MHS Leaflet, July 2023

Leaflet

A MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY PUBLICATION

As a society of members, Massachusetts Horticultural Society is at its best when it is both collegial and contributive. I was reminded of this forcefully last night at one of our regular meetings of the Friends Council. This is a group of 34 of our fellow members who have a long history of active work on behalf of the Society and are currently engaged in a role of leadership, advocacy and outreach on our behalf. We introduced several new members and in so doing asked each Council member to introduce themselves and their connection to MHS.

Two things immediately stood out. The first was that each individual, many of whom have had lifelong connections to us, and have built wonderful circles of friendship through the Society, said that from the very beginning they approached the organization in a spirit of service. They each joined knowing that in volunteering, participating, attending and leading, they would not only advance the mission of the society, but they would gain a great sense of accomplishment and belonging. For many in that group, this has been borne out over a full lifetime.

The second notable commonality was that over 80% of the group, including our Director of Garden and Programs Karen Daubmann, had as their first experience of the Society a visit to the Boston Flower Show as a child. More than this, for each without exception, it was a potent and uplifting memory, not just of the show, but of the parent or grandparent who took them, spent time with them, and encouraged their interest. It was moving to hear that this tradition for many continued with their children and grandchildren. For one, the 51-year-old Oak tree planted by their daughter (with her grandparents) from a flower-show acorn has just been joined nearby with a new sapling they have planted with their young

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grandson, keeping the tradition alive over through generations. Gardens and plants have a special power over our memory, and those happy times and important people associated with them live on through these ‘emotional souvenirs’.

These common threads in the experience of some of our most involved and hard working members lead me to two things I would like to share. The first is just my personal gratitude and thanks to the many hundreds and even thousands of members of this Society who over years, and even generations, have believed in our mission to bring plants and gardens to our communities and have worked together to achieve this. There are hundreds of thousands of lives that have been enriched and transformed by our members’ work. Thank you everyone, from the most modest to the greatest contributor, each has played a part.

The second is that the staff and Trustee team has also recognized the importance of the role of Flower Shows in introducing each new generation to plants in a fresh and inspiring way. Therefore, Massachusetts Horticultural Society will be seeking to restart a Flower Show in September 2024. The first few years will be held at the Garden at Elm Bank. This can only happen with the active support of many of the members reading this letter. While MHS can provide the logistics, support and venue, only our members and the many Garden Club exhibitors, Judges, Committee Members and supporters can actually make a show. Many of you with experience will be contacted in the coming weeks and months for your involvement – we need your wisdom and experience now more than ever! I urge you to seize the moment and help us host a wonderful show in September 2024. We long to see the rising generation of school children being connected to the same life enhancing passion that many of you have enjoyed through a life lived with plants and gardens.

James Hearsum President & Executive Director

The Art of Planting Design

— Learn to design or redesign your gardens using plants you love in seasonal sequence

Saturdays, July 12, 19, 26 10am-2pm

Colored Pencil Techniques for Botanical Subjects on Toned Paper

Saturday, August 17 9:30am-3:30pm

White Flowers of Summer in Colored Pencil & Graphite

Saturday, August 21 9:30am-3:30pm

Education Station Drop-In

Saturdays, 10am-1pm

CALENDAR

Wednesdays 11-11:30am

Join us for a new weekly drop-in program in our AAS and Proven Winner Trial Garden! Led by our Growing and Sustaining Horticulturist, this session will give you an idea of how we judge, analyze, and measure our 2023 trial plants. Not only will you get an inside look of new and unreleased varieties of annuals and perennials, you’ll also learn what makes them a success compared to established varieties of the same plants. No signup required. Included with Garden Admission.

Weekly Mah Jongg Drop-in Sessions

Wednesdays at 12pm

This popular Chinese tile-based game is returning to the Garden at Elm Bank! Join us for our weekly drop-in sessions to play with other Mah Jongg lovers in our beautiful garden setting! Please RSVP so we have an idea of how many boards are needed. Please note, participants should have a working knowledge of the game for these drop-in Mah Jongg sessions.

