Series
The Hort presents a variety of series each season that explore a range of horticultural topics from workshops to lectures to walking tours. To view all of our events, please check out our full calendar or continue on this page. Please watch this space as we continue to post new events for our upcoming spring 2012 season.Homegrown: A Do-It-Yourself Series
January 19—Herb Terrarium Workshop
February 22—Hydroponic Gardening with Boswyck Farms March 22—Botanical Hand Salves and Lip Balms with Hilda Krus April 26—Mushrooms Wild and Cultivated with Ari Rockland-Miller May 24—Pickling at Home with McClure's Pickles
The Hort Celebrates Black History Month
February 3—African Herbal Traditions: The Diaspora and Beyond February 7—Emancipation Oaks: Seeing the African-American History of a New York Landscape February 28—Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai
All Upcoming Events
The Hort Celebrates Black History Month
African Herbal Traditions: The Diaspora and Beyond
A Talk with Brandon Rosser
Friday, February 3
Professor Rosser, through first-hand experience as a traditional healer and spiritual guide, shares the history of traditional herbalism and herbal medicine and its importance to traditional African cultures in Africa and throughout the diaspora.
Brandon Rosser is a former professor of African and African American Studies, as well as Africana Folklore. He has had the pleasure of teaching at various institutions, including New York City College of Technology, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Passaic County Community College, and Nassau Community College. Mr. Rosser has also lectured at the City University School of Law, Columbia University, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Syracuse University. Additionally, he has contributed articles to numerous publications, and conducted radio interviews on WBAI, a prominent public radio station in New York City. Furthermore, he has made several television appearances on the Public Broadcast Service Network. Currently, Mr. Rosser is a practicing herbalist and a priest of the Congo/Lukumi tradition.
Doors open at 6pm; talk starts at 6:30pm
Free
RSVP to info@thehort.org
The Transition Activist Initiative
with Charles Eisenstein
Sunday, February 5
Join acclaimed author-teacher, Charles Eisenstein, in a day-long intensive aimed to revolutionize your effectiveness as a leader, healer, and/or social activist in times of rapid change. Our society is entering a time of profound transition. Crises in the economy, the ecosystem, health, education, water, energy, and more are propelling our civilization toward a radically different way of living on planet earth. Such conditions call for a new kind of leader, and even a whole new paradigm of leadership. At stake are the deep questions: "Who are we?" "What are we here to create?" "What is the role of humanity on earth, and how may I contribute to it?"
Charles Eisenstein is the author of Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. A faculty member of Goddard College, he writes and speaks on themes of transition, money, and cultural evolution. His work may be found on charleseisenstein.net.
In this gathering we will explore, in concept and in practice:
• Our unique historical moment: from separation to connection.
• The dynamics of transition (personal, organizational, planetary).
• Leadership independent of power structures and hierarchies.
• The necessity for miracles, and how to access them.
• What does leadership mean in a non-hierarchical setting?
• A leader: "One who holds the story of what-is-to-be."
• A leader: "One who creates opportunities for others to express their gifts."
10am – 4pm
Suggested registration for workshop: $40
(you will have the opportunity to pay in advance or gift Charles the day of the workshop)
Click here to register on NYCharities.org
The Hort Celebrates Black History Month
Emancipation Oaks:
Seeing the African-American History of a New York Landscape
with Morgan Powell, Landscape Designer
Tuesday, February 7
Hampton University in Virginia began like the NY Stock Exchange, under a tree in a simpler time. One Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) at Hampton has come to signify that Historically Black College—however a whole urban forest in New York City's northernmost borough has shaded sites of many professional and lay ecologists and civic builders whose work and lives have remained obscure until now.
Come see and hear over three hundred and fifty years of local African-American history—historic sites, epochal events and noteworthy people—as it has unfolded beneath a dynamic arboreal canopy.
