Town &_Country Garden Club Will

Host Bartlett Arboretum Guest Speaker   

The Town & Country Garden Club of Newtown will host a program by a guest speaker from Bartlett Arboretum on Wednesday, April 11, at 7:30 pm. The meeting will be at Newtown Senior Center, on Riverside Road in Sandy Hook, and is open to non-members free of charge.

Michael P. Harvey, the director of Bartlett Arboretum at University of Connecticut, will present a slide presentation called “Gardens of the British Isles.”

Mr Harvey earned degrees in botany and environmental studies while at Connecticut College, studying under the noted ecologist William Niering (co-founder of the CT Chapter of the Nature Conservancy and a vanguard in the conservation of wetlands). His advisor at college was Glenn Dreyer, the director of Connecticut College Arboretum.

Mr Harvey has also worked at Scott Arboretum and Chicago Botanic Garden and along the way, managed to bicycle cross country from San Francisco to New Hampshire. He is currently a candidate for a master’s degree in horticulture from UConn.

He is now involved in designing a four acre seaside garden on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, England. At the site of the new Boskenna Valley Garden, plinths that were part of a pre-war Japanese garden were recovered. Mr Harvey incorporated the plinths into the new garden design for the display of ceramic garden lanterns.