On May 31 from 10 – 12, enjoy the wonderful vistas of the meandering Sudbury River at Weir Hill, Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge with Neela de Zoysa and the New England Botanical Society. The habitat is lush and diverse, with floodplain trees, swamps of buttonbush and red maple, ferns, graminoids and other herbaceous species. We will take a close look at these riverine plants and learn to identify some typical denizens. The location has great observation platforms, and boardwalks for examining plants. This field trip will be geared towards beginners, but all are welcome to join. Bring a hand lens if you own one or a magnifying glass and a packed lunch to enjoy after the field trip.
Join GCA in the City – Boston for a guided tour of a 1924 Fletcher Steele garden in full bloom. Stroll through peonies, rhododendrons, azaleas, and irises at their peak, followed by refreshments and a floral demonstration with peonies fresh from the garden.
Registration required. Save your spot by emailing gcainthecity@gcamerica.org. Open to non-members in the Boston metro area.
The grass family (Poaceae) is one of the largest families of flowering plants and generally the most diverse family in any local or regional flora. In this June 6 Native Plant Trust workshop at Garden in the Woods we’ll learn to identify the genera and common species of early-season grasses in New England that are dominant features of meadows and wetlands. This course is ideal for field botanists as well as gardeners interested in native meadow restoration and planting. The instructor is Dr. Lisa Standley, Botanist and Curator of Vascular Plants, New England Botanical Society. $150. Register at https://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/early-season-grasses/
The Art Of Seaweed: We will explore the history of seaweed pressing in both a cultural and scientific context alongside a practical demonstration of the process. A Two Part Live Online Workshop With Molly MacLeod will be held on Tuesday 26th May & 9th June 4-6pm GMT 2026, but you can join the online sessions live, orwatch the recordings in your own time. Sign up and see more at https://plantsandcolour.co.uk/
Join The Loring-Greenough House for a self-guided walking tour of 12 neighborhood gardens.
On Sunday, June 7, 2026 the Loring Greenough House is presenting a tour of beautiful gardens in the neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. Each garden is special and unique, the result of many hours of planning and care by the homeowners. The gardens will be open from 12pm – 3pm. Visitors are invited to wander through each property, chat with the homeowner, and enjoy some light snacks.
Tour begins at 12 South Street where registrants will receive a paper map to guide their walking tour and enjoy the historic gardens of the Loring Greenough House.
Boston’s climate future is being shaped right now — and your voices are needed in the room.
Join Boston Harbor Women of Color Coalition for its May Monthly Meet-Up, an inspiring and interactive evening where BHWOCC members – the experts, the storytellers, the ones whose neighborhoods and daily lives are impacted most by the effects of climate change in our city – lead the way on waterfront resilience, climate planning, and community-powered solutions.
Together, we’ll get an exclusive briefing from the City of Boston Climate Resilience Team, and explore the future of Boston’s waterfront through conversations around the Boston Coastal Storm Risk Management (CSRM) Study — a major partnership between the City of Boston and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect neighborhoods from coastal flooding and climate impacts.
This is not just a presentation — it’s a call to action! You have the answers. Your lived experience, cultural resilience, your community expertise is what shapes real solutions.
This is YOUR space to: • Ask the big questions • Share your lived experience and personal expertise. • Build public comments at our “Craft Your Own Public Comment” station to directly influence public-facing climate resilience tools launching Summer 2026.
Friday, May 29. 6–8 pm at 15 Necco St, Boston, MA . Free – rsvp HERE.
Experience the intersection of architecture, history and landscape in the evocative paintings of award-winning artist and author Adam Van Doren. Trained as an architect at Columbia University, Van Doren brings a profound understanding of form and design to his impressionistic oil and watercolor paintings, capturing the poetic beauty of historic buildings situated within their natural surroundings from New York to Rome. Van Doren’s work celebrates the dialogue between the built environment and the landscape, translating his love of old buildings into detailed compositions of a particular place, illuminated by strokes of color.
The exhibition at Berkshire Botanical Garden runs June 6 – August 23 in the Leonhardt Galleries. Opening reception is Friday, June 5, 5-7 p.m.
Experience Berkshire Botanical Garden’s second annual Drawing on the Land design symposium at the breathtaking Rockland Farm, in Canaan, N.Y, on Saturday, June 13, from 1 to 5 p.m. (including a tour of the garden). Spend an afternoon immersed in landscape creativity as two distinguished designers share their perspectives, followed by an insightful panel discussion. The day concludes with a guided tour of the gardens at the height of their June beauty followed by a wine reception. Whether you’re a professional designer or an inspired enthusiast, this program will spark new ideas and deepen your connection to design in the natural world.