Morgan Powell is a Landscape Designer who has written about public open spaces from Monaco's succulent garden to the Stuyvesant Cove Park in Manhattan. His earlier work on this subject includes:
• 2004 Walking tour: Images of the Bronx in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 2004 NY Open Space Coalition health walk from Woodlawn Cemetery to the Bronx Zoo
• 2005 Multi-modal tour of Bronx River Architecture and Public Art for teen-agers
• 2011 Wrote the West Farms Rapids park historical sign for the Department of Parks and Recreation of the City of New York
• 2011 Power Point talk for the New York Public Library, 100 Golden Moments: the Bronx River's African-American Heritage
• 2011 Walking tour of the Bronx River's African-American Heritage
Doors open at 6pm; presentation starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $5; Non-members $15
Register online or email info@thehort.org
Manhattan Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society Meeting
Tweeting the Alps or Texting Farrer, a Century Later
A Talk with Matt Mattus
Monday, February 13
The Bernese Oberland is surely one of the most beautiful regions of Switzerland, and of course it is home to the most iconic alpine plants, which we all love to grow, but if you haven’t seen the photos of Matt Mattus on his blog or in his digital publication Plant Society Magazine, you are in for a treat. Matt is going to share with us his most favorite images from his summer trips to Switzerland, Austria, and the Dolomites of Italy. Better yet, Matt does all of this botanizing completely wired, with a laptop strapped to his back, documenting every detail and sharing it on his blog each night. With an artist’s eye and a scientist’s curiosity, Matt will inspire you to learn more about how new technology is changing everything. If you are still grousing about the loss of Ektachrome, then this talk is for you. A hundred years after Reginald Farrer famously introduced the world to this most well-known of alpine environments, Matt will share how he rediscovers it in the new millennium by using Facebook, texting, iPads, laptops, and digital technology to document his discoveries and observations and how they have opened all sorts of new possibilities for plant lovers.
Talk starts at 6:00pm
Hort/NARGS members FREE
For more information, please email ManhattanNARGS@verizon.net
Or visit www.mcnargs.org
Beekeeping as a Force for Good
A Talk with Andrew Coté
Thursday, February 16
People have been harvesting honey from domesticated bees for most of recorded history, providing a reliable source of food and oftentimes income. Recently, beekeeping has experienced something of a renaissance, bringing hives to seemingly unlikely places. Young homesteaders and urbanites alike are contacting local beekeeping clubs to learn as much as they can about raising their own colonies, whether for personal enjoyment or profit. Even New York City has seen an upsurge; since the Department of Health recently lifted the ban on keeping hives within the city, they’re popping up on rooftops and backyards with greater frequency.
Join us for an informative lecture with fourth generation beekeeper Andrew Coté, owner of Silvermine Apiaries of Connecticut. You may know Andrew from his New York Honey stand at the New York City Greenmarkets, but you might not know that he is the founder of a bee-based international development nonprofit, Bees Without Borders. Andrew and a group of dedicated apiarists teach beekeeping skills to groups of people in economically depressed areas of the globe as a means of poverty alleviation. This involves developing culturally appropriate training programs and materials for local beekeepers to increase honey yield and providing them with the opportunity to learn about and create new markets for their products. Join us for a honey-tasting and learn the basics of beekeeping, its challenges in an urban environment, and the progress that Bees Without Borders is making worldwide, most recently in a trip to Kenya.
Andrew Coté is a former high school dropout and vagabond turned Fulbright Scholar and professor. He was born into a beekeeping family in Connecticut and is (at least) the fourth generation to carry on this ancient art. When he's not busy with hives, Andrew teaches English as a Second Language at Housatonic Community College and runs Silvermine Apiary, home of Andrew's Taste-Bud Bursting Local Wildflower Honey, as well as the development non-profit Bees Without Borders.
Doors open at 6pm; talk starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $5; Non-members $15
Register online or email info@thehort.org
Hydroponic Gardening
A Workshop with Boswyck Farms
Wednesday, February 22
This is a time when we’re all paying more attention to what we eat. It seems that we’re finally waking up and seeking out safe and nutritional fruits and vegetables, free of pesticides and with minimal impact on the environment they grow in. Regardless of whether you approach gardening as a foodie, looking for delicious, fresh produce all year long, as an environmentalist, concerned about the future of our food, or simply as an enthusiastic beginner, hydroponics has a lot to offer the home gardener. Hydroponics, or ‘agriculture without soil,’ may well be an answer to our produce prayers.
Come learn the basics of hydroponics, as a hobby and an industry, with Boswyck Farms, a hydroponic research, development, and education company based in Brooklyn. The lecture will serve as informative introduction to the world of hydroponics, including its history, the development of hydroponic practices, and various growing methods and techniques. Following the lecture, everyone in attendance will have the chance to build a soda bottle planter: your very own passive hydroponic system made out of a reused plastic bottle. Come eager to learn, leave with a hydroponic starter garden and the knowledge to provide yourself with fresh, delicious vegetables all year long.
