be hosted by the Rhode Island Rose Society.  Enjoy workshops, a rose show, educational programs, and receptions.  For complete information, visit www.arsyankee.org.  Ruby Celebration rose from Apuldram Roses (www.apuldramroses.co.uk)

Powerful Vistas/Powerful Views: New Perspectives in Historic Landscape Preservation, the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation 2012 Conference, will be held in Victoria, BC, April 25-28, 2012.

The 34th annual gathering of the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation will discuss new perspectives in historic landscape preservation when it convenes in Victoria, British Columbia in April 2012. Suggested topics for discussion papers include challenges and approaches to the identification, sustainability and protection of historic landscapes and issues of cultural diversity, identity and meaning in landscape preservation. Our vistas will be Canada’s powerful, awe-inspiring West Coast landscape. The First Nations people knew it intimately. Emily Carr lovingly interpreted it in her paintings. Now you can see it for yourself.And Vancouver Island beckons you to engage in this kaleidoscope of ideas. The City of Victoria promotes itself as being “full of life” and we intend to inject as much of that into your conference experience as we can. Centered at the venerable Empress Hotel puts us alongside the Inner Harbour and in the heart of the city both convenient for exploring by foot or as a launching off point for bus tours. Field visits will look at aboriginal, colonial and multicultural engagements with the powerful landscapes of the Canadian west coast.And, as always, while we are not able to accommodate all that the Victoria region has to offer in the short time that we will be together, we’ll provide some ideas about interesting places that you might explore either before/after the conference (including Vancouver across the Georgia Strait or Seattle, if you are coming Stateside).

Learn more about the conference on the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation website, www.ahlp.org.

For complete information, visit www.ecolandscaping.org.

The February meeting of The Garden Club of the Back Bay will take place Thursday, February 16, beginning at 10:00 am at The College Club, 44 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Lee Schneller Sligh will present an illustrated lecture entitled Historic Gardens of Japan. Lee Schneller Sligh is a Master Gardener volunteer and has designed and built more than 200 gardens in Maine since 1995 as owner of Lee Schneller Fine Gardens. Her revolutionary perennial garden design system is the subject of her new book, The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden: A Blueprint for Continuous Color (Storey Publishing, March 2009), which has been a continuous bestseller in independent bookstores and on Amazon.com. She lectures frequently and offers four-hour workshops teaching her design method. In addition to continuously blooming gardens, Lee specializes in Japanese-inspired and naturalistic gardens. She lived in Japan for four years, earned degrees in Chinese language and literature and in Asian history and worked for ten years as a Japanese technical translator before starting her gardening business.
Illustrated with striking photos from her travels throughout Japan over thirty years, this talk and slide show introduces very old gardens, some brought to light only recently through the efforts of archaeologists. The oldest Japanese garden discovered so far is a little-known stream garden in rural Mie Prefecture dating from the 4th century A.D., which was just discovered and excavated in the 1990s.  Japanese gardens are widely admired for the sense of intimacy and inner stillness they convey to the viewer, an effect achieved through the sensitive and simple arrangement of elements. These qualities seem ever more precious, both to the Japanese and to foreigner visitors, and make the Japanese garden a timeless refuge from our complicated and fast-paced modern lives.  Lee specializes in creating Japanese-inspired gardens with native New England plants, and travels frequently to Japan to tour and research gardens. Examples of her work can be seen at www.LeeSchneller.com.

Garden Club members will receive written notice of this meeting in the mail.  Non-members are cordially invited to attend ($10 meeting only, $25 with lunch following the meeting) with reservations.  Email info@gardenclubbackbay.org, or telephone 617-859-8865.

Join fellow conservation professionals, volunteers and board members for a morning of free topical workshops on Saturday, February 11, from 8:30 – noon at the Canal Club Facility, Trowbridge Road (off the Bourne Bridge Rotary), Quality Inn Hotel in Bourne, Massachusetts. Come hear about: * How to deal with property violations and fund stewardship * The new Massachusetts tax credit incentive for conservation donations * Developing good governance policies for your organization * Using new media to reach out to your members and others. Funding for the Convocation is provided by The Island Foundation of Marion, MA. Co-sponsored by The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, Inc, Coalition for Buzzards Bay, Inc, & the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition, Inc.  For more information, visit www.thecompact.net.

On Valentine’s Day, The Cambridge Entomological Club will host Christian Rabeling, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, as the speaker for its February meeting.  Christian’s studies include the evolutionary biology of social insects, genetic evolution and speciation of social parasites, and the natural history of ants.  CEC meetings are held the second Tuesday of the month from October through May. The evening schedule typically includes an informal dinner (6:15 to 7:15 PM) followed by our formal meeting (7:30 – 9:00 PM) in MCZ 101, 26 Oxford Street, Harvard University. The latter begins with club business and is followed by a 50 minute entomology related presentation. Membership is open to amateur and professional entomologists.  For more information, email CEC President Jessica Walden-Gray at jessisoutside@gmail.com.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), and the Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives are launching a new project to update the Boston Zoning Code to support Urban Agriculture (UA) city wide. UA is small scale farming that makes healthy, fresh food more accessible and empowers Bostonians by creating economic opportunity. Examples of urban farming include rooftop greenhouse agriculture, aquaponics (fish farming), community farms, farm stands, composting, and other fresh food-producing endeavors. The kickoff and “visioning” meeting will take place Monday, January 30, from 6 – 8:30 pm at Suffolk University, 73 Tremont Street, 9th floor. The keynote speaker is Will Allen, Founder and CEO of Growing Power Inc. Will is a former pro athlete and 2008 McArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient for his work on urban farming and sustainable food productions.