Featured speaker Preston Montague, PLA, ASLA, is a landscape architect and artist working to strengthen relationships between people and the natural world. His environmental design studio deploys art, horticulture and landscape architecture in the service of building places that have meaning and ecological depth. When not in studio, Preston enjoys teaching landscape architecture at North Carolina A&T State University and hiking the wilder places. https://www.prestonmontague.com. He will speak on Designing for the Experience: Composition in Practice. Choreographing experiences with designed plantings is a feat of art, science, and will. The old adage of “right plant, right place” applies to plant survivability of course, but can also apply to the way we arrange plants to encourage particular reactions from visitors. There’s an art to the design of an experience, and there are also simple tactics that can hasten decision-making and help organize a design process. For landscape architect Preston Montague, those tactics come from composition he learned from an earlier practice as an artist. Join Preston for an examination of planting design strategies he deploys in his studio that are rooted in principles of composition.
The next featured speaker is Tony Spencer, the Canadian writer, photographer, blogger, and planting designer behind The New Perennialist. He is recognized and published internationally in the world of naturalistic garden design. In 2024, Tony won his second top Landscape Design Award of Excellence from the U.S.-based Perennial Plant Association (PPA). He was also named PPA Garden Media Promoter of the year along with a 2024 Silver Medal for Social Media from GardenComm. Day to day, Tony is a puckish ringleader for the naturalistic movement with over 100,000 followers on his various social media channels. He travels extensively to gardens and symposiums in his primary role as a communicator, documenter and sharer of ideas for this movement. Tony is currently at work on an upcoming book for Timber Press with a publishing date of 2027. www.thenewperennialist.com
Tony’s presentation is Wildscaping: Explorations in Naturalistic Planting Design. In the post-wild countryside of Ontario, Canada, Tony Spencer is conducting a series of open experiments to combine naturalistic planting design with Blue-Green Infrastructure into a fluid ecological art form. Working on the local level, he cultivates his universal concept of Wildscaping. This is about using plant-driven landscape design to create and sustain dynamic garden spaces, filled with beauty and wildlife, to rekindle our relationship to the natural world. The focus of this talk is how to link home to landscape in a symbiotic loop to build new nature and adapt to the inevitable extremes of the new climate.
The Concord Museum Guild of Volunteers is thrilled to present their Annual Garden Tour on June 5 and 6, 2026.
In 2026, the Tour will offer a wide variety of garden styles and features, including decorative elements and vegetable beds, manicured spaces and naturalistic plantings, native species and showstopper plantings. Each offers an approach to creating gardens that blend seamlessly with the surrounding landscape, complement the architectural features of the home, and offer delightful settings for everyday living. This year’s gardens also showcase expansive patios, immaculate pools and water features, hand-cut fieldstone walls, winding paths, and terraces.
All proceeds benefit the Museum’s vital school programs that serve over 15,500 K-12 students across the Commonwealth each year.
The Garden Tour will take place on two days, Friday and Saturday, June 5 and June 6, rain or shine. The tour is self-guided and self-paced, beginning each day at 10:00 a.m. and continuing until 4:00 p.m. Tickets are good for either or both days, but each garden may only be visited once.
As we move into a new age of ecological landscaping, how do we rethink our residential and civic landscapes so that they actively support biodiversity, climate resilience, and community wellbeing? As horticulture professionals, we have an essential role in the future of our world. Drawing from real-world projects and community-based design work, this workshop will explore practical approaches to creating beautiful, functional gardens that wildly expand biodiversity while connecting the human spirit back to the natural world.
Participants in this Ecological Landscape Alliance design workshop on June 24 at Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, will gain inspiration and actionable strategies for transforming landscapes from resource consumers to ecosystem contributors, strengthening connections between people and the natural realm while centering a changing world, biodiversity, and community action. We will explore real-life challenges and strategies for maintaining these ecological gardens and how to better connect design and care professionals for long-term success. We will learn how to build healthy ecosystems while at the same time connecting people back to the rhythms of the seasons, healing spirit, and building community and equity along the way.
Walking the property at Stone Barns mid workshop, participants will enjoy a guided landscape tour of the property with real-life success and challenges on plant choices and 10+ years of garden trails from in-house staff.
Instructor Shanti Nagel is the founder of Design Wild, a landscape design firm working at the intersection of climate, humans, and community well-being. She believes that the relationship between humans and the natural world is essential for individual health, the strength of communities, our ecosystems, and a future on Earth. She grew up gardening as a child in upstate NY, founded an organic vegetable farm at age 20, and later managed one of New York City’s largest urban farms. Shanti is a graduate of the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, a trained horticulturist, and a skilled landscape designer. For the last decade, she and Design Wild have been designing naturally ferocious, beautiful, ecologically rich and incredibly durable landscapes in New York City and the greater Hudson Valley.
