George Schoellkopf To Host September 5-7 Event

Garden Study Weekend At Hollister House

WASHINGTON — The public is invited to attend a Garden Study Weekend the weekend of September 5-7, which is being sponsored jointly by The Garden Conservancy and Hollister House Garden, a nonprofit preservation project of the Garden Conservancy.

Festivities will begin on Friday evening with a cocktail reception in the garden at Hollister House, where guests will be able to mingle among the flowers and meet Saturday’s speakers over drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Anyone wanting to attend the cocktail party, but skip the next day’s activities, is welcome to buy a ticket for $60 ($50 for Garden Conservancy members) for the party only.

On Saturday morning the focus of events changes to Bryan Town Hall, in Washington Depot, where keynote speaker Dan Pearson is coming all the way from England to talk about “English Gardens with a Sense of Place.” Mr Pearson has been much celebrated in the international gardening world for his trendsetting garden designs in which the concept of the traditional perennial border has been supplanted by a looser, rather Impressionistic combination of harmonious densely arranged plants.

More recently he has become interested in the greater landscape outside of gardens per se, but he still designs intimate gardens as well, where he says that “informality is the key.”

Next on the roster is Judith Tankard, the renowned garden historian and author, who will speak about “Shaping the American Garden Experience,” examining the evolution of the American landscape through the work of the nation’s finest landscape designers.

Ms Tankard teaches landscape design at the Radcliffe seminars and was the founding editor of the New England Garden History Society. She is the author of several excellent books on garden history, her most recent Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Other speakers later that morning are Hitch Lyman, garden designer and snowdrop specialist and dealer; Bill Noble, director of preservation projects at The Garden Conservancy; and George Schoellkopf, creator of — and working gardener at — Hollister House Garden.

In the afternoon guests will travel five miles to Hollister House Garden, where a buffet lunch will be served in the garden, before and during which there will be a rare plant sale with such notable vendors as Broken Arrow Nursery, David Burdick, Opus, Loomis Creek Nursery and Garden Vision (who specialize in rare epimediums).

After lunch noted garden author and lecturer Page Dickey and Marco Polo Stufano, elder statesman of American horticulture and ex-director of the famous garden at Wave Hill in New York City, will lead a discussion about plants suited to this area for late summer. Professional nurserymen Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nursery and Adam Wheeler of Broken Arrow Nursery will join in to offer their practical expertise.

To complete the weekend, on Sunday the Garden Conservancy will host a tour of five gardens in New Preston and Washington as part of the Open Days Program, three of which will be open for the first time on the program.

A combination package, including the Friday evening cocktail party and the events Saturday morning and afternoon (including lunch and morning coffee and muffins) is available for $180 ($160 for Garden Conservancy members). Separately, the Saturday seminar, lunch, plant sale and afternoon plant discussions cost $140 ($125 for members); and the Friday evening cocktail party alone is priced at $60 ($50 for members). The garden tour is priced separately at $5 per garden.

Registration to the seminar is limited. For additional information and registration, visit HollisterHouseGarden.org or call 860-868-2200.