By Sarah Cosgrove
04 October 2013

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Kingston Garden Club members continued to be busy this summer, caretaking our town’s community gardens and visiting members’ gardens for inspiration and consultation. The following families opened their gardens to members who were happy to have had the experiences: the Stanford Family, Loring Family, Sutherland Family, Carlson Family, Wade Family, Atanian Family, Leavitt Family and Elgee Family.

The KGC gathered at the first meeting of the 2013-2014 year. Newly elected President Linda Loring greeted old and new members and encouraged all to be energized and focused on the wonderful year ahead. Ms. Loring noted that the KGC’s challenge now is twofold: to stimulate a greater working spirit in current members and to continue to build membership, so that many hands make light work.

For the first meeting of the year, Saturday, Sept. 14, the program “Creating a Carefree Garden” was presented by Adriana O’Sullivan. Originally, from the Netherlands, Ms. O’Sullivan, graduated from the Landscape Institute, then moved to America. That’s when she enrolled in the Radcliffe Seminars for Landscape Design History, later becoming The Landscape Institute at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. During the next seven years she was in heaven learning about garden design, horticulture, and history.”

The presentation was perfect for those of us who have less time or energy to work in the garden. Adriana explained how to create a garden that is low in maintenance by showing us how to prepare soil, which plants to select that are easy to care for, are drought-tolerant and have several seasons of interest. She discussed how to add interest to gardens with architectural elements, as well as how to improve their design to make gardens more interesting.

Upcoming programs are being held at the Faunce School at 9 a.m. on the second Saturday of the month. Next month will be a work session for the KGC, focusing on closing chores for Kingston’s Community Gardens.

Becoming a part of the Kingston Garden Club provides the opportunity to meet others who share the love of gardening; new members are always welcome. If you are interested in joining, please call Judy @ 781-585-7793.

TROY, Mich. and GARDEN GROVE, Calif., Oct. 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — The annual Altair Technology Conference (ATC) is underway at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Garden Grove, Calif. This is one of nine Altair events held annually throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. The series collectively draws thousands of professionals to share experiences and successes leveraging Altair simulation and optimization tools to innovate design and development processes. New additions to the conference include the PBS Works™ User Group and the Enterprise Solutions Track.

Keynote speakers headlining the 2013 ATC include:

• Robert McIntosh, Boeing Chief Engineer of Weight Engineering in the BCA Flight Sciences organization;
• Brian Cottrell, Honeywell Aerospace Chief of Structures;
• Dr. Jayaraman Sivakumar, Senior Manager, Engine Structures Component Design and Analysis Department at GM Powertrain; and
• Norihiko Sawa, Group Manager for Toyota Japan.

Altair Chairman and CEO James Scapa will provide insight on how Altair’s expansion into a variety of industry verticals is helping customers better solve the toughest challenges in both engineering and business. Product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies like AcuSolve® and OptiStruct®, cloud-based simulation with HyperWorks Unlimited™, high performance computing (HPC), and advanced business and engineering analytics will be highlighted. Additional Altair executives will take the stage to showcase the company’s evolving software vision, including insight on its HPC and cloud strategies and how solidThinking Inspire® is radically changing the user experience in design.

“Our global technology conference series, and particularly the Americas ATC, provides a venue for Altair customers to showcase their domain expertise and demonstrate the ways Altair optimization and simulation technologies have encouraged advanced engineering and game-changing business decisions,” said Scapa. “We are looking forward to the knowledge sharing, networking, and ideation that have become hallmarks of this annual event.”

Throughout the conference, experts from a wide variety of industries will participate in workshops to present their insights on trends, lessons learned from addressing complex design and engineering challenges, and how simulation and optimization technologies – including Altair’s flagship software suite HyperWorks® – are enabling innovative problem solving. Session topics include analysis and automation, design exploration, structural optimization, composites design, concept design, and design for manufacturability.

About Altair

Altair empowers client innovation and decision-making through technology that optimizes the analysis, management and visualization of business and engineering information. Privately held, with 2,000 employees, Altair has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. With a 28-year track record for high-end software for engineering and computing, enterprise analytics solutions, and innovative product design and development, Altair consistently delivers a competitive advantage to customers in a broad range of industries. To learn more, please visit www.altair.com.

