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Speakers Program

Each year, CHS Board Members develop an outstanding speaker program. Searching the world, CHS staff and board contract with speakers - many of whom are nationally known for their horticul­tural contributions - to make presentations at one of the ten regular meetings. Members enjoy intriguing topics, such as garden design or how to find rare plants, for example. Experts in their fields, CHS speakers often boast a resume filled with lists of their books, articles and media experiences.

CHS regular meetings offer a time to share experiences with and seek advice from fellow gardeners, gain new ideas and inspiration from informative speakers, see slide shows of plants new to the trade, participate in plant raffles, and keep yourself up-to-date with the world of horticulture.  

 Monthly Meeting

Members and nonmembers alike will enjoy our regular meetings. Please join us for a socializing and learning experience you'll remember fondly.  (socialize and browse through books, seeds and catalogs beginning at 7:30p.m.) Emanuel Synagogue, 160 Mohegan Drive, West Hartford .

Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love
September 16 – Speaker Julie Moir Messervy of Saxtons River, Vt.

Julie Moir Messervy has an invitation: When you attend her presentation, come prepared with an outdoor design problem that needs solving.

“I’d like people to think about design problems that aren’t working for them,” says the internationally acclaimed landscape designer and author. Her talk, she says, will be “like Landscape Design 101,” in which she’ll discuss how to use the space around homes in “absolutely simple and clear and easy-to-understand language.”

To say that Julie, who has more than three decades of experience and has written six books, knows how to demystify landscape design is an understatement. She deconstructs some design principles in her 2009 book, “Home Outside: Creating the Landscape You Love,” from which her talk derives. Her previous book with architect Sarah Susanka, “Outside the Not So Big House,” is a consistent best-seller at Amazon, while other works, “The Magic Land,” “The Inward Garden” and “Contemplative Gardens,” have received literary distinctions.

Her most recent book, “The Toronto Music Garden: Inspired by Bach,” chronicles from its inception a one-of-a-kind, award-winning public garden created with cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The six garden movements are said to mirror the form, feeling and structure of J.S. Bach’s “First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello.” The sound garden was completed in 1999 and received a Leonardo Da Vinci award for innovation and creativity in 2005.

Her most recent big project is Hidden Hollow, an interactive, multi-sensory family garden being created at Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, Mass.

Julie’s career got off to an inauspicious start. She moved with her family to Wilton, Conn., from Illinois when she was 11 years old. It was summer. She had no friends, so she decided to plant a big vegetable garden. She went back to Illinois for a visit, charging her younger brothers with weeding and watering. She returned to Connecticut to find that her parents had bulldozed her garden and replaced it with a tennis court.

“That stopped me dead in my tracks,” she says, adding later that her mother was a great gardener who influenced her mightily.

After graduating from Wilton High School in 1969, Julie went on to earn her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College. While there, she took classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and “opened up a book on Japanese gardens and fell in love.” She received a fellowship with the Luce Scholars Program to study landscape design for 18 months with Japanese garden master Kinsaku Nakane in Kyoto.

She earned two master’s degrees from MIT, in architecture and in city planning, then returned to Japan to continue studying with Nakane. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston hired him to create a garden, he put his apprentice in charge of building it.

“It was a fantastic ending, coming full circle,” says Julie, who is the principal of Julie Moir Messervy Design Studio in Saxtons River, Vt.

Her design work and writings have been featured in countless publications and on television. An affiliate member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, she has received awards from the American Horticultural Society and the Association of Professional Landscape Designers.

Julie lives and breathes design. “Wherever people live, however much money they have, I’d like them to know they have access to good design principles,” she says. “My goal is to get people back outside who don’t know what to do with the land around their home or where to begin.”

Two of Julie’s books, “Home Outside: Creating the Landscape you Love” ($25) and “Outside the Not So Big House” ($20) will be available for purchase at the CHS meeting (cash or check).

To learn more about Julie please go to www.jmmds.com and www.blog.jmmds.com.

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Nonmembers are welcome (with a suggested donation of $5).