The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

What a whirlwind Festival of Trees has been this year! When planning started in August we never expected to see sell out days. We're so thankful for all our Members and guests who came to visit, and for those who haven't grabbed a ticket we hope to see you in the coming weeks!

Festival of Trees is our largest fundraiser and in times like these it means even more to us to see the support. This year's event may look different than in years past but it does come with a couple fun changes such as the option to virtually purchase tree raffle tickets! Use the button above to take part in the first ever virtual raffle or to take a peak at the trees on display. 

Please Donate to our Annual Fund

We are making a positive difference in people’s lives at a particularly difficult time. It is because of your generous  support that we are able to do this. Your donation, regardless of the amount, will help.

Thank you very much!

Staff Wish List

We're continuously adding items to our Amazon Wishlist. Help make our season (and workspaces) merry and bright by purchasing a needed item. From Horticulture to the Library, everyone is looking for something!  

P.S. Did you know you can also support MassHort through Amazon Smile? Learn More

Spotted Lanternfly Alert

Lycorma delicatula

From our friends at the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts:

We've learned of presence of the Spotted Lanternfly in Massachusetts. Since 2014, infestations of the sap-sucking insects, native to Asia, have broken out in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and West Virginia and Connecticut. See the FAQ sheet below for more information and details on reporting. 

Upcoming Classes

Designing the Winter Landscape

3 Session course, Virtual
February 10, 11, 17 

Botany for the Home Gardener

6 Session course, Virtual

February 2 - March 9

A Piet Oudolf Story, Virtual Lecture
February 16, 10am

Featured Articles

Holly for the Holidays

Operating Festival of Trees in 2020

Seasonal Books about Gardens, Landscapes and the Natural World 

December Horticultural Hints

From the Stacks; Good Bugs Bad Bugs

Holly for the Holidays

by Wayne Mezitt

MHS Trustee

During the holiday season what plants are more traditional than the hollies? Their distinctive leaves and bright berries help raise spirits at this season when daylight is shortest and the winter landscape is cold and barren. For hundreds of years people of all cultures have considered holly an important symbol of peace, health, happiness and hope for life’s renewal at the time of the winter solstice. 

We in New England are fortunate that a wide variety of holly (Ilex), evergreen and deciduous, thrives in our climate. The basic evergreen types are American holly (Ilex opaca), native to Cape Cod and all along the eastern seaboard, and the English holly (Ilex aquifolium), which grows best further south where winters are milder. 

Hybrids of these include the “Blue Hollies” (Ilex x meservaea), which have become most popular for local landscapes because of their superior hardiness, performance and reliability. Two of them, Ilex ‘Blue Princess’ and ‘Blue Prince’ (male), have received Tower Hill Botanic Garden’s prestigiousCary Award. 

Deciduous hollies can be just as appealing as their evergreen cousins. Some people consider the deciduous types (those that drop their leaves in winter) to be less versatile than the evergreens. But the spectacular berries on bare branches are often even more attractive for both landscape use and indoor displays. Numerous cultivars including ‘Sparkleberry’, ‘Red Sprite’ (another Cary Award winner) and ‘Winter Red’ are widely available in garden centers and well adapted for growing in this region. [Tip: combine cut berry-filled deciduous branches with male (non-fruiting) evergreen branches to fashion a fabulous winter wreath or indoor bouquet.]

Growing hollies in your home garden is easy, as they thrive in most any location. Evergreen types are attractive for many landscape sites. Bright splashes of berries on deciduous types contrast effectively against a background of evergreens or at woods’ edge all fall and winter, even in wetter-soil areas. And don’t be afraid to cut their branches--we’ve found that pruning the branches in fall, particularly the deciduous types, actually encourages heavier berry-set the following year!

Holly plants are either male or female; only the females produce berries, and that requires male pollination. Planting a male (non-fruiting) plant of the same species within a hundred feet of the female is commonly recommended to help assure pollinators will fertilize the female flowers that produce the berries. But hollies are now so widely used, adding a male pollen-source may be unnecessary. Should you find disappointing berry-set, you can always add a male plant later.

If you have even minimal space in your yard, consider planting some hollies for your family’s year-round enjoyment--they’re easy to grow and a prudent investment, particularly during the holiday season.

Wayne Mezitt is a 3^rd generation nurseryman and a Massachusetts Certified Horticulturist, now chairman of Weston Nurseries of Hopkinton and Chelmsford, MA, and owner of “Hort-Sense”, a horticultural advisory business. Wayne currently serves as a Trustee for Massachusetts Horticultural Society at The Gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, MA.