Please bring some form of ID (drivers license, credit card) to clear building security, or you may send your full name prior to January 27 to john.read.BRA@cityofboston.gov. You may call Tad Read, Senior Planner, at 617-918-4264 for more information.

For all those interested in improving and expanding Boston’s Urban Forest. Become a part of a resident based stewardship and advocacy group whose goals are to plant trees and educate the public about the benefits of trees. The meeting will take place Tuesday, January 24, from 6:30 – 7:30 at the BNAN offices, 62 Summer Street in downtown Boston. Please RSVP to reserve your spot at 617-542-7696 ext 20 or email mathew@bostonnatural.org.

Groundscapes Express has worked on many ecosystem restoration projects throughout the region. Groundscapes’ approach treats the whole site as an ecosystem or a sub-watershed for greatest success. Projects implement best practices for improved water quality, soil compaction, invasive species, and erosion control. At this Roundtable presentation on Thursday, January 19, from 1 – 3:30 pm at the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens’ Visitors Center, 106 Central Street in Wellesley,, John Engwer will describe ecosystem restoration projects at sites including Wellesley College, Kent Hospital, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Mount Auburn Cemetery, and Fresh Pond Reservation.  Though the sites differ widely, the issues of soil compaction, stormwater management, and invasive species control are common to all.  Registrations are limited – call 617-436-5838, or email ela.info@comcast.net.  $20 ELA or Wellesley Friends of Horticulture member price, $25 for nonmembers.

There will be a free joint program of the North Shore Community Health Network and the NCHC Northeast Prevention Institute on Thursday, January 12, from 8:30 am – noon at the Peabody Marriott, 8 Centennial Drive in Peabody, entitled Creating Healthy, Safe and Livable Communities: Bridging the Gap Between Public Health and Community Development.  What does it mean to “design” a healthy community? Why is it important? Where do you start? A panel of experts from community development and public health will share their knowledge and experience in developing projects and policy-making that make community and regional health a priority. The morning will begin with breakfast and networking within and across sectors. Local case studies will be presented by the panel followed by roundtable discussions to encourage new ideas, concepts and the building of knowledge in this area. You will walk away with: – greater understanding of the impact planning and policy (inherent in community development, housing, transportation, etc.) can have on public health – strategies for creating partnerships and strengthening role of public health in planning – concrete tools and resources that can be used to achieve effective outcomes – ideas for reprogramming and leveraging existing funds to support integration of public health and community development This workshop is funded in part by the North Shore Community Health Network (NSCHN).

Panel Presenters: – Lea Susan Ojamaa, Division of Prevention and Wellness, MA Department of Public Health – Stephen Winslow, Senior Project Manager, City of Gloucester Mass in Motion – Mariana Arcaya, Public Health Manager, Metropolitan Area Planning Council – Eric Halvorsen, Transit Manager, Metropolitan Area Planning Council – Heather McMann, Executive Director, Groundwork Lawrence.  For more information, contact Kirsten Doherty at 978-722-2861, or email her at kdoherty@glfhc.org.

The New England Landscape Design & History Association (NELDHA) cordially invites you to its first meeting of 2012, featuring a “Slide Slam” focusing on the theme Designing Paradise.  Share garden and landscape photos – from a recent trip or completed project – with fellow members.  Choose 8 – 10 slides (we still use these?) or PowerPoint visuals of a garden or landscape you would like to share and save to a portable memory stick.  AV equipment will be provided.  The event will take place Thursday, January 26, from 3 – 5 at the Fishbowl, The Boston Architectural College, 320 Newbury Street in Boston.  RSVP to Laurie Pazzano at 781-893-7185, or email her at lpazzano@hotmail.com.  Photo below taken in Magnolia, Massachusetts.

Join the New England Carnivorous Plant Society on Saturday, January 14, at 12:30 pm at the Roger Williams Botanical Center in Providence for the Nepenthes (Tropical Pitcher Plant) Cutting Event.  Members will leave with a cutting for propagation, and may bring in overgrown Nepenthes vines and share the fun with other members.  To join, or for more information, visit www.necps.org.

The National Organizers Alliance is planning an Organizers Gathering to bring together social justice organizers to build relationship across a wide spectrum of issues and campaigns on Wednesday,  Jan. 18 (snow date: Thursday, Jan. 19) from 5:30 to 8 pm, with a healthy catered dinner, at MIT, Building 9, 105 Mass Avenue, Rooms 9-450 A and B (note: 105 Mass Ave is right next to the Main Entrance at 77 Mass Ave).

We have found that organizers rarely speak to people outside our own circles or “silos” and therefore don’t develop the relationships that can nurture a broad movement for social justice. Rather than examine the things that divide us, let understand and learn from one another.

SPEED MENTORING We will also have a time for organizers who want to mentor others and for organizers looking for mentors to connect.

Sponsored by the National Organizers Alliance (see: www.noacentral.org) and an organizing committee (in formation).

To sign up for dinner, go to: www.noacentral.org to the “donate” button, and donate $15 for dinner. ($10 for NOA members)

For more information, Contact : Ron Bell, 617 378-1889, email:RonBell400@gmail.com; Michael Jacoby Brown, 617 645 0226 or mjbrown246@gmail.com, Nurys Camargo at nuryscamargo@gmail.com, or Ceasar McDowell, at ceasar@mit.edu.

Welcome new members and greet old friends at The Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay’s 2012 Member Reception, to be held this year at towne stove and spirits, 900 Boylston Street, on Sunday, January 15, from 4:30 – 6:30.  This event is free to members.  Enjoy complimentary hors d’oeuvres, with a cash bar.  An rsvp is requested by January 6.  Email names to info@nabbonline.com, or call 617-247-3961.