Ribbit the Exhibit On View During Garden Hours through Labor Day

Come visit our froggy friends who are here for the summer season! 25 frogs have found themselves at home in the Garden at Elm Bank. Find them all and read their backstories to learn about how these frogs are having fun this summer.

MHS Book Club

Third Tuesday of the Month at 1:30pm

Join other enthusiasts in great conversation while immersed in the beauty of the Garden. Book Club meets at 1:30 pm in the Crockett Garden (weather location: Dearborn Classroom, Education Center).

Upcoming Dates and Books:

July: No Meeting

August 15: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

In First Person

C.L. Fornari

Vice President of GardenComm International, an organization of professional communicators in the green industry Author of serval books on gardening Founder of the annual Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival

For ‘In First Person,’ Leaflet Editor-in-Chief Wayne Mezitt interviews people in horticulture and adjacent fields by asking a standard set of questions about their work. The column offers an opportunity for people in these fields to share with readers about their passions, what motivates them, and how they define and measure success. Based on the idea that we’re often reluctant to talk openly about ourselves because of the potential for miscommunication or misinterpretation, Wayne transforms his conversation with interviewees into a personal story from the interviewee’s first-person perspective.

Idescribe myself as a speaker/writer/radio host/artist––aka garden communicator or professional juggler. For 28 years, I’ve worked for Hyannis Country Garden, a family-owned garden center on Cape Cod, and I do some independent design consulting as well. I’m proud that I was the founder of the Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival, which raised over $100,000 for local non-profits in 2022. With everything I do, my goal is to share the excitement and wonder about plants and gardens.

My core motivation is to keep horticulture in popular culture. For a while, the awareness of how fundamental plants are to us was slipping away from people’s day-today awareness, and talking about horticulture was considered snobby, maybe because public felt confused by scientific names. Happily, today through their cell phones, everyone can quickly google a botanic name and immediately know what plant

we’re all talking about. Garden communicators like myself can use common and botanic names, making both more accessible to the public by relating a plant to everyday experiences.

We still have challenges; to this day, when we’re asked to identify the industry where we work on many websites or social media, it’s common to find that horticulture or even natural sciences isn’t on the list that’s provided. For years, there was no horticulture or gardening section on Apple Podcasts––now “Gardening” is there, but it’s placed under “Leisure Activities.” The people who labelled those categories clearly have never made and tended gardens…leisure? I think not.

So, if it’s not a leisure activity, how do people come to be garden makers? For me, it was because I was blessed to grow up in a time when kids were pushed outside and told not to come back in until mealtime. We made our fun outdoors, in nature. A downed tree would become our entire world for a week, as we turned it into houses/spaceships/exotic lands. We tried to weave baskets out of grass, made hollow dandelion stems into flutes (note: they taste terrible), and smashed berries in order to watch the ants gather around them. Plants were a constant presence and source of entertainment.

Although I grew up with that constant contact with plants, I never intended to be a garden communicator. I was an Art major in college and for most of my young life, all I wanted to do was go into the studio and make stuff. But beginning in the late 1980’s my artwork kind of stalled. This coincided with a time when we rather abruptly moved to Manchester-by-the-Sea on the North Shore, so that my older son could attend his middle grades at the Landmark School for Dyslectic Students. For those years I was without my gardens, and my artwork wasn’t progressing. As a result of this situation, I resolved that if art wasn’t what I was intended to be doing, I’d remain open to other possibilities, and the path that opened was into garden communications.

I’ve been very fortunate early on to have met and married a completely generous man. Dan is a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic and he also loves plants. In fact, when we met at the University of Wisconsin, we bonded over the fact that we both would spend time in the Botany Department’s greenhouses, even though neither of us was a Botany major.

I’m equally fortunate to be a part of several plant communities. From The Horticultural Club of Boston, to GardenComm International and the Perennial Plant Association, these groups have provided and continue to provide inspiration and education. I also learn from “my people” ––the customers at Hyannis Country Garden who need help, the callers to my radio show, and attendees when I speak. They let me know what they need to be more successful with plants and I’m pleased to assist them.

