Letter from the President

Dear Friends,

Labor Day has passed and it feels like summer once again! And, it was a beautiful summer for growing, both in the flower beds and the vegetable garden. 

The Gardens at Elm Bank were inviting and brilliant with color this summer!  I would like to introduce you to some of the special people who helped make this happen.

Thank you to David Fiske, our Garden Curator, his staff and interns, and our volunteer garden keepers for their tireless efforts in our gardens and grounds.  This year's volunteer garden keepers were:  Kathy Balles in the Welcome Garden, Martha Kramer and Bev Greer in the Trial Garden, Stephen Shaw in the Hosta Garden, Lisa Feldman, Jackie Dana and Judi Brooks in Weezies,  Carolyn Matthew in the Education Center and Putnam Gardens,  Suzanne Higham in Bressingham, Beth Gray-Nix in the Italianate, Susan Hammond in the Garden to Table Vegetable Garden, and Jeff Rosen in the Crockett Memorial Garden. These volunteers and many more from the Massachusetts Master Gardeners Association and the plant societies help to make The Gardens at Elm Bank a special place for visitors to enjoy.

... We move on to the fall and the many activities to help you connect to horticulture and enjoy our property on the Charles. The Perennial Plant Association will present its fall New England symposium on Sept. 12^th, followed by a fun Spirit and Bounty Garden to Table Fundraiser on Sept. 14th where you can enjoy specialty foods from great chefs and locally distilled beverages in a beautiful garden setting. 

We are honored to have Michael Dirr as our keynote speaker and George Robert White Honoree on October 16 with a wonderful list of awardees for the Honorary Medals Program.

A special thanks to our members and donors who help support Mass Hort and the care and maintenance of these beautiful gardens. We couldn't do it without you and your generous support!

Best regards,

Kathy

John Forti Named Director of Horticulture and Education at Massachusetts Horticultural Society

The Massachusetts Horticultural Society is excited to announce that John Forti has been named the Director of Horticulture and Education in the Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley. His appointment is a major step in the implementation of our 10-year strategic plan.

John will be an exceptional addition to our dedicated staff, and instrumental in realizing goals for our historic landscapes, teaching gardens, garden education program, and the development of tourism on our property. A nationally recognized lecturer, garden historian, ethnobotanist and garden writer, Forti comes to us from the Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH, where he created numerous award-winning gardens and educational programs in the role of the Curator of Historic Landscapes. He previously served as the Director of Horticulture at Plimoth Plantation Museum, where he created a gardens and seed program that brought international attention to the preservation of Pilgrim and Wampanoag heirloom crops.

John founded and serves as the board chair for Slow Food Seacoast. He serves on the bio-diversity committee for Slow Food USA and recently represented the group as an international delegate among the 150 nations at the Terra Madre or "Farmers United Nations" in Italy. He is chair of the board for the Herb Society of America's New England Unit, and won the 2014 Award for Excellence in Horticulture from the national office.

"I met John soon after I joined Mass Hort and was immediately struck by his enthusiasm and passion for horticulture and this legacy institution," said Katherine K. Macdonald, President and Executive Director of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. "John has a wonderful way of engaging with the public, and a clear commitment to helping people of all ages understand the natural world through our relationships with plants."

"For the last 185 years the Massachusetts Horticultural Society has influenced our communities, and fostered a love of horticulture that has touched all of us," John noted. "Since I was a child growing up on the North River in Norwell, MA, our regional landscapes and a passion for gardening (in large part fostered by Mass Hort) helped to shape the course and quality of my life."

Massachusetts Horticultural Society's legacy continues in the 21^st century: improving horticulture for the public good, inspiring gardeners and horticulturalists, and providing a setting, whether in the classroom, the garden, or the exhibit hall, for the public to learn and appreciate horticulture.

"New generations of young farmers, market gardeners and artisanal producers are hungry for mentors. Young children face even greater challenges in an age when studies show that kids know fewer than 10 animals and plants in their own backyards, but recognize over 1,000 corporate logos. But there are solutions, and I am excited to help create landscapes and programs that re-engage the generations and help them to learn from one another in the garden. I look forward to working with garden clubs, master gardeners, school administrators, and our region's horticultural & environmental groups to build resilient communities around our horticultural heritage and our cultural inheritance of heirloom and native plants," John commented.