Operating Festival of Trees in 2020

by Gretel Anspach

Festival of Trees Co-Chair

Welcome to the 2020 Festival of Trees! This is the 12th year that Mass Hort is presenting Festival of Trees, and not surprisingly, it’s kind of different this year.  We still have an amazing display of trains and Department 56 buildings called Snow Village.  And of course, we still have beautifully decorated artificial trees, but we’ve had to change the structure to keep people safe during the pandemic.

All visits to Festival of Trees are now scheduled, with tours leaving the Gate House every 20 minutes.  We’ve limited the group size to 22 to ensure that there are never more than 24 people in a room at a time.  We’ve also established a tour path to make sure that groups don’t encounter each other as they travel through the show. And of course, everyone wears masks at all times.

What to Expect when visiting: 

After checking in and collecting a hot chocolate, you'll enter the show on a lighted path through the Trial Garden and the Hartley Botanic Greenhouse.  The Trial Garden is now dormant but the seed-heads remaining are hints of the beautiful display there last summer.  Magnificent planters located at the entrance of the Education Building welcome visitors. New this year, these gorgeous displays will also be raffled off! We also welcome a poinsettia tree alongside an indoor display of shrubs and trees suitable for our climate. Guests are welcome to view these additions while waiting to step into the train room.

We call Snow Village a train set, but it’s so much more than that.  It’s comprised of at least  6 villages: Dickens, Amusement Park, Fenway Park, Santa’s Village, The Port, The Mountain. All complete with trains and trolleys winding through.  Swans swim on lakes, ice skaters skate, shoppers travel up escalators, and Santa keeps working on his list.  These villages are the gift of Bill Meagher whose continued dedication to his hobby keeps the trains running on time and the scenery refreshed from year to year.

After Snow Village, our guests move on to the first tree room. This year we’ve split the 63 trees into two rooms to spread them out and allow our guests to enjoy them for longer.  The first tree room contains 24 trees, ranging in size from a little Peanuts tree to a towering 12 days of Christmas tree. Raffle tickets can be purchased and placed into the ticket posts in front of each tree for a drawing that will take place December 20 in the evening.

(For those of you following along from home, we’ve put together an online raffle (See left) where you can see photos of all the trees in this year’s display.)

The penultimate stop on the tour is the Hunnewell Carriage House which contains the remaining 39 trees.  As always, the pride of place in the room is given to the 9-foot tall Bartlett tree, and some of the old familiars are there as well; an engineering tree, a beer tree, and a telescope.  We have some wonderful new contributors too, and I think the display shows that the festival gets better and better each year!

As a last stop on your tour, we usher you to one of our fire pits with a complimentary s’mores kit to toast.  Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you have a wonderful, safe, joyful holiday season!

Seasonal Books about Gardens, Landscapes and the Natural World 

Reviewed By Patrice Todisco 

In this most unusual of years, we continue to be grateful for the companionship books offer.  While we dream of future travels, we are reminded of the simple joys of staying near home and observing the natural world close at hand.  To inspire current expeditions and inform future explorations consider these recent publications about gardens, landscapes and the natural world.  

Offered as a "Grand Tour" of some of the world's most iconic royal gardens open to the public, Royal Gardens of the World: 21 Celebrated Gardens from the Alhambra to Highgrove and Beyond by Mark Lane (240 pages, Kyle Books, $45) synthesizes the history of horticulture, architecture, gardens, and art to tell the stories of their creation and preservation.  To achieve this goal, Lane researched the lives of more than 950 individuals, including patrons, designers and gardeners, placing each garden firmly within its unique historical context. While gardening tastes may change, the legacy of these spectacular landscapes lives on through modern day practices that address sustainability, biodiversity and ecological processes. Complete with historic images, layout plans and information about key plants, Royal Gardens of the World is both a practical and inspirational guide.  

While Americans don't have Royal Gardens, they do have Monticello, one of the thirty-seven gardens visited by BBC television host Monty Don and photographer Derry Moore In American Gardens (224 pages, Prestel Publishing, $50). Don and Moore travel across America in pursuit of outdoor spaces that epitomize or redefine the American garden. Along the way they offer a blend of history, observations and personal anecdotes about the people and places they visit.  Sharing parallel impressions, their conclusion that due to the scale and diversity of the country, American gardens resist definition should not surprise (although one does wish they had visited New England). Despite this oversight, American Gardens offers a breezy introduction to a complex and dynamic topic that merits further exploration.   