SOURCE Altair

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Van Valkenburgh lived in Boston for more than 25 years, and though his firm, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc., is now based in New York, he has an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a home on Martha’s Vineyard. When the museum’s building committee and director Anne Hawley were visiting gardens by the top nominated candidates for the Monks Garden project during the selection process, Van Valkenburgh was at his Vineyard home, so he invited them to his own private garden there, which is nearly the same size as the Monks Garden (and, we’re sure, gorgeous). That sealed the deal.

“Coming to the garden is not a practical experience,” Van Valkenburgh said as he stood in the museum’s Spanish Cloister during a preview event, nodding to the finished garden seen just outside through the Chinese Loggia. “I thought of the garden as a place to get lost.”

Your mind just may take a break basking in the foliage of 66 trees and more than 7,000 perennials (2,100 bulbs are scheduled still to be planted). And the 530 feet of winding paths placed in the garden’s 7,545 square feet might turn you around a bit, but you won’t truly lose your way — you’ll enjoy just being in the garden, and then walk one of the many paths back. “It’s not about getting here or there or anywhere,” said Van Valkenburgh, adding that like the museum, which invites personal exploration and study rather than presenting a singular, direct path to view the artwork, the garden is meant for meandering. A pause in nature during a museum visit.

Courtesy of Alex S. MacLean, 2013.

An aerial view of the Monks Garden shows the historic building on the left, the curved brick wall at the top right, and garden filling the space between.

You can enter the garden either through the historic building’s Chinese Loggia, where plants are pressing up against the glass walls, or you can emerge from the contemporary glass connector, which links the old building with the new. There, the garden has a softer edge, welcoming visitors in gradually. Curvy walkways made of dark clay with specks of shimmery mica schist expand the space by creating numerous pathways and vantages, and the fullness, achieved from ferns, wild ginger, daylilies, Hellebore, Japansese Stewartia, gray birch trees, and red and white camellias, juxtaposes with the openness of the museum’s central indoor courtyard. No bricks were cut for the project — an interesting detail that achieves an organic quality around the path’s edges.

Courtesy of Elizabeth Felicella, 2013.

Shimmery mica schist gives the clay bricks sparkle.

Historical photos of the Monks Garden are on the museum’s website, and the history is interesting to follow. Gardner’s initial design was, not surprisingly, Italianate, with tall trees planted in rows. Within a few years, she enhanced the garden with a pergola covered in vines. After her death, museum director Morris Carter added more shrubs and a rock garden, but when Roland van N. Hadley became director in 1970, he hired Sasaki Associates of Watertown, Massachusetts, to re-grade the garden and plant new trees, shrubs, and ground covers along a bluestone path. That was how the garden looked until the museum briefly closed to prepare for the opening of the new wing in 2012. Now, we’ve got Van Valkenburgh’s interpretation of Gardner’s vision to enjoy.

28 September 2013, 10:07 GMT

Provision of advisory consultancy services for the design of gardens

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Renowned architect Bobby McAlpine will make an appearance at
next week’s Antiques at The Gardens show, but tickets for his lecture have
already sold out. Birmingham Botanical Gardens director Fred Spicer isn’t
surprised: He said the four-day celebration of refined artistry is shaping up
to be the biggest since the Gardens took over the event in 2005.

“The whole first floor and part of the second floor of the
Garden Center, our main building, is totally transformed,” Spicer said. “We’ve
created booths for antiques dealers we’ve selected from eight years. We have a
lot of returning fan favorites.”

In addition to the heirlooms and artifacts, this year’s show, which raises money for the Gardens’ educational programs, will the event will feature walk-in displays that show off the talents of
interior designers and architects around the state. Themes for the tastemakers (as the event calls them) include “Jewelry Box” and “Weeks to Africa.”

Birmingham interior designer Dana Wolter and architect Jeff
Dungan will spend early next week furnishing a 9’X5′ box with a cozy living
room feel – and several for-sale antiques – for a theme titled “Fireside Chats.”
Wolter said the show serves as a kind of convention for Birmingham’s artists,
designers and dealers.

“Everyone’s space will be a little bit different, but it
will be a reflection of who they are and what they like,” she explained. “I’m
excited to see everyone else’s creativity, forget my own. Just to see what
everyone else is going to do with their little auditorium space.”

The things you can actually take home include jewelry, furniture,
paintings, silver, prints, maps and books. Artifacts range from a bureau from
Victorian England to more affordable items, such as a tea set that costs, say,
a few hundred dollars instead of a few thousand. Not exactly a steal, but then
again, the show isn’t What’s on Second.