Aside from history and supportive communities, I wonder if the route to plants or garden communications might be genetic? Is there a “plant gene?” My maternal grandmother, Dorothy Young, had a special way with plants, as did my mom.. As a young adult, I remember walking into my mother’s plant-filled living room. “Your plants are thirsty,” I said to Mom, without even thinking about it. She looked at me and said, “Oh! You can do that too!” Plants speak to both of us. Genetics? I wouldn’t be surprised.

When I try to characterize my particularly critical skills, abilities, and strengths, I guess I’d say that I’m lucky that my brain is hardwired to generate ideas. My friend and podcast cohost, Ellen Zachos, calls it “the Fornari Idea Store,” and for better or worse, I can’t turn it off. I have countless files on my computer of ideas for books, articles, events, marketing plans and more. I only wish there were more hours in the day, but I guess two of the most elementary things that gardens teach us are flexibility and patience.

The benefits of plants and gardens continue to be well documented, and many such studies are readily available on the National Initiative for

Consumer Horticulture (NICH) website: https://consumerhort.org/. People need easy access to information and inspiration about how they can take joy from plants and gardens, while continuing to share space with weeds and wildlife. It’s important that people are changing their relationship with the natural world. During the 20th century people were all about dominating nature. The mandated Covid isolation may have helped realign our awareness about life’s priorities. Now we are (hopefully) starting to recognize that everything is connected to everything else, and that Mother Nature has the controlling hand.

How I define success changes from day to day, hour to hour. On one day I might feel successful because I got an article or blog post written. The next day I might feel like a total failure because I haven’t gotten an agent or publisher for the book I’m writing. Two days later I feel successful when I help someone see their property “with new eyes,” so they can make changes they’d never envisioned. On Saturday morning I might feel good because I answered questions called into GardenLine. Yet the next day I’m unhappy that I wasn’t selected to present at a conference where I was hoping to speak.

But here’s where I never feel like a failure: in my gardens. Of course, I have plants die, some from natural causes and others from my neglect. There are plants that thrive and others that sulk. But in the garden, I know that I’m not completely in charge…in fact, it’s more a classroom. I ask “What have you got to teach me, Mother Nature?” and I’m always astounded by the answer.

I measure my progress as a garden communicator by the responses of my audience. I love hearing back that they’ve tried a particular plant and love it, or that their gardening was made easier because of suggestions I made. In 2020, when the pandemic lockdown began, I started a virtual, weekly Friday evening Horticultural Happy Hour for my garden center. It was a way to help people focus on plants and gardens, which is one of the most life-affirming things we can do. I had over 200 people on every Friday in the spring and summer of 2020. To this day people come up to me and say, “Your Horticultural Happy Hours got me through Covid.”

To share information with me, please contact me through my website or at clfornari@gmail.com. All the best from my garden at Poison Ivy Acers on Cape Cod, to yours.

Featured Collection: Library Webpage

Have you explored the Library’s webpage? It contains lots of useful and interesting information such as research and finding aids, links to our Collections and electronic copies of some of our valued artifacts. These aids, compiled by our volunteers, summarize many of the Library holdings that are not in our online catalog. Most of the items are searchable.

Here are some of the resources you will find:

• Honorary Medals – You will find the names and other information of past recipients of the Society’s most prestigious awards: The White Medal of Honor, and the Dawson, Roland, gold, silver, centenary and Hunnewell medals.

• Links to historical records of the Society’s proceedings published on Internet Archives.

• Plans – A listing of plans held at the Library, primarily of Horticultural Hall in Boston, Elm Bank.

• Seed and Nursery Catalogs – Historic national and international catalogs as well as contemporary catalogs. These are sought by researchers, writers and the public throughout the world.

• Pamphlets – Pamphlets capture moments in history and were designed to be temporary. However, they are often the only record of what occurred in history and give valuable glimpses into our past. They can be a treasure trove for researchers.

Nothing is pleasanter than exploring a library.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)

• Links to images in our Lincoln Negative Collection and Botanical Print Collection hosted by Digital Commonwealth.

• A listing of rare images in the Society’s Member Albums from the 19th century. We maintain these albums at the Library at Elm Bank.

