Category Archives: Botanic Gardens

Resilient Landscapes in Built Environments

How do you design a resilient landscape when our shared environment is under increasingly mounting stress? Here’s some of what I learned from landscape architect Lisa N. Cowan, PLA, SITES AP, at a Coastal Maine Botanic Garden class today.

Landscape Design for the Long Run

Resilient landscapes are designed from a holistic point of view, taking into account not just your property, but your neighborhood, community and region. The ingredients—including diverse plantings, efficient use and infiltration of water, habitat for people and wildlife, connection to the adjacent areas, small scale moments of nature, and climate change—combine to make a meaningful statement about resilience and shared values.

Because so much land has been disturbed for so many generations, every yard and every landscape matters, starting with yours. Your landscape can contribute to resilience and your lifestyle while supporting ecosystem structures and processes that provide us ecosystem services such as:

  • Air quality
  • Water quality and security
  • Wetland integrity
  • Biodiversity conservation
  • Forest resilience
  • Carbon sequestration
  • Economic diversity
  • Social and cultural well-being

From this big picture view, we work together to articulate your land use and resilience goals, evaluate the property, sketch out simple bubble diagrams and conceptual design sketches, fine tuning through discussion and further discovery until we have a plan that satisfies you.

Because a landscape is a living system, many variables come into play. We’ll need to be patient to see how the plan and implementation evolve over time, and adapt as necessary. Some level of maintenance will likely be required—depending on your goals—at least during the plant establishment period.

So, how do you want you make your landscape more resilient today? If you think we might be a good match, please get in touch and let’s talk it over!

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THE WONDER OF PLANT ADAPTATIONS at NATIVE PLANT TRUST

Carol Lundeen with Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust

Carol Lundeen with Native Plant Trust Director of Horticulture Uli Lorimer outside the Trust’s education building after his Plant Adaptations class at the Trust in Framingham, MA. Lorimer demonstrated how every feature of a plant is a result of an adaptation designed to afford reproductive, environmental or cultural success.

The magic of botany. If you love botany, or appreciate nature, you would have loved Uli Lorimer’s Plant Adaptations class at Native Plant Trust. Right down to the molecular level, every feature of a plant is a result of an adaptation designed to afford reproductive, environmental or cultural success. This class explored the myriad ways plants have adapted to different habitats, soil types, pollination and dispersal schemes while co-evolving with other organisms in shared, co-dependent ecosystems.

Some adaptations may make it very difficult for a plant to survive in different environments, cultural and/or ecological conditions than those in which it evolved over time, which is why climate change makes it so difficult for some plants that their populations and distributions have declined, and some are vulnerable to extinction. Other plants are able to thrive and reproduce in a wide variety of situations, and so can overcome and replace vulnerable populations.

Native Plant Trust’s mission is to conserve and promote New England’s native plants to ensure healthy, biologically diverse landscapes, and vision is that through their leadership, New England’s native plants will exist in vigorous populations within healthy, evolving ecosystems, and people across the region will actively promote and protect them in the wild and in their gardens.

As Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust, Lorimer oversees Garden in the Woods, a botanic garden in Framingham, MA, and Nasami Farm in western MA, a nursery focused on propagation of and research about New England native plants.

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TOP 100 NATIVE PLANTS FOR NEW ENGLAND GARDENS

Cover of Native Plants for New England Gardens

Congratulations to Mark Richardson and Dan Jaffe on publishing their extensive observations and close up photographs of their top 100 New England native plants. I’ve studied with them dozens of times while earning a certificate in native plant horticulture and design at the New England Wildflower Society’s Garden in the Woods in Framingham, MA and I think of them as native plant rock stars.

Mark is Botanic Garden Director, and Dan propagator and stock bed grower at Garden in the Woods.

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LESSONS LEARNED WHEN FIELD BOTANY MEETS DESIGN – MARCH 7

Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, will present Lessons Learned When Field Botany Meets Design at Grow Native Massachusetts’ Evenings with Experts lecture series at the Cambridge Public Library, Wednesday March 7 from 7:00 – 8:30 pm.

Evenings with Experts | Uli Lorimer | March 7 | Grow Native Massachusetts | Cambridge Public Library

Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Ecologically attuned designers are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration in the design of managed landscapes. But connecting field botany to horticulture is complex, and insights gained from observations in the wild don’t always translate directly into a cultivated garden.

Uli will use the recently expanded native flora garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a cultivated pine barrens and coastal plain grassland, as a case study— sharing lessons learned along the way as the project evolved from a concept into a dynamic, living landscape. Good design allows for change and succession to occur, and flexibility in design intent is a valuable strategy because things do not always work out as planned.

Uli Lorimer has been the Curator of Native Flora at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Garden for over a decade. He was instrumental in the expansion of the Garden’s native plant collection, using only material sourced from the wild and grown from seed. As Field Chair at BBG, he coordinates fieldwork with regional botanists and leads botanical expeditions for naturalists and horticulturists.
This lecture is co-sponsored by Mount Auburn Cemetery

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