 “These are fine
dealers; it’s certainly not a yard sale,” Spicer said. “You’re talking about
people who know the things that they have, who have selected them very, very
carefully, who know about the provenance of the pieces that they’re selling.”

And for those of us who sometimes go a whole day without
using the word “provenance?” Admission is just $10, and Spicer said anyone is
more than welcome to just browse, speak with dealers and designers and learn
about how the other half lived.

“It’s a quality antique show and sale and something that
Birmingham really doesn’t have except for this. There are wonderful antiques
dealers in Birmingham, but the kind of show and sale that we’re doing is unique
to Birmingham.”

And besides, he continued, plants and antiques just go
together.

“Buying an antique is kind of like the ultimate in
recycling. If it’s  a beautiful wooden
desk, that tree was turned into a desk a hundred years ago, it’s not a new tree
that had to be cut down.”

Antiques at The Gardens will run October 3-6. Tickets are
$10 and parking is free. If you missed out on lecture tickets, you can still attend
a black-tie gala on Friday night for live music, refreshments and private
browsing of the sale.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Lisa Delplace, the chief executive of Oehme, van Sweden Associates, the firm Mr. van Sweden founded in 1977 with Wolfgang Oehme, a fellow landscape architect, to spread their gospel of a kinder, shaggier horticulture.

In books, lectures and an expansive oeuvre of gardens, the two men led a revolt against the staid American lawn, with its evergreen plantings cosseting the house, manicured grass stretching to the curb and few herbaceous flowering plants. Their alternative was to put shrubs like yews toward the street, where they could grow unclipped and provide privacy for an inner space crammed with surprises like fountains and fine ferns.

Other surprises — actually carefully concocted visual effects — came with the passage of time as the light changed, shadows grew and the seasons turned. Even changing winds were considered.

And the bigger the effect, the better, even if acreage was minimal. “You have to think big,” Mr. van Sweden told The Washington Post in 1998. “Think huge leaves, enormous grasses and flowers big as dinner plates. The worst thing you can do is be ditsy.”

The result was gardens that “move in the breeze and sparkle like stained glass,” Mr. van Sweden wrote in “Gardening With Nature” (1997). The designers called their vision “the new American garden.”

Mr. van Sweden immodestly called his collaboration with Mr. Oehme (pronounced EHR-ma) “a partnership of genius,” and plenty of prestigious clients agreed. Their work has graced embassies, universities and private homes, including Oprah Winfrey’s elegant French chateau-style country house near South Bend, Ind.

In Washington their work can be seen at the Treasury Building, the National Gallery of Art, the United States National Arboretum, the Federal Reserve building and the National World War II Memorial on the Mall. Ronald Reagan National Airport, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and Francis Scott Key Park in the Georgetown district also carry their signature.

In New York, they created pieces of Battery Park City and Hudson River Park. Their work extended to Minneapolis, Chicago and West Virginia.

The son of a builder, James Anthony van Sweden was born on Feb. 5, 1935, in the large Dutch community in Grand Rapids, Mich. He learned a sense of order from his mother, who hung laundry on her clothesline hierarchically from small to big, socks to sheets, The Post said.

He earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and did postgraduate work in city planning in the Netherlands. He then spent 13 years as an urban designer in Washington.

In 1957, his future collaborator, Mr. Oehme, came to Baltimore from East Germany as an already respected landscape architect. Mr. van Sweden was awe-struck when he saw a garden Mr. Oehme had designed.

“I had never seen such a beautiful garden in my life,” he wrote. “I knew right then that Wolfgang Oehme was somebody to grapple with, to be involved with.”

When Mr. van Sweden bought a row house in Washington’s Georgetown district in 1970, he asked Mr. Oehme’s help in creating a garden for his narrow backyard. The result was an unusual mix of huge ornamental grasses, magnolia, holly, Japanese snowball and witch hazel. Mr. van Sweden thought others might appreciate a similar amenity, and he proposed that the two men set up a firm. Their partnership began in 1977.

In a memorial to Mr. van Sweden on its Web site, the Cultural Landscape Foundation praised him and his partner for their environmentally benign approach: they eschewed pesticides and favored perennials. It lauded their fecundity: they planted flowers and bushes not by threes and fours but by the thousands. It called Mr. van Sweden’s sensibility “painterly,” and indeed he claimed inspiration from masters like Johannes Vermeer and Willem de Kooning.

