Category: Lectures

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Garden Dreaming

Winter may not be the time for gardening outdoors in most of the country, but it is the time of year to start dreaming about plants and gardens by getting seed catalogs in the mail or going to flower shows or going to garden symposiums and lectures.

One website that claims they list over 500 Garden shows in the US in 2015 and also tells you where to get tickets is this.

A good website to find 70 free seed and plant catalogs is this.

Every botanical garden in the country and most of the great gardens have outstanding lectures on plants, horticulture, gardening, you name it related to your garden or indoor plants. Check their list of programs to see if there is a talk that interests you. Wikipedia has a list of the major botanical gardens and arboretums in the US. You can then go on the website of the place that interests you or find their phone number to call to see what talks or garden programs they will be having in 2015.

Happy garden dreaming.

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Excellent Gardening Lectures

morris in the spring by lisa cee

This is a great time to attend excellent gardening lectures- now before you are busy working in your gardens. The different flower shows host excellent speakers that you can hear free, just for the admission price to the flower show. Don’t fail to check the list of events when you enter the shows so that you can dash over to hear an informative talk while resting your weary feet. I have found these lectures to be under-attended.

Also, many of the Botanical gardens have excellent lecture series. I wish I could attend so many of the interesting sounding lectures that are being given all over the country. It seems like one can get a college-level horticulture or landscape education for a nominal fee by just attending. But sign up early, some of these lectures fill up quickly.

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Conifers

Fall is a good time to attend gardening lectures. Not that there isn’t a lot of work still left to do in the garden: harvesting if you have vegetable gardens, putting your plants to sleep for the winter if you have flowers, bringing in summer bulbs like gladioli,  planting next spring’s bulbs like daffodils, etc.  But since there are many good lectures going on in the Fall, like the Perennial Plant Conference on Friday, October 17th at Swarthmore, when readers have free time, they should make every effort to attend.

To that end of going to lectures to learn more, TheGardenLady attended a lecture entitled “Conifers for Your Garden” given by Steven Kristoph who has taught about conifer trees at Rutgers University for over 25 years. He also owns Steven Kristoph Nursery and has a website. 

Steven opened his lecture by saying how pleased he was that so many people attended his lecture since so many excellent websites can be Goggled up on conifer trees that one can find out just about all there is to know about conifers without leaving home.  Conifer trees are defined as a grouping of trees with needle or scale-like leaves (e.g. pine, spruce, cypress) and bear cones. They are usually, but not always, evergreen. A website that he recommends is The American Conifer Society.  This website lists all the conifers with photos as well as tells the readers where there are lectures or symposium on conifers.

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