Berkshire Botanical Garden announces 8th annual 'Rooted in Place' ecological gardening symposium

by Felix Carroll

Berkshire Botanical Garden's 8th annual Rooted in Place ecological gardening symposium will take place on Sunday, Nov. 13, 10 to 5 p.m., at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School's Duffin Theater.

The theme for this year's symposium, "Seeding Community in the Garden," acknowledges that gardeners' work extends beyond the soil and ripples out to communities of every type. Symposium speakers are Wambui Ippolito, Page Dickey, Elijah Goodwin, and Annie White.

Both in-person and online options are available. To register, visit BerkshireBotanical.org/rooted or call 413-298-3926.

Wambui Ippolito's talk, "Growing in Weeds," will address how landscape designers, gardeners, parents, and communities can approach design and create new spaces that bring a new vitality into children's green spaces.

Page Dickey's talk, "Bringing Meadows into the Garden," will keep climate change and energy conservation in mind as she discusses the merits of cutting down on mowing and blowing and replacing some of our lawns with higher grass. Dickey will discuss a wide range of examples showing how beautifully meadows — however small — and meadow plants can be incorporated into our gardens.

Elijah Goodwin's talk, "Agriculture as Conservation: Lessons for the Landscape," will focus on how our increasingly complex environmental challenges can't be met by wildland preservation alone. Goodwin believes it's clear that we must also radically change our approach to intensively human-managed landscapes.

Annie White's talk, "Ecosystem Approaches to Landscape Design: Building Resiliency Through Community," will focus on how today's gardeners are faced with more challenges than ever before — a changing climate, more pressure from invasive plants and pests, and more decisions about what to put into and how to manage our landscapes. White is striving to create a new culture of gardening where we move away from carefully curated gardens and become better stewards of the ecosystems within and around our gardens. White will share her ecosystem approach to landscape design that helps build resiliency through community.

For costs and tuition assistance, see the Events section of SU. Registration deadline: Nov. 11.

Harvest Festival fun. Photo: Lionel Delevingne