Ecological Gardening Symposium — Rooted in Place

Berkshire Botanical Garden will hold their 10th Annual Ecological Gardening Symposium: Rooted in Place with the theme Pollutants and Climate — Hopeful Applications in Berkshire County.

“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands but also for our relationship with the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants”

In collaboration with Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT), Berkshire Botanical Garden presents Rooted in Place, our annual ecological symposium. This year we will inspire participants with insights into our ecological past, present and future. We will explore the impact of pollutants and climate change on the Berkshires and beyond and reflect on what is classically known as the Four Elements of Nature: earth, water, air and fire.

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Full Schedule

9 to 10 a.m. — Mohican herbalist and author Misty Cook of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community on native plants as medicine (pre-recorded presentation done for the program).

Misty Cook, MS, of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, works with plant medicines and continues to pass on traditional knowledge by teaching, giving presentations, and through her book Medicine Generations. During this event, participants will learn from Misty about history of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans Medicines and how her people preserved them. Misty will focus on the Medicines used throughout the Winter months, discussing gathering, preserving, usage and questions.

10 to 10:15 a.m. Break

10:15 to 11:30 a.m. Eloise Gayer of the Morris Arboretum will speak on her practice of integrating native plant ecological horticulture into the land and how this practice reverses some of the destruction caused by invasive plants. Brittany Ebeling of BEAT will talk about herbicides and how the composition of this pollutant affects our plants, ground and surface water.

Eloise Gayer is the Rosarian at the Morris Arboretum and Gardens of the University of Pennsylvania, a former private estate founded in 1887 and now a distinguished public garden renowned for its educational programming, innovative displays and horticultural research. Eloise has trained at both Chanticleer Garden and Great Dixter House & Gardens in formal horticulture, and has learned and developed ecological horticultural practices at Stoneleigh: a natural garden which she hopes to apply and teach in all her future career endeavors.

Brittany Ebeling, BEAT’s deputy director, supports the organization’s programs and administration. Brittany has worked as a researcher, writer, and advocate with various non-profit and inter-governmental organizations, particularly on housing issues, collective land ownership models, and anti-capitalist economic and monetary systems thinking.

She has an undergraduate degree in International Economics and Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s in Urban Policy from Sciences Po Paris, where she was the 2018 Michel David-Weill laureate. Brittany lives in Sheffield, Massachusetts, where she rock climbs, bicycle tours, and co-owns Little Bean Farm and Pantry, the Berkshires’ first veganic farm, with her partner Ben.

11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. — As the interconnectedness of nature reveals, light pollution is also ecologically destructive. Tim Brothers, an MIT astronomer and manager of the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory, will discuss the unexpected loss in plant life resulting from light pollution. Some examples of lights and guidance on lighting for a better future will be included in the presentation.

Tim Brothers is the Observatory Manager at MIT’s Wallace Astrophysical Observatory where he teaches students how to observe the night sky with robotic telescopes. He also co-founded the Massachusetts chapter of DarkSky International, where he is primarily focused on outdoor lighting policy for communities in the region. Tim was recently awarded a minor planet designation, asteroid (28992) Timbrothers, for his work on asteroid detection. He and his wife are also quite busy raising their two kids (and quite a few chickens) on their rural homestead where they can just barely still see the Milky Way.

12:15 to 1 p.m. Lunch provided @ $15pp

1 to 1:45 p.m. — Wilding the land and restoring natural processes has potential in the management of extreme fires and the smoke pollution that goes along with them, something that will be further considered by Sam Gilvarg, PhD student at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, using the “One-Health” approach: human, animal and environmental systems all working together for a more just and free ecology.

Sam Gilvarg is exploring how wildland fire can be utilized to promote the regeneration and survival of pyrophytic— or, fire adapted— plant species and ecosystems, while simultaneously mitigating the threat posed by ticks to human communities through the creation and maintenance of abiotic environmental conditions that are unsuitable to tick survival.

1:45 to 3 p.m. — As land, air and fire all end up in water, the reciprocity of the elemental interconnectedness calls for a review of water pollutants and remedies. Jane Winn of BEAT will report on the clean up of our region’s freshwater resources and how that impacts the Berkshire ecology. Erik Reardon will present “At the Water’s Edge: Riparian Buffers and Nature-Based Solutions to Stream Corridor Restoration.”

Watershed protection organizations in New England and beyond work at the intersection of land and water. Land use decisions can have profound downstream impacts for stream ecology and the aquatic species that require clean, cold, and connected habitat to complete their life cycle and produce the next generation.

In this presentation, Erik Reardon—Berkshire Watershed Director with the Housatonic Valley Association–will discuss the ways waterfront buffers comprised of zones of native trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers along a riverbank or lakeshore, serve vital ecosystem functions that transcend the boundaries between the aquatic and terrestrial.

In addition, as heavy rain and flooding events become a more consistent feature of our changing climate, Erik will emphasize the critical work of protecting our stream banks against the violent seasonal flows that erode and incise our stream banks, fill channels with sediment, and degrade habitat for our native species like eastern brook trout.

Jane Winn was selected to be the Berkshire Environmental Action Team’s Executive Director in 2006. Jane has a Bachelor’s Degree in biology and a Master’s Degree in Zoology. Her scientific background and passion for the environment brought her together with a small band of outraged environmentalists who saw environmental destruction continuing with regulators allowing the illegal destruction. This group believed that the law was supposed to prevent this sort of destruction and took action to make that happen. That is how the Berkshire Environmental Action Team started back in 2002.

Erik Reardon joined the Housatonic Valley Association as the Berkshire Watershed Director on February 1st, 2024. Erik studied environmental history at the University of Maine where, in 2016, he earned a PhD focused on the historical dimensions of dam removal and fisheries restoration in New England.

In July of 2021, his book, Managing the River Commons: Fishing and New England’s Rural Economy, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Recently, Erik also worked with the Adirondack Experience Museum, the Wild Center, the Nature Conservancy, and the Adirondack Diversity Initiative to develop and direct a collaborative, public-facing project series titled “Adirondacks for All” which explored the region’s history and present-day reality through an expansive lens of environmental justice.

3 p.m. — Rooting: a meditative closing, guided by community mindfulness-in-nature facilitator, Sandrine Harris.

Sandrine Harris (SEP, GCFP, RSMT/E) is a community facilitator offering public programs and private sessions in healing trauma and remembering our belonging within the natural world. With long-term training in the neurobiology of trauma and chronic pain, she collaborates in an embodiment and meditative process to foster adaptive resilience, with folks all over the world.

Locally, she collaborates with organizations devoted to earth stewardship, climate awareness, and mutual care, including: Berkshire Botanical Garden, The Trustees, Berkshire Natural Resources Council (BNRC), and VIM (Volunteers in Medicine) Berkshires. She stewards unceded Stockbridge Munsee Mohican land in the southern Berkshires, where she continues her own healing alongside her cat companion, Willow.

BBG provides information, education and inspiration concerning the science, art and joy of gardening and its role in preserving the environment. Berkshire Environmental Action Team envisions a world where all people recognize their interconnectedness to, and dependence on, the natural world.