Press Release for Blithewold
Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum
What’s the Big Idea?
Landscape Designer Julie Moir Messervy presents...
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Julie Moir Messervy, consumate landscape designer,
author, gifted teacher, garden artist and landscape interpreter
presents an interactive collaboration in design, to benefit
Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum of Bristol,
Rhode Island. The setting for this unique garden design
presentation is the elegant National Historic Landmark Squantum
Club in Providence, overlooking the Narragansett Bay. The
date - Thursday, November 8th, at 11:30 am, with luncheon
served.
Julie Moir Messervy’s national reputation
rests on her skilled expertise in garden design highlighted
not only by her training and work with the Japanese garden
master Kinsaku Nakane of Kyoto, but most recently perhaps,
by her heralded project with famed Cellist Yo-Yo Ma in which
she designed a garden as an interpretation of the first
of Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello. This
televised project became manifest as the Music Garden on
Toronto’s bustling harbor front. The Toronto Music
Garden gave form to many of Ms. Messervy’s beliefs
that the creation of beautiful sacred spaces in the landscape
should spring from the “inward garden” of the
spirit. This then became the title of her second book, published
in 1995, which succeeded Contemplative Gardens, published
in 1990.
Ms. Messervy has worked extensively in and
around Boston. Her work can be seen at the Arnold Arboretum,
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Museum of Fine
Arts at The Garden of the Heart of Heaven.
For Ms. Messervy garden design is always a
journey and her hope is that this day at the Squantum Club
will cause you to take that journey and shift your design
perspective with a quantum leap in creative thinking to
look at gardens and the landscape with new eyes and see
what she calls “The Big Idea.” Gardeners, landscape
designers, landscape architects, and growers alike will
come away from Squantum invigorated and anxious to exercise
their new vision.
The Squantum Association, incorporated in 1872, takes its
unusual name from its wonderful location known to the native
Americans as “Heap of Rocks” but which does
more than justice to such a humble name. This prestigious
private club Squantum rests on a majestic outcrop of rocks
sitting out in the Narragansett Bay offering superb views
of the water and surrounding landscape.
The beneficiary of this gracious day at Squantum
is the horticultural oasis of Blithewold Mansion, Gardens
& Arboretum, a 45-room country home set in 33 acres
of lush gardens on the Narragansett Bay in Bristol. Blithewold
has the rare distinction of being one of only two other
arboreta situated on salt water.
Tickets for “What’s the Big Idea?” are
$75, and seating at the prestigious Squantum Club is limited.
Please call ahead for reservations. For more information,
or to purchase tickets, contact Blithewold at 401-253-2707
or visit the website at www.Blithewold.org.
