Start Date
03/04/2025
End Date
03/03/2026
Description
The Boston chapter has a longstanding partnership with Grow Native Massachusetts. This annual spring lecture series, Evenings with Experts, does just that: bring national experts to speak about topics related to native plants and ecology as relates to the work of landscape architects and designers. These workshops are recorded in a live (virtual) presentation and then available online for the next year.
SESSION DESCRIPTION
Our current environmental crises are born of modern humanity’s destructive re-shaping of Earth to suit our short-term interest. We have become so profoundly detached from the natural world that we have forgotten that we too depend on the web of life. Author and activist Mary Reynolds envisions a healing process where humans embrace our role as caretakers with Acts of Restorative Kindness to the Earth, or ARKs. Join us to learn how an ARK is different from a typical wildlife garden, and what principles to follow to create true sanctuaries for our shared kin, the rooted and the unrooted. Together, we can step up and become weavers of the web of life, re-stitch the threads we have broken, and build a patchwork quilt of life to restore our planet.
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Mary Reynolds is a reformed, internationally acclaimed landscape designer. In 2002 as a complete unknown, she won a gold medal for her garden design at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London, the story of which was made into the 2016 movie Dare to Be Wild. Best-selling author of The Garden Awakening, Mary is a motivational speaker and founder of the global movement We Are The ARK.
Distance Learning
Yes
Course Equivalency
No
Subjects
Sustainable Development & Design
Health, Safety and Welfare
Yes
Hours
1.50
Learning Outcomes
1) Understand ways that landscape architecture, landscape design and other “green” industries have become disconnected from and damaging to the natural world, and why it is so important to reverse this trend.
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2) Learn about a model for landscaping that has a positive impact on the natural world with Acts of Restorative Kindness to the earth. The acronym ARK can be used to describe any patch of ground that has been actively stewarded to become an ecologically healthy native plant landscape.
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3) Learn about the many forms an ARK can take, site-specific considerations, methods for getting started, and ways to maximize the ecological potential of the space.
Instructors
Mary Reynolds is an internationally acclaimed landscape designer, 2002 gold medal winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show (London);subject of the 2016 movie Dare to be Wild, and author of The Garden Awakening
Course Codes
Provider
Boston Society of Landscape Architects