As it has in years past, the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack will offer a respite from the dreary slog through March with its winter lecture series. Titled “Singular Gardens,” this year’s iteration features three distinguished horticulture professionals whose talks will transport landscape enthusiasts to unique New York State gardens.
The series will kick off on March 1 at noon with Kate Kerin, the landscape curator at Innisfree Garden, which has been cited by Rory Stuart, a writer and garden designer, as one of the world’s ten best gardens. Located in Millbrook, N.Y., Innisfree was established by Walter Beck and Marion Burt Beck, who began to work on their country estate in the late 1920s.
They hired the landscape architect Lester Collins in 1938 when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard, and the three of them collaborated on the development of the 185-acre property, which opened to the public in 1960. Collins’s landscape merges the essence of Modernist and Romantic ideas with traditional Chinese and Japanese garden design principles to create a distinctly American stroll garden.
Ms. Kerin’s previous projects include the Wallace Visitor Center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, the Dutchess Golf and Country Club in Poughkeepsie, and many historic estates. She is also the director of recruitment for the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program.
Wave Hill, the public garden that overlooks the Hudson River and the Palisades in the Bronx, will be the subject of a talk by Louis Bauer, its senior director of horticulture, on March 8. Mr. Bauer will discuss “Nature Into Art,” a new book about Wave Hill by Thomas Christopher, a garden writer, with photographs by Ngoc Minh Ngo.
Mr. Bauer previously worked as the director of horticulture at Greenwood Gardens in Short Hills, N.J., where he oversaw the landscape aspects of its recent restoration and revitalized other features of the century-old garden.
“Singular Gardens” will conclude on March 15 with “Wethersfield: A Renaissance Garden in the Hudson Valley,” a talk by Toshi Yano, the garden’s director of horticulture. Wethersfield began as two abandoned farms bought by Chauncey Devereaux Stillman in 1937. A garden enthusiast, conservationist, and equestrian, he developed the property over the next 50 years. The 10-acre garden is nestled in a 1,000-acre estate.
After stints at Stonecrop Gardens and a private estate in Westchester County, Mr. Yano came to Wethersfield in 2019, where his focus has been in part on inducing flowering vines to bloom atop classical statuary.
Each lecture will take place in the summer studio at Madoo starting at noon, and be followed by a reception in the red living room. Tickets are $25, $20 for members, with series tickets available for $65 and $50.
Looking ahead, the seventh annual Madoo in Manhattan Robert Dash Garden Design Lecture will take place on March 24 at a private club, with a talk by Stephen Scanniello, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden Curator at the New York Botanical Garden and the rosarian for Elizabeth Park, the nation’s oldest public rose garden.
