Program & Workshop Events

Bring whimsy and charm to your garden. Break out the craft supplies and join us for virtual fairy time! We’ll get creative and build our own clay fairy doors.

Bring whimsy and charm to your garden. Break out the craft supplies and join us for virtual fairy time! We’ll get creative and build our own clay fairy doors.

Cost of Admission:  Free- WEBINAR, please sign up on our website. 

High summer in the mountains is something we celebrate, especially after a long winter with months of snow cover. In this presentation Arboretum horticulturist, Ryan Moore will discuss about a dozen native tree species, where they grow, and how to identify them. We will look closely at leaves, branching, bark and seeds.

Cost of Admission: Suggested donation $10 for Non-Members

Note: This program is limited to 20 participants. Pre-registration is required.

Best known as the man who secretly rigged a wire between the towers of the World Trade Center, Philippe Petit has performed on the high wire at majestic sites all over the world, including Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Lincoln Center and Grand Central Station. He personally rigs every wire on which he walks and has thus become a self-taught engineer and Master Rigger. His life depends on knots.

In Philippe’s Knot-Tying Workshop at the Arboretum, you’ll learn hands on: a vicious knot no one can untie, the best one to join ropes of different diameters, a shoelace knot that won’t loosen, an improvised set of handcuffs and, of course, how to tie your camel to a palm tree while still being ready in a half a second to flee an attacking horde.

Photo Credit: Howard Schatz

Cost of Admission: Suggested donation $10 for Non-Members

Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature, Forthcoming, Summer 2021

Published by the Library of American Landscape History

In Beauty of the Wild, Darrel Morrison tells stories of people and places that have nourished his career as a teacher and a designer of nature-inspired landscapes. Growing up on a small farm in southwestern Iowa, Morrison was transported by the subtle beauties of the native prairie landscape—the movement of grasses in the wind, clouds across the sky, their shadows over the plain. As a graduate student at University of Wisconsin–Madison, he encountered the Curtis Prairie, one of the first places in the world where ecological restoration was practiced. There he saw the beauty inherent in ecological diversity.

For more than six decades, Morrison has drawn inspiration from the varied landscapes of his life—from the Iowa prairie to Texas prickly pear scrub to the maple-beech-hemlock forests of Door County, Wisconsin, to the banks of the Oconee River in Piedmont Georgia. He has been guided as well by the teachings of Jens Jensen, who believed that we can’t successfully copy nature but can get a theme from it and use key species to evoke that essential feeling. In native plant gardens at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Morrison has blended communities of native plants in distillations of prairie, woodland, and coastal meadow. At Storm King Art Center, his landscapes capture the essence of prairie grasslands and native meadows. These ever-evolving compositions were designed to reintroduce diversity, natural processes, and naturally occurring patterns—the “beauty of the wild”—into the landscape.

DARREL MORRISON is a renowned landscape architect and educator whose ecology-based approach to design has influenced generations of practitioners.