Due to concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, this lecture has been postponed. We will post the new date here.

GCFM President Bonnie Rosenthal's Project is the Native Plant Challenge that encourages all of us to redesign our garden projects with 50% native plants. We need to communicate the ecological importance of using native plants but, designing with natives can be challenging. Come and be inspired by the possibilities and learn how to create a beautiful and stellar native landscape for your communities and your own back yard.

Landscape Architect Amanda Sloan, RLA, ASLA is giving a lecture on Thursday, March 26, 2020 on "Designing with Native Plants." The lecture will take place in the Parkman Room, Massachusetts Horticultural Society, 900 Washington Street, Wellesley, Massachusetts at 10:30 am.

The lecture is open to all and you may register by mailing your check, payable to “GCFM” to: Mary Nokes, 35 Woodpark Cir., Lexington, MA 02421 by March 21, 2020. Please write ‘Native Plant Lecture’ in the memo line and include your email address. For more information contact Georgia Papavasiliou at logganiko@verizon.net.

On February 6, 2020, Landscape Architect Lauren Meier will lecture on “Mabel Cabot Sedgwick, Marjorie Russell Sedgwick and their horticultural legacy at Long Hill.” Long Hill was the summer retreat of publisher Ellery Sedgwick and his wife, Mabel Cabot Sedgwick, an accomplished gardener and horticulturist. Mabel Sedgwick set about designing gardens and landscape amenities that are renowned a century later. After her death in 1937, her vision was sustained and expanded by the second Mrs. Sedgwick, the former Marjorie Russell, a rare plants specialist, who added new and rare species of trees and shrubs to the estate, some introduced by the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. Meier is also a historian and preservationist who is currently a consultant at this property owned by the Trustees of Reservations.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

1:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Reception Follows

900 Washington Street

Wellesley, MA 02182

Members & Professional Affiliations $70/$85

Non-Members & General Public $85/$100

Sign up here

John Phibbs

Beginning with efforts first made by Lancelot "Capability" Brown and then by his successor Humphry Repton, both looked to implement an ever greater closeness to the environment that they found around them. Then in the case of Repton, to progress beyond that - to make landscapes that inspire joy. With every decade from 1750-1820 these two men stripped away and received ideas of what landscape gardening should do, one after another the difficulty, of course, is to recognise simplicity when you see it and to know joy when you find it.

As the Romantic Movement found its voice, there was Revolution, and then came Napoleon.

Phipps has run Debois Landscape Survey Group in Chalford, England since 1978. It is dedicated to the management and conservation of historic landscapes of all kinds. He led the tercentennial celebrations of the birth of Capability Brown in 2016 and published two books on Brown at that time: Capability Brown, Designing the English Landscape for Rizzoli, and Place-making, the Art of Capability Brown for Historic England and the National Trust. He was awarded an MBE by the Queen for Services to Landscape Architecture in 2017.

Ethan Carr