7:30 am |
Continental Breakfast, Bookout Reception Hall
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8:45 am |
Welcome and Introductions
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9:00 am |
Emerging Scholars' Panel
Writing a Sacred Garden, Francis D. Pastorius’ Nature Prints from his Garden in Germantown, Pennsylvania (ca. 1683–1719)
Miranda Elizabeth Mote
Miranda Mote earned her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Her dissertation focuses on the life and papers of Francis D. Pastorius, the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania.
"Something of a Gardiner:" Enslaved Gardeners and Landscapes of Labor in Early Annapolis
Bethany McGlyn
Bethany McGlyn is a Ph.D. student and Jefferson Scholars Foundation Fellow at the University of Virginia, studying slavery, craft labor, and material culture in the 18th-century American South and Atlantic World. She holds an M.A. in American Material Culture from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture and has worked in curatorial departments at Historic Rock Ford, Historic Annapolis, the National Parks Service, and Winterthur.
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10:00 am |
Break
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10:15 am |
Lafayette, Robert and La Grange: the making and restoration of a 19th-century lieux de mémoire
Gabriel Wick
To his peers, Lafayette’s La Grange was remarkable for its apparent simplicity. The general was emphatic that he wished to retire to a farm, not an aristocratic seat. Nonetheless, keenly aware of his status as a public figure, he brought in a fashionable and talented collaborator – the painter, and former royal landscape designer, Hubert Robert. The artist’s interventions were modest, yet his very presence casts the general’s intentions in a different light. Certainly, La Grange was to be a profitable and rationally organized estate, where the general might receive his friends and admirers, but was he also using it to define his own image for posterity? As we prepare to restore the landscape of La Grange for the very first time, it is now more critical than ever to understand precisely what image and message Lafayette himself wished this landscape to convey.
Gabriel Wick is advising the Chambrun Foundation on the restoration of Lafayette’s La Grange in France. He received his doctorate in history from University of London – Queen Mary, and holds advanced degrees in landscape architecture and historic conservation from UC Berkeley and ÉNSA-Versailles. His research focuses on the role of public spaces and landscape gardens in the political life of pre-Revolutionary France. He has written a number of books and articles on 18th-century landscape gardens and recently curated an exhibition on the designed landscapes of Hubert Robert. He teaches at the Paris campuses of New York University and Parsons / The New School.
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11:15 am |
Art and Nature: Homes, Gardens, Museums and the Human Spirit
Carrie Rebora Barratt
George Washington breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived at Mount Vernon, coming down the Potamac River to the sight of not only home, but a place of creative restoration. His project inspired countless others–home owners, artists with studios, museum founders–to create places of culture writ large. Think of George Washington’s project in relation to Henry Francis DuPont, Henry Clay Frick, Frederic Church, and Philip Johnson. Mount Vernon’s model inspired Henry Huntington and Isabella Stewart Gardner. In the modern museum world, the connection between art and nature founded the great museums in public parks: The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Oldfields (now Newfields) and so many others. A look at the vital connection of art and nature is critical to human health, wellness, joy and resilience, more important than ever.
Carrie Rebora Barratt, an historian of American Art, enjoyed a career that led to leadership at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the New York Botanical Garden. At The Met, she rose from summer intern to Deputy Director, immersing herself in the vital importance of museum work in our world. In 2018, she took over the New York Botanical Garden as ninth CEO and President, the first woman to hold the position in its 127-year history, leading a 250-acre campus of art and nature. She is now the founder of The Solace Project, fostering advocacy for art and nature, and providing interim leadership to organizations going through difficult change in this time of the great resignation.
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12:15 pm |
Lunch, Founders' Terrace
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1:45 pm |
Keynote: The Dazzling Continuum: Bridging the Past and Future in the Historic Landscape
Thomas L. Woltz
Land holds the cultural marks of humankind; fragile traces that connect us to our dynamic past, often concealed through varied maintenance regimes or by intentional erasure. Over twenty years of practice, Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) has developed a research-based process that reveals the intertwining layers of cultural and ecological history through contemporary design. The compelling power of these complex stories is manifested through design which provides an expansive platform for addressing pressing issues of today including racial equity, regenerative agriculture, and climate extremes. In his keynote, Thomas L. Woltz will present a range of projects in historic and cultural landscapes, revealing the firm’s process and the narratives that inform the designs. These projects include Olana, the home of Frederick Church in Hudson, NY; Sylvester Manor, a former slave owning plantation on Shelter Island, NY; and Centennial Park in Nashville, TN.
Landscape architect Thomas L. Woltz has forged a body of work that integrates the beauty and function of built forms with an understanding of complex biological systems and restoration ecology. As principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, Woltz has infused narratives of the land into the places where people live, work, and play, engendering stewardship and inspiring connections between people and the natural world.
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2:45 pm |
Break
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3:15 pm |
Conserving the Royal Splendours
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
Few British landscapes are so rich in historical associations, or have been so celebrated, so visited and the subject of so many panegyrics as Hampton Court; and fewer still retain attractions so uncommon and yet so varied and numerous – from ranges of humble Tudor courtyards to miles of grand and venerable avenues – which chart so comprehensively five centuries of landscape change. Todd will discuss his role in some of the most dramatic landscape improvements which have taken place in the palace gardens in the wake of the devastating fire of 1986, including the redevelopment of the King’s Privy Garden, the replanting of the Long Water Avenue (est.1662), the re-establishment of the Lower Orangery Garden and the re-forming of the New Kitchen Garden.
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect, historian, author and collector based in London. He is Gardens Adviser to Historic Royal Palaces and has been involved in most major landscape initiatives at Kew, Kensington and Hampton Court Palaces. He is currently redesigning the gardens at the Morgan Library in New York City.
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4:15 pm |
Landscape in a Time of War and Peace
John Phibbs
The title of this conference calls on a belief, shared by all humanity, that those are truly blessed who live in a time of peace and horticultural plenty. Never is this truth more apparent than in time of war. Just as F. L. Olmsted’s vision of a new kind of green city sprang from his terrible experiences in the Civil War, so 50 years earlier, his hero, the English landscape gardener Humphry Repton (1752-1818), forged a new relationship with Nature and a new way of organising society out of the equally terrible European war of 1793-1815. Repton was the last of the three great figures of English landscape gardening, preceded by William Kent and Capability Brown (1716-1783), and this talk will do justice both to the claims made on his behalf and to the remarkable body of work that is his legacy.
John Phibbs is the principal of Debois Landscape Survey Group, which specializes in the management and understanding of historic landscapes – generally, places associated with English country houses. In 2016, Rizzoli published his Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape, which has sold over 9,000 copies. In 2017, Historic England, in partnership with the National Trust (UK), published his more detailed analysis Place-Making, the Art of Capability Brown. John is currently writing parallel books on Brown’s successor, Humphry Repton, which will be published in 2021 and 2023. John was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in 2017 for services to landscape architecture.
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5:45 pm |
Reception, Mansion Bowling Green
Mansion Open House
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7:00 pm |
Dinner, Upper Garden
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