On Wednesday, September 17^th, Whole Foods, Wellesley, will generously designate Mass Hort's Garden to Table Program as its 5% community support day beneficiary. On that day, 5% of all store purchases will be given to the Garden to Table program. If you are not ready to shop on that day, stop by and pick up a gift card because future sales will also be included.

Elm Bank in the early fall

This fall there are many opportunities to learn at Mass Hort.

On September 12, in partnership with the Perennial Plant Association, we will host an all-day symposium on design and perennial selection. On September 27, Art Scarpa will lead a workshop on dish gardens. Come learn how to assemble and care for these table top arrangements-all materials will be provided. Art in the Garden continues this fall with three courses. Choose any or all of these two-day courses led by instructors from the New England Watercolor Society. Finally, on October 25, we will host a two-hour Floral Design course focusing on jewelry and craft design. Sarah Boynton will teach the basics of creating unique and beautiful pieces from dried flowers. Follow the links to learn more and register.

Beginning in October, we will host a six-week course on the Basics of Floral Design. Each Wednesday, experienced instructors will help you create your own floral arrangements. The class will even help you prepare to enter a design competition. No need to have a competitive spirit though. The course will teach everyone the basics of table design, traditional and creative designs, and miniature designs. Learn the terminology and mechanics and gain confidence. Sign up now.

Reviewed by Patrice Todisco

Published to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth, André Le Nôtre in Perspective celebrates the life and legacy of France's famous royal gardener through an exploration of his achievements as a designer, engineer and collector of fine art.  

Containing forty essays written by academics, curators, landscape architects, gardeners and hydraulic engineers, the book provides fresh insights into Le Nôtre's extraordinary genius and enduring influence on landscape and garden design. The essays consider, in parallel, Le Nôtre's position in society, the material conditions in which his art and work developed and the role his work played in shaping the design profession. It is divided into three sections; Le Nôtre and His Times, Le Nôtre's Art and Work, and Elsewhere and After.

Impeccably researched and lavishly illustrated, André Le Nôtre in Perspective is a work of art in and of itself, combining scholarship with exquisite illustrations, photographs and plans as well as designs and drawings from Le Nôtre's notebooks. The essays present new research culled from documents unavailable in previous studies and provide a fresh perspective on Le Nôtre's origins, family relations, social standing and clientele, reducing the aura of mystery surrounding the "famous and obscure" gardener to King Louis XIV.

Le Nôtre's multi-faceted relationship with Louis XIV is explored within the context of his role as architect of the king's gardens, a responsibility that included providing designs for all of the royal establishments.  For forty-three years Le Nôtre served as Contrôleur general, overseeing finances for construction projects and monitoring their progress.  However, he maintained his passion for horticulture and never "were the spade and the rake completely replaced by the ledger and the pen". 

While André Le Nôtre in Perspective pays homage to Versailles, it fully explores other facets of his work, including that at the Tuileries Gardens, where recent historical and archaeological research have revealed his skill as a "master craftsman working in soil". Chapters are devoted to individual elements of his designs, including vistas, sculptures, hydraulics, parterres, trees and groves, and each is placed within its historical context.      

The formal French garden, as defined through Le Nôtre's vision, has been extensively copied and adapted and is at once both historic and modern. While vilified by proponents of the picturesque, his work inspired the avant garde, providing inspiration for twentieth and twenty-first century designers as diverse as Fletcher, Steele and Le Corbusier.  Versailles, Marly and the Champs- Elysees were the spatial models used by L'Enfant when he designed Washington, DC in 1791.  

This is not a book to be taken lightly.  With a shipping weight of 6.6 pounds, it contains 440 pages, 180 color images and 170 black-&-white illustrations (all of the highest quality). Despite its heft, André Le Nôtre in Perspective will not languish on your bookshelf (dusty or not) but will instead be read and reread, a rare treat to savor.              

Patrice Todisco writes about parks, gardens and the public realm at the award winning blog Landscape Notes: www.landscapenotes.com.

This month we'd like to tell you about the birds and the bees...and some heirlooms, please!

