Mass Marketplace will host over 45 vendors along with fun activities for kids on August 6th

New this year: Scarecrow Contest!
Help protect the vegetables in our new Chef's and Pantry Gardens by creating an awesome scarecrow. Prizes will be awarded to the most original entries.
Learn more about the contest here.

Admission
Adults - $6
MassHort Members - $4
Children Under 12 - $2

Tickets are available on site the day of the event.
Event proceeds benefit the Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

Massachusetts Marketplace Festival is produced by MassHort with in-kind support from the MA Department of Agricultural Resources and MA Specialty Food Association.

Have you ever had a hankering to be a part of history? How about taking part in a near-century-long tradition? On Thursday, September 8, you're cordially invited to do both.

Lynden B. Miller will be the keynote speaker at the 2011 Honorary Medals Dinner

Each year the Massachusetts Horticultural Society honors superior achievements in horticulture through its Honorary Medals Dinner. This year, ten people will be recognized, led by Lynden B. Miller who receives the George Robert White Medal of Honor for her work as a designer of urban parks. Ms. Miller will deliver the keynote speech as part of the evening's events.

Ms. Miller is a public garden designer in New York City and director of The Conservatory Garden in Central Park, which she rescued and restored beginning in 1982. Her work includes gardens for The Central Park Zoo, Bryant Park, The New York Botanical Garden, Madison Square Park, and Wagner Park in Battery Park City as well as many smaller projects in all five boroughs and beyond, including waterfront gardens in Red Hook, Brooklyn, improvements to Union Square Park and the 97th Street Park Avenue Mall, renovation of the "Gateway to Harlem" Broadway Mall at 135th Street, Loeb Plaza for Hunter College, and the 67th Street Armory.

Wesley R. Autio, professor of pomology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will receive the Jackson Dawson Award.

Also being honored is Wesley R. Autio, professor of pomology in the Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Mr. Autio grew up in a rural/tourist part of western Maine and received his B.S. degree in Horticulture from Virginia Tech and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Pomology from UMass. In 1985, he joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts. He currently serves as the UMass Fruit Program Leader and Coordinator of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture’s Fruit & Vegetable Crops Program. He regularly interacts with tree-fruit farmers and the many individuals interested in tree fruit in the landscape. His research focuses on apple and peach rootstocks, controlling growth apple trees with mechanical and hormonal approaches, and chemical thinning of apples. He will receive the Jackson Dawson Award.

The recipient of the Thomas Roland Medal will be Richard Jaynes. Jaynes has always enjoyed growing plants. The acres of Christmas tree fields at his Broken Hill Nursery trace back to a couple hundred spruce seedlings he planted as part of a 4-H project in 1947. A graduate from Wesleyan University (BA) and Yale (Ph.D.), he worked at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station for 25 years as a plant breeder and horticulturist with specialties in chestnut and mountain laurel. He has received numerous awards for his research and edited the reference book Nut Tree Culture in North America and authored Kalmia: Mountain Laurel and Related Species. He resigned from the Experiment Station in 1984 to start Broken Arrow Nursery.

Gold Medals will be given to volunteer Joyce Bakshi, who for the past two years has organized the Festival of Trees at Elm Bank. Also receiving gold medals will be Theodore Landsmark of Boston Architectural College for his work on behalf of the Landscape Institute; Organic Gardening Magazine for its promotion of ecologically sound practices in gardening and farming; writer Ellen Ecker Ogden for her articles, essays and talks on organic gardening; and Carrie Waterman for her outstanding volunteer work over several decades on behalf of amateur horticulture.


Tickets are $150 per person to this event. There are also opportunities to either co-host or host a table. You may order individual tickets here. To co-host or host a table, please call our reservation line at 617-933-4995. All proceeds from the dinner will be used to support maintenance and improvement of MassHort gardens.

Every Wednesday evening from April through August, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society has offered a talk on a different subject of interest to the home gardener. We're down to just two more sessions, but they're dandies!

Mary Arnberg

Paul Miskovsky

How avid a home gardener are you? Serious enough to devote a day to improving your garden? If so, you'll want to put Thursday, September 15 on your calendar. That's when the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and the Perennial Plant Association team up to offer a day-long seminar titled, ' Exploring Design and Perennial Selection for the Home Garden'. It's the third annual teaming of Mass Hort and the PPA to present some of the best writers and creative plantsmen in the business to serious home gardeners.

