Innisfree Lecture Series

The “marginal garden” explores the boundaries between the wild and the cultivated, particularly the interface of where native plant species meet naturalising garden ones. Such places have ideally achieved a reasonably stable co-existence. Marginal gardens, including Innisfree, can be exciting and surprising, and can challenge our conceptions of both what ‘nature’ and ‘cultivation’ are.

Innisfree trustee Brad Roeller believes that by learning about the environmental and biological factors which influence deer and their food choices, homeowners and professionals can implement informed strategies for deer-proofing their landscapes. Drawing on over forty years of gardening in deer country and his findings in the Deer Browse Garden he created at the Cary Institute funded by a ten-year grant from Cornell, Brad will share hard-won lessons on how to deter deer from browsing ornamental plants.

Federal Twist is set on a ridge above the Delaware River in western New Jersey, USA. It is a naturalistic garden that has loose boundaries and integrates closely with the natural world that surrounds it. It has no utilitarian or leisure uses (no play areas, swimming pools or outdoor dining) and the site is not an obvious choice for a garden (heavy clay soil, poorly drained: quick death for any plants not ecologically suited to it).

Join painter and art historian John McGiff to explore the evolution of Romantic ideals in art. In 17th century Europe, when formal baroque gardens like André Le Nôtre’s Vaux-le-Vicomte were being built that express the rational order and mathematical clarity of the Age of Reason, the fine arts began to look at nature differently.

Help us celebrate National Poetry month with poet Paul Kane, who will discuss the convergence of poetry, nature, and ecology in Romantic ideology and how these ideas can be read in the Innisfree landscape. A professor of English and Environmental Studies at Vassar College, Paul is a scholar of both American and Australian literature.

Those who know his work think of landscape architect Lester Collins as a modernist, even a minimalist. Those who know Innisfree think of its connections to the gardens of ancient China and Japan. Innisfree and Collins’ larger body of work nevertheless draw deeply on the ideas and ideals of the Romantic Era, celebrating nature and the deep, emotional connection between humans and the natural world.