Teacher, writer, lecturer, nurseryman, naturalist, gardener. Daniel Hinkley has created not one, but two remarkable gardens in the Pacific Northwest.  In Windcliff: A Story of People, Plants, and Gardens (280 pages, Timber Press, $35) he shares the story of how, when feeling suffocated by the success of his first garden and nursery Heronswood, he set out to recalibrate. This he achieved at Windcliff, a six and  half acre site set atop (appropriately enough) a windblown cliff overlooking Puget Sound. Enthralled with the "enchantment of gardening, of collecting, of cultivating and sharing" Hinkley is a generous guide, providing in-depth information about creating the garden and plantings.  This is a personal journey, evoking sentiments of memory and loss elements essential to shaping a memorable landscape. An intrepid traveler, at Windcliff  Hinkley finds his "personal geography" that he eloquently shares in this horticultural memoir as a testament to the power of place.              

Perhaps no other English garden has captured the imagination of so many than Sissinghurst.  The creation of writer Victoria 'Vita' Sackville West and her husband, diplomat Harold Nicolson, the garden has been widely studied, so much so that author Tim Richardson began a recent interview at London's Garden Museum with the query, " Do we really need another book about Sissinghurst?" In Sissinghurst: The Dream Garden (223 pages, Frances Lincoln, $45) Richardson answers his question in the affirmative by offering a deeply personal account of the garden that is both a cultural and intellectual history. Enhanced with insights on the garden's design and horticultural features, Richardson brings the garden into the present detailing its evolution since 1967 when it became a property of the National Trust.  Described as a third personality in Vita and Harold's complex relationship, the garden which is celebrated as creative endeavor woven indelibly into Vita and Harold's beings, retains its magic as a place of renewal and loss that is deeply rooted in the landscape they both loved.   

In Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again (Timber Press, 243 pages, $27.95) garden designer and author Page Dickey shares her account of leaving the beloved Duck Hill, where she lived and gardened for thirty-four years, to move to a former Methodist Church on 17 acres of rolling woodlands in southern Connecticut.  Here, on the banks of the Housatonic River, Dickey and her husband embrace the inevitable changes of aging while finding solace and inspiration in the surrounding landscape. A personal narrative of transformation, letting go and embracing change, Uprooted is uniquely suited to a year in which the natural world brought comfort to many.  

We all know how important bees are to the environment but just how much do we know about bees? Artfully designed, Bees and Their Keepers: From waggle-dancing to killer bees, from Aristotle to Winne-the-Pooh by Lotte Möller (224 pages, MacLehose Press, $30) is a social and cultural history of beekeeping that spans from antiquity to the present and sheds light on both our practical and imaginary relationship with bees.  Sweden's Garden Book of the Year in 2019, this encyclopedic account of bees is a fun book that is written with personal feeling and a sense of wonder that will  appeal to both the general reader and beekeeper alike.        

A collection of essays by award winning author Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays (261 pages, Grove Press, $27) provides daily meditations on living in the natural world.  Delicately crafted, they speak to power of mindfulness and being fully present in the moment as a spiritual goal.  Whether walking in the woods, installing nestboxes, witnessing a solar eclipse or observing migrating finches, Macdonald illuminates each essay with a keen sense of observation that is tempered by an acknowledgement of the imperceptible changes on the natural world wrought by the passage of time.  Infused with the quality of wonder, Macdonald  rejoices in the simplicity of observing daily what is close at hand, while writing about topics that are of the "deepest possible importance in our present-day moment."  Hers is a poignant plea to rethink the manner in which we view and interact with the natural world, one made more critical with each passing day.        

Patrice Todisco writes about gardens and parks at the award-winning blog, Landscape Notes.

October Horticultural Hints

by Betty Sanders

Lifetime Master Gardener

Don’t wait to order seeds.  Last year, seed companies found themselves overwhelmed by orders from people wanting to start vegetable gardens amid pandemic shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders.  Anyone who waited to order found not just their favorite seed varieties sold out, but also second- and third choices.  Despite assurances they were increasing orders from their suppliers, a quick check in late November showed many favorite seed varieties are ‘not available at this time’.  Don’t wait until the new year to put in your order; do it now. Your seeds won’t spoil!

Winterize your tools. Outdoor gardening season is over, so now it’s important to clean and organize your gardening equipment.  Send your mower in for service (you won’t care if it’s not ready for three months).  Wash the dirt off shovels, rakes and trowels.  