• A list of the original holdings of the Society’s Library, the oldest horticultural Society in the United States.

• A memoir written by Elizabeth Clapp Cheney for her family. Cheney was the widow of Benjamin Cheney and mother of Alice Cheney Baltzell who constructed the beautiful Manor at Elm Bank.

• In 1938, floral designer and business woman, Margaret Helburn, collected postcards and correspondence from consulates around the world on flower markets. This collection provides a glimpse of what there was and wasn’t on the eve of the Second World War.

Current projects include historical 19th century photographs of Elm Bank, a finding aid for historical correspondence of the Society, biographical files and gardens.

Book Club

The next meeting of the Book Club is on Tuesday, August 15 at 1:30pm. Meetings take place in the Crockett Garden. If the weather is poor, the meeting will be in the Education Building. All are welcome to attend.

Here is the line-up for our upcoming book discussions:

» August 15: A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

» September 19: The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf

» October 17: Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

by Camille Dungy

» November 21: Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening by Aurelia C. Scott

» December 19: Strange Bright Blooms: A History of Cut Flowers by Randy Malamud

» January 16: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Windows – Children's Books on Frogs!

Help Grow our Collections

Consider making a donation from the Society’s Amazon Smile Wishlist. It is just a click away!

COME VISIT!

The Library is open on Thursdays from 10am-1pm, by appointment and when the lights are on. Please email Library & Archives Manager Maureen O’Brien at mobrien@masshort.org for an appointment if you want to schedule a visit.

△ Bridge at the entrance to Elm Bank Estate in 1874 on what is known today as Cheney Drive.

▽ In 1897, the 1874 bridge was replaced with the bridge you see today on Cheney Drive.

Excerpts from Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner, trailblazing botanist

By Lisa J. Delissio and Lindsay Hall Department of Biology, Salem State University

While little known within today’s botanical community, Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner (July 5, 1823 - July 18, 1906) was among the most highly accomplished American botanists of her time. At a time when fewer than seven percent of women botanists in the United States and Canada earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society served as Horner’s academic home.

Although women had been allowed to participate in its activities for 38 years, she was the first woman to give a scientific talk to the Society in what was its 51st year. This 1880 talk was entitled “Native Plants” and was published in the Society’s transactions. Although couched in a Victorian woman’s language of modesty and piety, her talk demonstrated botanical leadership and expertise. In her address, she encouraged public education and field study, and continued to advocate for the widespread use of scientific names. Horner stated that, counter to common perceptions, many plant species are not dormant in winter; in fact, quite a few even

bloom in the colder months. Having kept detailed phenological records, she listed the exact dates of bloom for 15 species from November to March during the period 1867–1880. Horner encouraged the horticultural use of North American species that would be hardy and profitable as plantings in Massachusetts, including species she had recently received as pressed specimens from Colorado. To demonstrate her points, she exhibited more than 38 identified, freshly collected specimens, many with flowers or other interesting features. The event attracted “an unusual number” of women. More than 15 attendees, almost all men, participated in the lively, in-depth discussion that followed, described in detail in the transactions of the Society.

Horner had a prominent role in the Boston-area botanical and horticultural scene and regularly attended Saturday meetings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society at Horticultural Hall in Boston and was sometimes invited to lead discussions. […] her displays for the Massachusetts

Horticultural Society were considered “centres of interest and instruction to the large number of visitors.”

Her many exhibits on native flowering plants tended to be among the largest and were labeled with scientific names. They included the largest-ever display of native flowering plants with “over 260 species and varieties,” 110 native specimens as the only presenter, and “160 varieties of native plants” displayed at Music Hall in Boston, now the Orpheum Theatre. In 1885 she exhibited Habenaria (now Plantanthera) hookeri Torr. ex A. Gray from Georgetown to some excitement.

Between 1871 and 1896, Horner won dozens of awards and cash prizes for her displays of many hundreds of specimens including flowering plants, ferns, mosses, fungi, vegetables, and fruits presented at weekly, monthly, and annual exhibitions of the Horticultural Society and the Essex Agricultural Society. In 1877, her displays of rare native species won the most first-place prizes of all the entrants in the native plant category. In 1880, she became the first recipient of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s silver medal for native plants. It was written of her exhibit that day, “Mrs. C. N. S.

