NHS LECTURES

THREE LECTURES FREE WITH MEMBERSHIP

Reception 6:45 p.m. — Lecture 7:15 p.m., Wednesdays

Location: Center for Urban Horticulture — Click here for directions

No Reservations are Taken for Wednesday Evening Lecture Series

Fee: Members $5 — Non-members $10

2012 NHS Lecture Schedule

January 11, 2012: Looking at Gardens through a Wide Angle Lens; Polly Hankin; Polly Hankin, landscape architect, designer and instructor at Edmonds Community College, will discuss her approach to garden planning. Her title is a metaphor for an attitude about gardens that invites us to step back and widen our focus when considering our gardens to include time, physical context and society. She says that when she walks into a garden she tries to step back and see the big picture first before she focuses in on the vignettes and carefully composed pieces. Polly will show us how to escape falling into the all too easy habit of looking too closely at detail and failing to see the forest for the trees.
March 14, 2012: Gourmet Gardening: Growing Your Own Groceries; Willi Galloway; Willi Galloway, garden writer, radio commentator, popular blogger and author of the soon to be published Grow Cook Eat: A Food Lover’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening lives and gardens in Portland. In this photo-filled lecture, Willi will explore the diversity of food in our gardens. Many crops can be eaten at more than one stage of growth or have several edible parts, including fruit, roots, leaves, flower buds, and seed pods. You’ll learn to harvest crops like garlic scapes and green coriander, discover the best vegetable varieties for the Pacific Northwest, and learn strategies for growing the best tasting food all season long.
April 11, 2012: On Top but Never In Control—Tales from a Small Garden; Timothy Walker; Timothy Walker, botanist and Director of the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and the Harcourt Arboretum, presented a series this past summer on BBC Scotland, Botany: A Blooming History. His current post involves a mixture of teaching, administration, begging and curating of the National Collection of Euphorbias, but no gardening. This happens on weekends in his wife’s garden, if allowed. Timothy will share with us the story of the making of his wife’s 1/5 acre. It is a story of successes and failures. It charts not only the development of the garden during the past 13 years but also the gardeners and gardens that have influenced the style of planting. He will show what you can do on your own in a short period of time in a small garden.
May 9, 2012: Soul Gardening; Jenks Farmer; Jenks Farmer, writer, lecturer, curator of Moore Farms Garden and owner of LushLife Nursery in South Carolina, has designed gardens from Seattle to Managua. He will talk about the missions, research and style of two botanical gardens he has built since moving back from Seattle to South Carolina, other private gardens and of course the plants that need lots and lots of heat hours that make his South Carolina gardens unique (such as crinum, saw palms, manfreda, berchemia, mucuna, rhexia...). He will touch on how growing up in the ruins of plantations and farms he learned to love plants as a child and how plants from around the world, plants that climb, jump, intermingle and dominate make their way into his gardens. You will see how the gardens he creates are places where the soul rather than the hand of man is in charge. His gardens are ruled by plants response to excess—rain, sun, heat and rich soil—and are furnished by architecture and stuff which reflect the agrarian, sustenance farms of the South Carolina low country but are thoroughly of the modern world.
June 13, 2012: Hydrangeas: What, How, WOW!; Nita Jo Rountree; Nita Jo Rountree, lecturer, garden designer and former president of NHS, will take us beyond our grandmother’s hydrangeas to discover a world of exciting cultivars and species. Nita-Jo will review flower color, cultural requirements, bloom time, pruning, and inspire you with design tips. She will demonstrate how to successfully care for and grow these showy, versatile beauties and how to enjoy their lovely, large blooms inside as dried or cut flowers.
October 10, 2012: The Pleasure Garden; Jeffrey Bale; Jeffrey Bale was educated as a landscape architect, but he has built a career as a garden designer and artist using a hands-on approach to creating gardens of intimate, sensuous beauty. His gardens and wonderful stone mosaics have been influenced by his extensive travels in Europe, South Asia and South America. His travels to places like the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, the ancient villas of Pompeii, and Renaissance Mannerist gardens in Italy taught him that the garden is a place to experience pleasure. Learning from those models he has built a variety of gardens for himself and his clients where the visitor can commune with the abundance of nature and the divine, rest, feast, bathe, listen to music, and party in a world of heavenly, meaningful beauty.
November 14, 2012: Personal Expression in the Garden; Lee Buttala; Lee Buttala, Preservation Program Manager of The Garden Conservancy, will discuss four gardens whose creators—writers, painters, designers, and architects—applied the lessons of their profession to the landscape, creating deeply personal gardens of exceptional merit. By merging their sense of color, rhythm and form with intriguing plant selections and vernacular materials, each of these gardeners is responsible for providing us with another way of seeing the garden as a work of art. They reveal that what makes a garden magical is not only genius of place, but the ability of an individual garden maker to interpret this quality and add another layer of artistry into the mix.