Horticultural Design, Inc. and the Brine Garden

Bound in Books

The Nonstop Garden

by Stephanie Cohen and Jennifer Benner
includes one of our gardens
Timber Press
Pub. date May 2010

Stephanie, aka the Perennial Diva, is an award-winning author, speaker, and the former director of the Landscape Arboretum at Temple University in Ambler, PA. Jennifer is a writer, photographer, and horticulture consultant, and a former editor at Fine Gardening magazine.

Gardens of the Hudson Valley

Photographs by Sue Daley and Steve Gross
Text by Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
features the Brine Garden.
Monacelli Press
Pub. date October 2010

Steve and Sue are photographers who specialize in architecture, interiors, gardens, travel and lifestyle. Nancy and Susan are the authors of Garden Guide: New York City, revised edition, 2010, Norton.

Designer Plant Combinations

by Scott Calhoun
features ten pages of images and plant combinations from the Brine Garden.
Storey Publishing
Published 2008

Scott is a recipient of the highest awards from the American Horticultural Society and the Garden Writers Association of America.
His blog: Scott Calhoun’s Desert

From New York to Boston:
Book a design consultation with Duncan Brine, principal landscape designer

Horticultural Design, Inc.
hortdesign@gardenlarge.com
(845) 855-9023

Get an eyeful of his perspective here.

http://www.townofdover.us/HudsoniaPresentation.pdf

On Route 82, you will have passed Buttercup Farm Sanctuary, over 500 acres of diverse habitats, six miles of trails, and, on a good May day, over 80 species of birds, including, if you’re lucky, nesting Great Blue Herons, Wood Ducks, Bobolinks.]

Buttercup Farm Audubon Sanctuary, Route 82, Pine Plains
Dawn until dusk, seven days per week. For further information, contact sanctuary warden David Wheeler; 518.325.5203.

Excerpted from a Posting by Marilyn Bethany on 04/01/08

Info on Gifford Garden in Millbrook, NY here

Re The Mount:

more than 100 people attended a public forum on the future of The Mount, the Edith Wharton Estate and Gardens. It’s become clear that the current financial crisis (owing millions to Berkshire Bank) has a complex, tragic and compelling backstory

Gordon Travers, the only member of The Mount’s board of trustees to live in the Berkshires (he has a weekend house in Sheffield), wanted to focus on the future. “It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback,” he said. “In hindsight the wrong decisions were made.” One of those decisions was the 2005 purchase of Edith Wharton’s library for $2.6 from an English book collector without having the money in the bank to pay for it. “It was something of a Hail Mary,” said Travers.

Travers explained that the Berkshire Bank was doing its best to be patient with The Mount, but that the bank has a fiduciary responsibility to its stockholders and employees. He said the threat of foreclosure is very real and that the bank would probably have no trouble finding someone with deep pockets who would like to buy the property and turn it into a private residence. Having raised $580,000 in the past five weeks, the board hopes that it can convince the bank to hold on until the summer when The Mount will be able to use admission receipts to pay for operating expenses while continuing its quest to raise $3 million to satisfy the bank and win a $3 million matching grant (payable over five years) from an anonymous donor.

“We’re in a triage situation,” said Travers, who noted that the five member board needs to be three or four times larger. “It is of critical importance to us that a number of these new positions be filled by local Berkshire people with the time, commitment, vision and fund-raising capability to achieve success,” he said.

An excerpt of a Posting by Dan Shaw on 04/02/08

Our Towns

Susan Stava for The New York Times

Alison Broda practicing Zen archery at the Garrison Institute on Friday. It is a discipline combining intention and action, focus and carry-through.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: March 30, 2008

GARRISON, N.Y.

The idea of the Zen archery is to combine intention and action, focus and carry-through. Physical action slows. The archer and the bow become one. The art becomes artless. The archer evolves through perseverance and discipline. Or so they say.

It’s not much of a stretch to go from the visiting Zen archers to the institute’s own initiative, an ambitious program next month to look at how the ideas of Mohandas K. Gandhi relate to current environmental issues, particularly climate change.

So there’s nothing unexpected in the current melding of Gandhi and climate change, tied to the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Philip Glass’s opera about Gandhi, “Satyagraha” (“The Power of Truth”), beginning April 11. After that is a private conference at the institute, followed by a free public event on April 13 at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan including scholars, environmental leaders and artists, among them Mr. Glass.

Remarkably, almost a century ago, Gandhi’s writings were full of thoughts on the environment.

“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. … If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

From Storm King to Woodstock to the institutes and ashrams that dot the landscape today, the Hudson Valley has played a remarkable and barely understood role in the evolution of the nation’s environmental and personal consciousness over the past half-century.

Proceeds to Benefit Sam’s Point Preserve and The Nature Conservancy

Cragsmoor, NY — March 27, 2008 — On Saturday, May 10th from 4-8 pm, six local artists, CRAGSMOOR SIX (C-6), taking inspiration from the natural beauty of Sam’s Point Preserve, will create a spontaneous collaborative painting, comprised of 90 individual canvases joined as one.

As the painting takes shape the audience will be invited to bid on individual canvases, while enjoying refreshments from acclaimed area restaurants and wineries.

“Art fueled the land conservation movement historically in the Hudson Valley, and today artists continue to engage people in the beauty of our region,” said Cara Lee, director of the Shawangunk Ridge Program for The Nature Conservancy’s Eastern New York Chapter.

For more information about the event, please contact Heidi Wagner at (845) 647-7989 x101, or hwagner@tnc.org

FrOGS News Alerts

Eighteen Acres of Promise (2008)

by Judy Kelley-Moberg

FrOGS has been able to acquire an 18-acre patch of uplands and floodplain meadow bordering Quaker Brook at the corner of Haviland Hollow Road and East Branch Road in the Town of Patterson.

Quaker Brook, sometimes called Haviland Hollow Brook, runs through the 18-acre parcel before turning south to join the East Branch of the Croton River in the Great Swamp.

Quaker Brook is not only a major artery that feeds the “heart” of the Great Swamp but it’s also an ecologically unique and important waterway. Fishermen know this brook as a pristine trout stream thought to be one of the rare places where native trout populations can still survive.