As we reach the peak of summer, many of our crops with longer maturity are ready for harvest. One of these crops was our sunflowers, in the "Seeds We Eat" bed. They matured very suddenly and we had not put netting over them in time, so most of them went to the local birds instead of the food pantries.  But this is not as bad as it sounds. Since we're growing our garden organically, birds are an important part of the ecosystem.  Many birds eat insects as well as seeds, so we're happy to see them in the garden as part of our insect control program.

 We are also providing a good environment for bees. One of the crops we planted in our "Grow The Rainbow" bed is borage, an heirloom herb with edible flowers and leaves. We intended to keep the borage pinched back so it would be a low growing plant, but as it started to produce flowers we saw more and more bees being attracted to it. If you stand quietly near it and watch, you may see up to four different kinds of bees at a time feeding from it.   We've decided to let the borage take up more of the garden bed so we can help the bees and have the educational value of showing this to our visitors.

Traditional plants come from many cultures.  For example, in our Indian bed, the bitter gourd has started to produce usable fruits. In India this is a popular crop, often called Kerala. It's not commonly available in our area and it is a great example of how specialty crops can be grown at home.

The crop most of us think of when we say "heirloom" is tomato. They come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, and have flavors ranging from rich to sweet and everything in-between. Unlike the grocery store tomato, they may have cracks, divots, or wrinkles.   These are not an indication of a problem with the fruit; they are part of the unique heritage of heirloom tomatoes, the star of our August garden.

Come and visit the garden during our harvest and work days (Monday and Thursday, 9-1) to see the full bounty of the garden!

Your garden journal. This has been an unusual summer - drier and decidedly cooler than most. How did your garden fare? What needed the most watering? What vegetables did best, and worst in this weather? What would you give another chance because it was a cool summer? What's off your grow list for next year? If you kept up your garden journal - making even one or two entries a week - you could easily answer those questions. If not, take an hour today and write down what you remember, and what you'd rather forget. It will help you next year and in future years to make your garden better - and perhaps your work a little easier.

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Put away your pruners, for now. This is not the time to be pruning any woody plants around your garden. Spring blooming trees and shrubs have set their flowers for next spring, so pruning would remove those buds. As to those still blooming (or recently finished), pruning them now will encourage new growth that will likely be too tender to make it through the winter. Pruners and saws should not be used on woody plants until the cold weather is thoroughly established in November.

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September weeds

Keep weeding! Weeds are setting seeds in every area of our gardens now. They want to be ready for next season. To save yourself extra work in the spring and summer, remove weeds now. Start with any that are in flower or have seed pods. Pull or dig them out and put them in the trash (composting weeds can lead to weed seeds with a great head start!).

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Lawn renewal. Now is the best time to begin renewing your lawn, or installing a new one. In the fall the temperatures are cooler (the grasses we grow for lawns come from areas without our hot summers) and there is usually more rain. Even more good news, most weeds will not germinate as the days get shorter, which means your lawn will get a good start before it faces competition from plants you don't want to grow.

Grass fertilization from Cornell University

An ideal time to fertilize is between Halloween and Thanksgiving - about two weeks after your last mowing. Apply one pound of 70% slow-release nitrogen fertilizer per 1,000 square feet. That almost always means an organic fertilizer. Are they more expensive? Yes. Will they do a better job? Also yes.  

A late fertilizer application helps the plants build up reserves to get through the winter and green up healthfully in spring. That's because top growth stops in fall after about ten days with average daily temperatures below 50° F. Roots, on the other hand, will continue to grow and take up fertilizer until the ground freezes.

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Tomato blight

In the vegetable garden. While your vegetable garden may be slowing down, you still have a lot to do. If you planted lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard and beets last month, there will be food to harvest until a heavy frost (below 28°) or even closer to 20° if you cover the plants at night with row covers or old blankets. Don't use plastic as it readily transfers cold to the leaves it touches.

As crops finish their season, clean the beds thoroughly. This year, late blight again made its ugly presence known in Massachusetts gardens. Tomato and potato plants infected with blight need to be bagged and sent to the trash. This includes fruit that fell from the vine before ripening as well as dead leaves. As a general rule, it is much better to be safe by sending any plant material from your garden that was insect- or disease-infected to the dump rather than the compost heap.