Horner exhibited a very large and well-arranged collection of native plants, with their names. This was without a doubt the best among the many fine exhibits she has made, and your Committee were glad of the opportunity to express the high estimation in which the members of the Society hold her attainments as a practical botanist.” Practical botany is a field of science that deals with “plant life in all its aspects” and which forms the basis for all applied and economic botany. Two years later, Boston newspapers commended her receipt of a second silver medal for “100 species and varieties of native plants.”

She created for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society a competitive display of invasive species described as “plants, particularly injurious in cultivated or grazing lands, only one of which is indigenous in this vicinity, though all are found growing wild.”

In 1877, Horner became a founding member of the Window Gardening Committee of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which had the aim of involving “the laboring classes,” and their children in particular, in practical botany. It was the Society’s first program to engage children in botany. During this period, the practice of keeping houseplants was

common in Europe, but had not yet been widely adopted in the United States. The committee advertised in the Boston Herald, enlisted pastors and teachers to spread the word about the project and developed a plan to award prizes. Wolcott, the Secretary of the committee, reported that, “The touching spectacle of the procession of little children bearing their plants so proudly through the street, and presenting them to the Committee, carried its blessing.”

Excerpts with sources removed. Reprinted with permission from: Delissio, Lisa, and Lindsay Hall 2023. Charlotte Nichols Saunders Horner, trailblazing botanist. Salem State Digital Repository. DOI 10.13140/rg.2.2.11078.24643

To see the entire paper with sources, visit: http://hdl.handle. net/20.500.13013/2926

About the Artist

Marianne Orlando is a Framingham artist who has a masters in landscape architecture and has illustrated four books. She left the field of landscape architecture to become an editor after realizing she could possibly be doomed to designing an endless series of parking lots.

Orlando founded a freelance illustrations business, Marianne Orlando Illustrations, in 2016, and since then has created more than 150 portraits of homes, pets and people for folks all over the US. After 45 years in the corporate world, she is delighted to be spending her time doing drawings, marketing her business, playing the violin, singing in her church choir, and gardening. She has a love of both nature and art and admits to being “obsessed by plants.” She’s been known for stopping in traffic to stare at a particularly beautiful Cornus florida. She is delighted to be working with Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

You can see samples of her work at www.marianneorlando.com

By Marianne Orlando

Italianate Garden Gate at the Garden at Elm Bank

GARDENING CHALLENGES

&

GARDENING SUCCESSES

By Catherine Cooper

This month I’m going to do a typically British thing, and from my time living in Massachusetts, also a very New England thing: talk about the weather. This past year has presented several challenges, which have tested plants and gardeners alike.

A year ago we were at the start of a warm and dry summer. Watering restrictions

were to become more stringent than usual and rain events were few and far between. Fortunately, hand watering was still permitted where I live, and it led to evenings spent not only watering edible crops and a few new plantings, but also some established plants that I couldn’t bear to lose. Even the drought tolerant plants struggled at times; I have a few bald patches in some creeping phlox

and ground cover thyme, and a couple of rue plants decided enough was enough. I resigned myself to the fact that if I lost some things I often had some in other parts of the garden where conditions seemed less stressful, and if these events were to indicate that I hadn’t applied the rule of “right plant, right place”, I would have space for something new. However, the tenacity of things was to surprise me. Even the black-eyed susans that looked ready to admit defeat are back again this year as if nothing had happened.

