Community Calendar

Internationally recognized landscape architect/artist W. Gary Smith kicks off annual lecture series August 1

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is now able to present widely known experts from the realms of horticulture, the arts, sciences, and other fields of interest, thanks to both the space provided by its new Bosarge Family Education Center and a generous gift from Ina and Lew Heafitz to create the endowed lecture series that bears their name. Inaugurating the series will be Toronto-based landscape architect W. Gary Smith, whose award-winning projects grace many of this continent’s most renowned botanical gardens.

The Heafitzes believe that beyond the delightful sights, sounds, and smells of the Gardens, the learning and educational experiences are a part of watching the Gardens grow, and in the final analysis may be the most enduring. Smith will present a thought-provoking, beautifully illustrated lecture, “From Art to Landscape: Unleashing Creativity in Garden Design,” on Wednesday, August 10, at 2 p.m. in the Education Center. The program, which will be followed by an iced-tea reception, is free for Gardens members and $12 for non-members; reservations are requested.

In a world where designers solve problems and artists raise questions, Smith will help his audience step beyond the impulse to create “solutions” in garden design and instead find delight in creating more questions than answers. After exploring a visual vocabulary of shapes, patterns, and processes that drive the Universe, he’ll look at artists’ techniques for observing and recording it all. Along the way, his audience will learn how to unleash the artist within, making meaningful gardens that express the relationship between local sense of place and one’s own creative spirit. After the lecture, Smith's books will be available for sale and signing.

As both an artist and landscape architect, Gary Smith celebrates the connections between people and plants, combining art and horticulture to explore ecological design and artistic abstraction. Current projects include the Santa Fe Botanical Garden; the children’s gardens for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas; and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as well as garden restoration at the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware.

A current project of Smith’s is the new children’s garden at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Recently completed work includes the Southern Highlands Reserve, a native plant garden and preserve in Lake Toxaway, North Carolina; the Texas Arboretum at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center; conservatory gardens at Callaway Gardens in Georgia; and the Wister Rhododendron Garden at Tyler Arboretum in Pennsylvania.

Smith is the 2011 recipient of the American Horticultural Society’s Landscape Design Award, and his new book From Art to Landscape: Unleashing Creativity in Garden Design has received a 2011 AHS Book Award. Also in 2011, the Association of Professional Landscape Designers awarded him a Gold Award for “Innisfree,” a private estate garden of native plants in central Virginia, and a Merit Award for “Art Goes Wild,” an exhibition of abstract sculptures made of native plants and materials harvested from native plants, at the New England Wild Flower Society’s Garden in the Woods.

He has also received a Gold Medal award from the Association of Professional Landscape Designers for the Tropical Mosaic Garden at the Naples Botanical Garden in Naples, Florida, as well as their Award of Distinction. His design for Peirce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens, an “art-form” garden of native plants, was honored with a Design Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

“We’re thrilled that we can plan to have renowned guest speakers,” says Executive Director Maureen Heffernan. “We want to create not-to-be-missed lecture events that stimulate thought and discussion.”

For reservations for Gary Smith’s illustrated presentation, call 207-633-4333, visit www.MaineGardens.org, or stop by the Visitor Center, off Barters Island Road in Boothbay.

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