Six speakers, none of whom has previously appeared at Mass Hort, will present hour-long talks on subjects including 'The Arts and Crafts Garden', 'Spanning the Globe with Perennials', 'Goosebump Perennials for the Garden' and 'Creating the Non-stop Garden'.

9:00 am - 10:00 am - The Arts and Crafts Garden
Dr. Denise Adams
Stony Point, New York

Beauty, efficiency, and simplicity are the hallmarks of gardens created in the early 20th century. Denise will trace the history of this garden style and discuss and illustrate ways to apply the principles to today's home landscapes.

10:30 am - 11:30 am - Who Does Your Garden? Spanning the Globe With Perennials
Dr. Steven Still
Perennial Plant Association, Hilliard, Ohio

Gardens and nurseries in Europe have been a fertile ground for perennials that are used in Midwest US gardens. Dr. Still will provide a visual history of noted perennials and the individuals responsible for their introductions. Learn the origin of Karl Foerster feather reed grass, Magnus purple coneflower, Goldsturm gloriosa daisy, and many others that grace your perennial gardens. The Perennial Plant Association has selected many of these important perennials as Perennial Plants of the Year™.

11:30 am - 12:30 pm - When Pretty Isn't Enough: Comparative Perennial Trials at the Chicago Botanic Garden
Richard Hawke
Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois

Each year hundreds of new plants are introduced. Whether the plants bring excitement or disappointment depends in part on a rigorous evaluation process before the plants go to market. The Chicago Botanic Garden's Plant Evaluation Program has been evaluating perennials in comparative trials for 29 years. Richard will discuss the plant evaluation process that ultimately leads to recommendations of superior plants for gardens. He will present a variety of proven perennials, including new selections and old favorites.

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm - Goosebump Perennials for the Garden
Chris Hansen, Great Garden Plants
Holland, Michigan

Join Chris for a fast-paced look at the most exciting new perennials, shrubs, and groundcovers for 2011 and 2012. For more than 15 years, Chris has scoured the United States and Europe for the newest and best to introduce through various online mail-order plant companies. Chris guarantees goosebumps as you sneak-preview more than 100 tantalizing new plants.

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm - Creating the Nonstop Garden
Jennifer Benner, Roxbury, Connecticut

A nonstop garden doesn't mean nonstop work. Lower maintenance is just one of many benefits of four-season gardening. In this lecture, horticulturist Jennifer Benner will outline the benefits of creating a nonstop garden. She will highlight plant choices from key plant groups-trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, edibles, bulbs, and vines-and explore other ornamental elements that help achieve year-round interest.

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm - Contained Joy
Irvin Etienne, Indianapolis Museum of Art
Indianapolis, Indiana

One of the simplest ways of enriching our lives with plants is through the use of containers. Containers let us experiment with new plants. They beautify our gardens. And they even provide food for the table. Regardless of whether a garden is in a traditional yard or on a tiny apartment balcony, both the container and the plants chosen help express your individuality. Want to grow vegetables but don't have land? Tomatoes and eggplants do fine in containers. You only like orange? Use plants with orange flowers or foliage in an orange container. The possibilities are limitless. This lecture will cover the basics (cultural conditions, soil, some ideal plants) and look at some finished designs that will lend inspiration. Emphasis will be on over-the-top tropicals.

The Speakers

Denise Adams
Dr. Denise Adams is a horticulturist, garden historian, lecturer, photographer, and garden writer. Denise has been a Perennial Plant Association member since her graduate days at The Ohio State University. She serves as co-chair of the PPA Nomenclature Committee and has received the Perennial Plant Association Service Award. Denise is the author of Restoring American Gardens - An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants.


Jennifer Benner
A graduate of The Ohio State University horticulture program, Jennifer gained experience in nursery production, garden design, installation, and maintenance. She eventually worked as a horticulture manager, specializing in perennial and container gardens. Jennifer joined Fine Gardening magazine, where she spent seven years taking articles from conception to print and as an associate editor. Now the communications manager for the Connecticut Forest & Park Association, she also works as a freelance writer, photographer, and horticulture consultant. Her book, The Nonstop Garden, a collaborative project with perennial expert Stephanie Cohen, was published by Timber Press.