Then remove any rust with a piece of steel wool.  Finish with by rubbing on a light coating of oil on all metal parts.  Clean and sharpen edges pruners, loppers and other cutting tools.   In the spring you’ll be glad you are ready to start gardening with like-new tools.

Inventory your tools.  If you need a new shovel or you lost the hand hoe; put it on your list to Santa.  There’s nothing like a finding new pair of high-quality pruners under the tree.

Inventory your garage or garden shed, and note any old packages of herbicides and pesticides. Heat, cold and age all reduce the effectiveness of many of these products, but not their toxicity to the environment. Put them aside to dispose of at special collections centers or toxic material days held locally. NEVER place them in the trash or pour them down the drain or out on the ground. The environment you save is the one you and your family live, garden and play in.

Protect your shrubs. Any plant that regularly fails to thrive after a tough winter needs extra protection. You can use many of the same techniques that work for roses for spring flowering hydrangeas that fail to bloom, as well as not-quite-hardy shrubs. Plants can be protected with wind screens, or cages stuffed with mulch, straw or leaves. Plants susceptible to branch break from heavy snow need special help. Tying branches together with heavy twine can be effective. For small plants, slatted structures allow good air flow while preventing crushing snow loads from building up.  

It’s an excellent time to prune. Deciduous plants – those that lose their leaves in the winter – have now gone dormant.  Examine the structure of the bare tree or shrub and decide what needs to be done to keep your plant growing the way you want. Start with the easy-to-spot dead or diseased wood, then look for crossing or rubbing branches. If the tree (or shrub) is too big to tackle while standing on the ground, let a professional do the work for you.

Decorating Evergreen pruning has a second benefit. You can use the cuttings to make holiday arrangements! Cuttings from spruce, cedar, pine and fir make great decorations on their own and elegant arrangements especially when combined with flowers for special occasions. Conversely, don’t bother bringing in hemlock; it sheds its needles almost immediately. Similarly, holly must be kept in clean water and will still have a short life span. Leave the winter berries for the birds that need them for food. They fall off and can disagree with small children or pets who find them on the floor.

You can read more of Betty’s horticultural advice on her website, www.BettyOnGardening.com.

From the Stacks

By Maureen T. O’Brien

Library Manager

Bugs are not going to inherit the earth.

They own it now.

So we might as well make peace with the landlord.

Thomas Eisener (1929-2011)

Good bugs, bad bugs, we can’t live with them or without them. As biologist E.O. Wilson stated 

[I]f all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

We need to know our bugs – the good and bad. 

I got to thinking about bugs when I was bitten by a tick while gathering my holiday greens. I thought that during the cold weather they went away so I did not employ my usual defenses. I was wrong. Ticks, while most prevalent in warmer months, can be active year-round. Although the tick was successfully extracted, I now sport a red, itchy, swollen lump as a reminder of my folly.

Scientific terminology is precise and orderly. We often use the word bug to describe all sorts of small, crawly, creepy things. But Hemiptera or true bugs are an order of insects comprising 50,000 to 80,000 species. True bugs have piercing mouthparts. True insects are small air-breathing arthropods with a body divided into three parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), three pairs of legs and usually two pairs of wings. They inhabit our gardens, while some enhance the garden, others wreak havoc. How we interact with insects has dramatic influence on our health and that of our garden and the ecosystem. Thoughtful plant selection, good horticultural practices and ecological deterrents will create a successful garden that is balanced and environmentally friendly. 

What I learned: while ticks are commonly thought of as insects, they are actually arachnids like scorpions, spiders and mites. Members of this group have four pairs of legs as adults and no antennae.

Although ticks are a pest to humans, they play an important role in the ecosystem. They serve as a food source for reptiles, birds and amphibians, control wild animal populations and provide scientists with valuable information an ecosystem's overall health and stability.

Want to learn more? Browse our catalog of books at Masscat.org.

In the Windows – 

We have decorated our windows for the Festival of Trees. Inside we have selected holiday books on display. Take a peek and plan to visit when the gardens reopen in the Spring. If you need information or have questions from the Library, send an email to mobrien@masshort.org.

We are still collecting …

The Library relies on the generosity of the public to build and preserve its Collections. Do you want inspiration for donating to our collections?  Check out the books on the Society’s Amazon Wish List here―we’ve added some new titles we would love to add to our Collections! 

Image:  A few a of the 196 books we have on bugs, the earliest dates from 1816!

The Gardens at Elm Bank

Closed for the Season, Open April 1

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