So in some ways it was a relief to see last year’s growing season come to an end as it had been a struggle to maintain important plants, and with the dormancy of perennials I was no longer reminded how some of them were less than happy with a long, hot and dry summer. In eastern Massachusetts the winter seemed at first to even things out. Mild, with almost no snow it looked as if we were going to get some compensation for the struggles of earlier months. As this year began we were even getting decent amounts of rainfall, so when Mother Nature decided to give us a taste of the Arctic at the beginning of February it was to have serious consequences. The lack of snow on the ground was to compound matters as there was no insulation against the bitter cold that was with us for twenty four hours or so. The damaging effects weren’t immediately apparent, although if memory serves me correct, reports of damage to this year’s peach crop were quick to come in. Peach trees, along with several other flowering woody plants were at a critical point in their bud development that this sudden blast of intense cold destroyed their flowers. For the most part it was not enough to kill the plants, although any already suffering other stresses such as insect or fungal problems, were likely to find this cold just too much. However,

spring would show that certain plants did not bloom as normal. Most notable was the damage to ornamental cherries and plums and even that rugged stalwart, forsythia, was hard hit. So yes, I like many had no forsythia flowers to bring an early splash of spring color, but in the case of these plants they have flushed out leaves just fine and look as if they are none the worse for their experience.

The mildness of winter generally continued and as things burst into growth it became apparent that while many plants survived last summer’s troubles with little or no consequences, there were a few that did die, or more intriguingly are in a state of limbo in that I can see stunted shoots at the base of the plant, but no growth is happening. This may be due to the final wintery attack which came in the form of a late(ish) frost on May 17th. Plants as well as people had decided that cold danger was past, but on that occasion we all needed to protect vulnerable plants where possible. It was a salutary reminder that it can be quite late in May before it is safe to plant annuals and tender vegetables without need for occasional frost protection. However, while it might not be too onerous to cover vegetables and annual planters, the same cannot be said for general garden plantings and some of us, me included, got to experience frost damage to tender new growth on certain trees and perennials. A few days after the frost the extent of the damage was visible, and on plants that had not normally experienced this. Among those displaying browning tips in my garden were a European beech, giant fleece flowers, a Tiger Eyes sumac, and the new growth on andromeda. Even certain perennial geraniums weren’t spared. However, while this damage looks ugly, for the most part it was superficial. The fleece flowers have bounced back, new

◁ Playing "wait and see" with Aralia 'Sun King'

△ Fleece flower frost damage

growth masking the damage and they will bloom just a little less prolifically and a bit later than normal. Shrubs and trees are slower to respond, or more accurately lose the visible signs of damage. It will happen, and for this year it is as if nature decided they needed pruning. The damaged foliage will ultimately fall off, and providing there are no further stresses, growth will resume. The calycanthus currently has reduced foliage and flowers, but as a mature shrub it will recover. The same probably can’t be said for one of the andromeda; it has never been happy in its location and looking at how attractive the nine bark are in full bloom, I feel it will be better to replace it with another native shrub. I have two

perennials that I am waiting to see what happens: an Itoh peony and a Sun King aralia. Both are displaying stunted shoots which seem to show no desire to grow. I suspect they are suffering from more than weather hardships, as Japanese beetle grubs are still a reduced issue in parts of my garden.

On the plus side, a couple of things have relished last summer’s heat. For the first time in about three years my yucca Color Guard is going to flower and will produce four flower spikes. Red valerian is also doing well along with all the other drought lovers my garden suits. The exuberance of native golden rod, daisy fleabane and bergamot

▷ Sumac Tiger Eyes, showing both withered leaves and healthy new growth

△ Frost damage barely visible 3 weeks later - note reduced flowers though

is undaunted, although I am having to carefully nurture the common milkweed which has disappeared from some locations this year. Some of the invasives are also thriving, but at least where the hypericum is concerned, the hypericum beetles have made a resurgence this year and while they won’t reduce the overall number of plants they will hopefully stop them setting seed.

All this goes to prove one of the things that we gardeners know: one year is never the same as another. Each year brings different challenges, which hopefully we manage to surmount. Whether we overcome them or not, the wonderful thing about gardening is that it is a continual learning experience - a chance to flex mental as well as physical muscles!

Born in England, Catherine learned to garden from her parents and from that developed a passion for plants. Catherine is in charge of the greenhouse at Weston NurseriesChelmsford. When not at Weston Nurseries, she can often be found in her flower beds or tending to an ever-increasing collection of houseplants.

THANK YOU TO OUR 2023 GARDEN

The Julie and Dennis Murphy

Family Foundation