Throughout the year, the New Canaan Beautification League offers a variety of educational programs, hands-on workshops, garden tours, and special events designed to inspire a love of gardening, conservation, and community beautification. Whether you’re an experienced gardener or simply enjoy beautiful places and connecting with your community, there’s something for everyone. Many programs are free and open to the public, while others are reserved for members or require advance registration. Please see the calendar below for details. Please click the title of each event to register!
Click here to view past recorded programs on our YouTube channel.
Designing Women, Marta McDowell
Learn design techniques from the Golden Age of American Gardens. Stretching across the turn of the twentieth century, designers such as Marion Coffin, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, and Ellen Shipman transformed the wealth of the Industrial Revolution into beautiful landscapes for estates across the country. This lecture highlights the design principles these women employed, principles that work for gardens of any size.
Marta McDowell teaches landscape history and horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and is a popular lecturer and writer. Her latest book is Gardening Can Be Murder, about the horticultural connections to crime fiction. Timber Press also published Unearthing The Secret Garden, Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life, The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, New York Times-bestselling All the Presidents’ Gardens, and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, now in its ninth printing. She was the 2019 recipient of the Garden Club of America’s Sarah Chapman Francis Medal for outstanding literary achievement.
This is a joint program with New Canaan Garden Club.