Chris Hansen
Chris is the vice-president of Great Garden Plants of Holland, Michigan. Great Garden Plants, established in 2007, is an online source of new and exciting garden plants. Chris's career in horticulture includes time in internships at the Missouri Botanic Garden and Longwood Gardens, as Director of Horticulture for Wayside Gardens, and in a wholesale nursery for several years. During this time Chris has visited and photographed thousands of nurseries and home gardens. His experiences searching for new perennials will be highlighted in "Goosebump Perennials for the Garden".

Richard Hawke
Richard is the Chicago Botanic Garden's Plant Evaluation Manager, and is responsible for the comparative evaluation of more than 9,000 plants representing 1,000 taxa of herbaceous perennials, vines, shrubs, and small trees. His work is frequently cited as unbiased, scientific analysis of plant performance. He is the author of Plant Evaluation Notes, writes for numerous horticulture publications, and teaches frequently at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Irvin Etienne
Irvin began his career at the Indianapolis Museum of Art as a horticulturist/gardener in 1992 and was named Horticultural Display Coordinator in 2003. He helps others in their plant selection and design while maintaining several areas himself. Irvin's strength is his wide knowledge of plant material. His weakness is also his wide knowledge of plant material (the more you know, the more you want). He has a definite bias for and towards everything tropical and annual (and gaudy). A product of the Midwest, Irvin might be considered, well, really just a simple farm boy that likes shiny sparkly things. He has a degree in Public Horticulture from Purdue University.

Steven Still
Steven is the Executive Director of the Perennial Plant Association and professor emeritus of The Ohio State University. He is the author of the widely used textbook Manual of Herbaceous Ornamental Plants. Dr. Still's teaching included courses in herbaceous and woody plant materials. During his 30 years of teaching he had opportunities to tour numerous private and public gardens and nurseries in Europe. He will use information from these travels in "Who Does Your Garden? Spanning the Globe With Perennials".

You may register online or call 614-771-8431 if you have questions.

You may also download the program and mail-in registration form.

The Garden to Table program continues to flourish, demonstrating sustainable and beautiful vegetable gardening and bringing healthy local food to a growing audience.

Phase one of our program was to re-design, re-build, and re-plant our one-acre vegetable garden. Betty Sanders, Gretel Anspach, and Sonja Johansen led this effort, and we partnered with YouthBuild Boston to build our new raised beds. The Chef's Garden demonstrates 22 different approaches to home gardening; and the Food Pantry Garden is supplying fresh vegetables and herbs to our neighbors in need. As of this writing, Mass Hort has donated 359 pounds of fresh produce to three local food pantries.

The frames of the raised beds in the new vegetable garden

YouthBuild Boston to build our new raised beds

A panorama of the bounty in the vegetable garden

In phase two, we're holding a series of Chef's Tastings, welcoming friends to Elm Bank and offering three courses of beautiful garden-based food. We've had three Tastings so far: Greens and Cheese, The First Harvest, and New England Summer featured local chefs serving dishes inspired by the fresh produce available in our garden. The next tasting will be held in September.

'The First Harvest' with chef John Lawrence , June 6

'New England Summer' with chef Jeremy Sewall, July 25

The third phase is to increase our education and outreach efforts. In September and October, we'll be holding a series of classes, including two in partnership with the Wellesley Free Library. Watch the Leaflet for information about classes on weight loss, three things to do with tomatoes, preserving the harvest, and many more.

Finally, we're seeking volunteer cooks! We're looking for home cooks and culinary professionals to hold quick and simple cooking demonstrations using our contributions to the Wellesley Food Pantry. Email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it to learn more.

by Betty Sanders
Lifetime Master Gardener

A familiar sign of summer

A tree watering bag

A soaker hose

In hindsight, it seems as though July 13 was pre-ordained to be a special day. The week-long heat wave broke overnight, threatened thunderstorms went elsewhere and a few fair-weather clouds provided just the right amount of shade. At 9 a.m. sharp, a group of 45 ardent gardeners finished the last of their coffee and Danish in the Crockett Memorial Garden and walked a hundred yards to the entrance of the Bressingham Garden.

Leading them was Adrian Bloom, the U.K. horticulturalist and plantsman who designed the garden four years ago, and whose namesake nursery, Blooms of Bressingham, developed many of the cultivars that grace the acre-plus garden.