Boswyck Farms is a hydroponic farm in Bushwick Brooklyn. It was founded in 2008 by Lee Mandell with the idea of growing fresh food for the surrounding community. Lee is an urban farmer specializing in hydroponics with over 20 years of experience in the field. Located in Lee’s 1,000 square foot loft, Boswyck Farms has grown into a research and development space to build and test hydroponic systems with the purpose of bringing sustainable methods of growing into the hands of people.
All participants must bring an empty 2-liter bottle. All other materials provided.
NOTE: Classes must be paid in full at the time of registration. A full refund will be given with a 5 business day notice only or if the workshop is cancelled.
Doors open at 6pm; workshop starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $35; Non-members $45
Register online or email info@thehort.org
Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation across Two Centuries
A Lecture by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Wednesday, February 29
Please note: this event has been moved from Thursday, January 26.
Focusing on gardeners’ words about the art of gardening, Writing the Garden: A Literary Conversation Across Two Centuries by landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers brings together a diverse array of authors. For the most part they are not professional landscape designers or how-to horticulturists but rather hands-on gardeners who write with their own gardens in full view. Ranging in time and place from Enlightenment France to modern-day New York City, they invite the reader into the natural world of soil and flowers, insects and sun, pride and frustration.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Gertrude Jekyll, Andrew Jackson Downing, Celia Thaxter, Vita Sackville-West, Russell Page, Rosemary Verey, Hugh Johnson, Paula Deitz, Lynden Miller, and Michael Pollan are among the fifty writers whose works are excerpted and discussed by Rogers.
Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies. A native of San Antonio, Texas, she earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wellesley College and a master’s degree in city planning from Yale University.
A resident of New York City since 1964, Rogers was the first person to hold the title of Central Park Administrator, a New York City Department of Parks & Recreation position created by Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1979. She was the founding president of the Central Park Conservancy, the public-private partnership created in 1980 to bring citizen support to the restoration and renewed management of Central Park. She served in both positions until 1996.
Subsequent to guiding Central Park’s restoration and instituting a new management structure during the Conservancy’s first fifteen years, Rogers resumed her career as teacher, lecturer, and writer on the subject of place. At the same time, she has maintained her commitment to the preservation of living landscapes through good design and sound management practices.
Doors open at 6pm; talk starts at 6:30pm
FREE
RSVP to info@thehort.org
In Praise of Chickens
A Talk with Jane Smith
Wednesday, March 7
Fascinated by chickens? You are in good company, from Aristotle to Darwin to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Join us as Jane S. Smith, author of In Praise of Chickens, explores centuries of poultry lore gathered from scientists, artists, poets, philosophers, breeders, feather fanciers, and egg-coddlers through the ages.
Ever wonder if chickens have their very own vocabulary, how to get hens to lay in winter, or why churches have weathervanes shaped like roosters? Can't remember which royal court it was where the ladies hatched eggs in their bosoms? Whether you want the earliest recorded instructions on how to hypnotize a chicken, or nineteenth-century tips on sending a year's supply of fresh eggs to your child in college, you'll find the answer here, along with portraits of prize-winning breeds both fierce and fluffy.
Jane S. Smith writes about the intersection of natural history, science, business, and popular taste. Recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and, most recently, the Caroline Bancroft Prize for Western American History (for The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants), she is a member of the History Department at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.
Doors open at 6pm; talk starts at 6:30pm
FREE
RSVP to info@thehort.org
Botanical Hand Salves and Lip Balms
A Workshop with Hilda Krus
Thursday, March 22
Many of the plants that we know and interact with every day have been used for their healing properties for centuries. Aside from traditional herbal medicine, many plant-based materials can be easily converted into healing balms and salves to support healthy skin. Shea butter, a natural fat derived from the shea nut, is a wonderful moisturizer; lavender, in addition to its wonderful fragrance, is touted for its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties; rose hips are celebrated for their ability to deliver skin-nourishing vitamins as well as their high antioxidant levels. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Please join us for an evening of learning more about these wonderful herbal traditions and how we can use simple techniques to harness their benefits through homemade hand salves and lip balms. Hilda Krus, Director of the GreenHouse Program at the Horticultural Society will teach us everything we need to know using an array of organic, dried herbs and botanical materials, including calendula, lavender, rose hip seed oil, shea butter, mango butter and olive oil. Come prepared to learn and dig into these rich traditions, and return home with your own healing salves, as well as the knowledge to recreate them for years to come.