In its online appreciation, Landscape Architecture magazine said “legions of designers and home gardeners embraced the firm’s style.”

Many learned the details of that style from Mr. van Sweden’s books, including “Gardening With Water” (1995); “Bold Romantic Gardens” (1990), written with Mr. Oehme and Susan Rademacher; and “Architecture in the Garden” (2003), written with Thomas Christopher.

That latter book discusses the garden’s surroundings and interior elements like paths, edgings and artwork, areas in which Mr. van Sweden specialized. Mr. Oehme took the lead in horticultural matters.

Mr. Oehme died in 2011. Mr. van Sweden’s marriage to Linda Nordyke ended in divorce. He is survived by his sisters, Karyl Mangus and Christie Kauffman.

In “Architecture in the Garden,” Mr. van Sweden recalled the problem he perceived when Ms. Winfrey commissioned him, for a reported $9 million, to improve the grounds around her country home in Indiana: nothing separated it from the surrounding farmland.

“Over the next four years, we worked together to create an architectural context around the house, including newly installed terraces and walls,” he wrote. “The materials we selected, brick framed with limestone, echoed the house, yet this architecture also conformed to the surrounding countryside, adopting its long, horizontal lines. In this way, we quite literally pulled the house out into the site.”

At a joint meeting of Bogalusa Garden Guild and Northeast Garden Club held recently at the Bogalusa Senior Center, Susan McNeese, a member of Mt. Hermon Garden Club and an accredited garden club judge, presented a program on floral design. Hostesses were Sydney Hughes and Rosemary Earles from Bogalusa Garden Guild and Cidette Rayburn and Pris Sampson from Northeast Garden Club.

McNeese, a very knowledgeable horticulturist, said that this year’s theme of the Flower House at the Washington Parish Fair is “Flowers on Parade.” In addition, Garden Club exhibitors will be making designs called “Dancing with the Stars,” “Reaching for a Star” and “A Falling Star.” These special designs, she said, will be reflective, underwater and stretch.

To demonstrate the underwater design McNeese used a square glass container placed on a heavy base. She emphasized that a portion of the arrangement, as well as the flower or flowers, must be ulderwater. She suggested that flowers that do well under water are mums, roses, gerber daisies, ginger or bird of paradise. She said to secure the flowers well to prevent floating and to use a bottle of spring water to prevent clouding.

She continued saying that the container for a reflective design needs to reflect light, and suggested using silver, gold or a copper container. In addition, she said, the weight of the greenery must complement the weight of the container, and the flower selected needs to sparkle or give off a starburst effect.

McNeese demonstrated the stretch design by using two black containers of different heights. A needlepoint frog held the line material and flowers for the container. A stretch design requires the containers to be tied together, she said, and deomonstrated by using a large grape vine which had been dried. She used different colored back drops to show her audience how important the selection is, and how the addition of a back drop can make or break an arrangement.

In closing, McNeese reminded members that the District VI meeting will be held at The Castle in Franklinton.

Following the floral presentation, Vice President Lee Mizell presented McNeese a gift from the two clubs.She noted that on Friday, Oct. 1, hostesses will be Washington Parish Garden Club Council: Bogalusa Garden Guild, Franklinton Garden Club, Home and Garden Club, Mt. Hermon Garden Club, Northeast Garden Club and Southeast Garden Clippers.

A brief business meeting followed and Linda Pope, yard judging chairman, announced that the yard of the month for September was Billy and Sue Magee, 1502 Lynwood, first place; Joe and Shirley Saltaformaggio, 1510 Military Road, second place; and Donnie and Donna Crain, 224 Bankston Drive, honorable mention.

Members present were: Mary Anthony, Sharon Ball, Jolene Black, guest Justin Black, Evelyn Blair, Jenene Bracey, Rita Clayton, Earles, Fran Harry, Hughes, Regina Hunt, Bertie Lee, Shirley Lewis, Susan Lewis, Annette Magee, Mizell, Martha Pierce, Linda Pope, Rayburn, Marcy Regan, Alice Rushing, Margaret Ryals, Sampson, Brenda Simon, Patty Sue Stevenson, Ellen Taylor and Nelda Woodward.