Adrian, who is head of Blooms Nurseries, Ltd., comes to Elm Bank once or twice a year to check up on his creation. It's his largest installation in North America and one that gets rather a lot of attention. On this morning, he combined his inspection with a designer's-point-of-view talk to a small group. For more than an hour, he spoke about what he had in mind when he created the site, what had worked, and what had to be revised on the fly.

Adrian Bloom answers questions atop a boulder in the Bressingham Garden

The New England Wild Flower Society invites Mass Hort members to the Garden in the Woods in August.

Free Admission to Garden in the Woods for Mass Hort Members. Between August 13 and August 21, the New England Wild Flower Society invites members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society to enjoy free admission to Garden in the Woods. Just show your membership card. Located at 180 Hemenway Road in Framingham, Garden in the Woods is open 9 a.m. -5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. You're also invited to view the 'Native BUZZ' competition: 14 creative container gardens designed to attract pollinators throughout the property. You'll also receive a 10% discount on your purchases of native plants and more.

Getting Married, or Know Someone Who Is? On September 25, Elm Bank will host The Wedding Event, an opportunity to personally meet more than 30 vendors who offer every kind of wedding-related service from photographers and caterers to wedding planners. And, of course, it's an opportunity to see Elm Bank as a perfect place to hold a wedding or reception.

Cerceris fumipennis, a native wasp species, is an expert at catching Agrilus beetles.

Wasp Watchers Wanted. Want to help protect Massachusetts from the invasive emerald ash borer? Volunteer teams are needed to track the beetles, using a wasp that is an expert at finding them. Cerceris fumipennis, a native wasp species, is an expert at catching Agrilus beetles, including the Agrilus of greatest concern to us in Massachusetts: the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis, "EAB"). EAB has not yet been found in Massachusetts, but specimens were discovered within 25 miles of our border last summer. Cerceris wasps are a valuable tool in our efforts to find EAB as early as possible. The wasps are easy to hunt for because they build their nests in sandy soil, in areas like baseball fields, parking lots, campsites and roadsides. And these wasps do not sting, even when handled. The Mass. Department of Agricultural Resources is looking to train small teams or volunteer leaders from larger organizations to help locate new Cerceris colonies. For groups able to commit more time, volunteers are also needed to adopt sites with established colonies, in order to monitor the wasp nests and collect beetles. For more information, visit http://massnrc.org/pests/blog/2011/06/wasp-watchers-wanted.html.

Sometime in late October or early November, millions of viewers are going to tune into This Old House and see homeowner Rebecca Titlow walking with TOH's landscaping expert, Roger Cook. Rebecca will explain that she's been thinking about the need for a vegetable garden at the 1720 house in Bedford, Massachusetts, that is the subject of the fall season of the venerable PBS program (which begins airing October 6). Rebecca will say that she wants her daughter to know where food comes from.

And then Roger will say, "Well, Rebecca, that's why I've brought you to see this great vegetable garden at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society."

This Old House lanscaping expert Roger Cook and homeowner Rececca Titlow encounter Betty Sanders

Review by Judith M. Taylor, M. D.
www.horthistoria.com
The San Francisco Garden Club
Member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society

An Englishman's Garden is but one of the 100 books Edward Hyams wrote. Hyams, 1910 - 1975, was a rather extraordinary man. He was born into a comfortably middle class family, well educated at excellent schools and when his father's work took them to France attended a lycée in Paris and university in Lausanne. Hyams became completely bilingual and frequently translated significant books for the English market. Those of us old enough to have read Zoe Oldenbourg's The Cornerstone will have read it in Hyams' translation.

After serving in the Royal Navy in WWII he threw up his urban existence and moved permanently to a small property in Kent. The war had shown him the futility of his previous life and he wanted to get back to basics. Fortunately his wife agreed. In1961 they moved to a rather dilapidated vicarage in Devonshire and spent the next few years building a garden.

In the mornings Hyams wrote articles and books to earn enough money to keep them going. He spent the rest of the time doing very heavy manual labor in the garden. An Englishman's Garden is the account of that experience. Country parsons received vast drafty houses with their livings because of their large families. That was fine as long as they came from the wealthy classes and used their own (or their wives', see Barchester Towers) money to keep everything up. With the decline of the established English church all this changed and the vicarages were too expensive to maintain.