Hilda Krus is a registered Horticultural Therapist and graduated social worker and is the Director of The Hort’s GreenHouse Program on Rikers Island. There, she provides male and female students with class room horticultural training, year round hands-on experience in horticulture and ongoing horticultural therapy, encouraging the men and women to grow new hope and dare to change after their release. Hilda grows a wide range of ornamental, aromatic and edible plants on the island, many of which she harvests and uses to teach her students to make botanical hand salves and lip balms.
All materials included
NOTE: Classes must be paid in full at the time of registration. A full refund will be given with a 5 business day notice only or if the workshop is cancelled.
Doors open at 6pm; workshop starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $20; Non-members $30
Register online or email info@thehort.org
Mushrooms Wild and Cultivated
A Workshop with Ari Rockland-Miller
Thursday, April 26
We’ve all done it: you walk past a mushroom, appearing as if by magic after a heavy rain, and wonder what exactly it is. Is it edible? Poisonous? Medicinal? Mushroom identification is an invaluable skill, especially if you want to learn the art of foraging: without it you could find yourself in a very uncomfortable situation, but take the time and caution to learn the nuances of different species, and you could find yourself with a delicious bounty. Ari Rockland-Miller will be teaching us the basics of the gourmet and medicinal mushrooms common to our region, connecting us with a hobby that will enrich our understanding of the natural world and build appreciation for an ancient, critically relevant, and useful body of knowledge.
Join us for an illustrated lecture introducing us to some of the safest and most distinctive species for beginners, focusing on those in season for our region. After an explanation of Ari’s approach to the safest and most fruitful way to forage for mushrooms, he will be showing us how to inoculate a log with shiitake mushroom spawn. Everyone in attendance will take home an inoculated log, giving you fresh shiitake mushrooms in your own kitchen and the resources needed to kick start your new hobby.
Ari Rockland-Miller, co-founder of The Mushroom Forager, is an ardent mycophile who enjoys nothing more than the exhilarating feeling of the mushroom hunt. Over the past few years he has found hundreds of pounds of gourmet and medicinal wild mushrooms, and he loves sharing his knowledge with blog readers. Ari became an expert in shiitake cultivation after managing Cornell University’s Mushroom Research Project and the MacDaniels Nut Grove, Cornell’s forest farming demonstration site. He has a BA from Brown University, where he studied Buddhist philosophy as well as environmental policy and ethics. When he is not out in the woods filling baskets with mushrooms, Ari enjoys writing songs and playing music with friends.
All materials included
NOTE: Classes must be paid in full at the time of registration. A full refund will be given with a 5 business day notice only or if the workshop is cancelled.
Doors open at 6pm; workshop starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $20; Non-members $30
Register online or email info@thehort.org
Pickling at Home
A Workshop with Bob McClure of McClure's Pickles
Thursday, May 24
Pickling originally came about as a method of preserving food from the harvest, but has since evolved into a culinary art. From traditional dills to mouth-watering watermelon rinds, pickling has become an incredible diverse craft, one that lends itself well to the do-it-yourself ethos.
Please join us as Bob McClure of McClure’s Pickles teaches us to bring this delicious skill into our own kitchens. Bob will talk about the history and basics of pickling, and give a hands-on demonstration. Everyone will have the opportunity to create their own batch of McClure’s delicious pickles and relish. The McClures are strong believers in using seasonal, local produce, and have been a long-standing presence in farmer’s markets in Detroit and Brooklyn.
Growing up, Bob and Joe McClure never realized how influential pickles would be in their lives. In 2006, using their great grandmother’s recipe, they started McClure’s Pickles after years of making pickles in their tiny Michigan kitchen. In Brooklyn they produce small batches for research and development.
Bob McClure is an actor, comedy writer and pickle maker living in Brooklyn, NY. He splits his time between Detroit and Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, he manages new product development, east coast distribution, small batch production and a lot of other things from brand management and national account management for McClure's.
All materials included
NOTE: Classes must be paid in full at the time of registration. A full refund will be given with a 5 business day notice only or if the workshop is cancelled.
Doors open at 6pm; workshop starts at 6:30pm
Hort members $25; Non-members $35
Register online or email info@thehort.org