Landscove in Devonshire was a supreme example of this trend. It had 3 acres of land which once were a large garden. By the early 1960s the only vestiges of cultivation were several handsome cedar trees, some overgrown shrubs and mountains but mountains of rubbish. In each chapter of his book Hyams describes how he cleared different sections of the land, mainly by hand, graded it and then planted it. He chose his plants with extreme care.

Somewhere along the way Hyams had learned an enormous amount about horticulture, so much so he was the garden correspondent of a leading weekly magazine, The Illustrated London News. This was one of his sources of income. One of the useful by-products of his horticultural journalism was becoming friendly with the major figures in British gardening at the time. On every other page of his book he notes that he received cuttings of a rare species from one or another noted garden person. Dartington Hall was not too far away in Devonshire. The garden had been designed by Beatrix Farrand and continued to be faithfully maintained by Jonathan Johnson, the gardener.

While Hyams extolled the virtues of the garden and the gardener he did not mention Beatrix Farrand in his book. It may be he had not heard of her. He enjoyed Dartington Hall's resources in the early 1960s and her reputation had not yet been restored to its former glory.

Hyams also visited amazing gardens in other part of the British Isles and experimented with plants which had flourished on the West coast of Ireland or high up in Scotland. The book offers penetrating commentary on their success or failure.

True to the rarefied company he was keeping Hyams tended only to grow species plants. In the case of rhododendrons this was a profound contribution to gardening knowledge. He grew more than 40 species of this genus. I know because I have made a list of the 256 plants mentioned in the book. Occasionally he became a bit bombastic and pompous about the iniquities of hybrids, wholly undeserved in my opinion.

The strengths and weaknesses of the soil and climate in that part of Devonshire were key to the results he reported. Standard lilies grew magnificently as did many tender shrubs when carefully placed for protection from cold winds. A number of rhododendrons flourished in spite of soil which was not particularly acid. Native violets and primroses prospered under his trees and shrubs and he planted a number of very productive fruit trees. He was most impressed by a fecund lemon tree in his greenhouse, rare for him but not strange to us. It was a Meyer lemon…

After almost a decade of hard slogging the garden was "finished". He sold up and moved away. Everyone knows that a garden is never finished but in his epilogue he commented that he had no wish to do the heavy work of maintenance. Under this insouciant attitude we now know the sale was probably due to the breakup of his marriage. Hyams met someone else and married her a year or two later. He was by then well into his 60s. They bought another "fixer upper" in Suffolk and proceeded to go through the whole cycle yet again.

In addition to horticulture Hyams had a profound interest in the history of anarchism. He died suddenly in France while doing research on the famous anarchist Pierre Proudhon and is buried in Besançon. Several of his books are minor classics and his contributions deserve more recognition.

There has not been space in this review to do justice to his advanced views on soil maintenance and its importance for successful crops. For this alone we should remember his name.

Copyright © Judith M. Taylor July 2011

An Englishman's Garden
Hyams, Edward
London
Thames and Hudson 1967

by Betty Sanders
Lifetime Master Gardener

Drought and your garden: This issue of the Leaflet includes an article, 'Gardening in a Time of Water Bans'. It's 'must' reading even if your town hasn't imposed watering restrictions.

In the garden . Keep weeding! The weed seeds you prevent now are the weeds you won't have to pull next year and for many years after. When removing weeds, put them in the trash - not the compost. And, keep your garden clean. Take off leaves infected with mildew or other diseases and put them in the trash along with those weeds. It is better to sacrifice one plant with persistent problems than to allow it to spread throughout the garden.

August brings the insect hordes, including pest insects. Always treat insects with the least toxic methods available. Most of the insects you see do little or no damage to plants and can be left alone. Those seriously damaging plants can sometimes be removed with a hard spray from a hose which sends them to the ground where they become other bugs' dinner. Others can be hand-picked.

Remove spent flowers from perennials

Order spring bulbs now

Editor's note: We have a celebrity in our midst. On May 27, Betty Sanders was honored at the annual convention of National Garden Clubs, the parent organization of more than 6200 garden clubs with 200,000 members. Betty was recognized as 'Volunteer of the Year' for the New England region, one of eight people so honored nationally for their work beyond the garden club world. Her monthly 'Horticultural Hints' column for the Leaflet is just one of her activities that benefits Mass Hort.

You can explore more of Betty Sanders’ gardening thoughts at www.BettyonGardening.com.