Plein Air Days

Friday-Monday, June 9-12, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Attention artists! Come join us for the annual Plein Air Days long weekend. Bring your art supplies and easels, and admission is free! You must make reservations, but you’re welcome to come any or all of the four days.

Location: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens 105 Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Price: Free

Construct A Garden Tuteur

Garden tuteurs, garden obelisk, or trellis—no matter what term you're familiar with, this creative pyramidal structure supports edible or ornamental vines. These practical features add vertical interest and provide visible textural contrast, line, and structure to a garden. Join us just in time to support seasonal vines and make your own rustic wooden tuteur to add to your garden space. Instructor and CMBG Horticulturist, Kelsie Birney, will provide all needed supplies and lead students through the constructing process. Please bring your own gloves, clippers, and battery-operated or cord drill, if you have one handy. While this class is a part of our adult education offerings, it is open to advanced younger students, ages 14 and older.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Kelsie Birney
Price: $68 / $85

Sustainable Horticultural Practices

Friday, June 16 & Saturday, June 24 | Ecosystem balance, soil, and water quality are all influenced by our landscape practices. This extensive, two-day sustainable horticulture class will help students apply the principles of ecologically safe gardening practices to their garden or landscape. Through online and in-person sessions, we’ll examine composting, techniques for eco-friendly soil amendments, alternatives to pesticide and herbicides, responsible native plant acquisition, erosion control methods, plant forms for function, and so much more.

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Location: Online / at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens 132 Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Irene Barber
Price: $130 / $155

Pastel Painting in the Gardens

Tuesday-Thursday, June 20-22, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

In a workshop designed for all levels of experience, participants will be inspired by beautiful gardens while learning to create vibrant paintings with the pastel medium. Led by artist Diana Rogers, this three-day course will introduce beginning artists to pastels with pure pigments, the perfect complement to the colorful bounty of nature. For experienced painters, the course offers techniques for loosening up compositions and using bold color and painterly mark-making. Diana will offer demonstrations and plenty of one-on-one attention and encouragement at the easel. Using fun exercises, participants will learn how to use color selection, simplified compositions, and mark-making to create expressive garden paintings. We will paint indoors in the classroom and spend time outdoors observing nature and preparing sketches. Participants will have plenty of time to paint and complete fully developed paintings.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Diana Rogers
Price: $285 / $305

Integrated Pest and Disease Management

This one-day class will cover extensive ground on the insects, diseases, and deficiencies found on plants in the landscape. Applying principles of integrated pest management (IPM), the course will help students identify, monitor, and prevent poor plant health and, when necessary, deal with treatments. State Horticulturalist Gary Fish will emphasize preventative measures and help students determine methods to mitigate further plant-pest problems.

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Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Gary Fish
Price: $48 / $60

Make a Container Garden Bursting with Color

Color, color, and more color! Join us and learn how visually stunning color combinations can be achieved effectively and harmoniously in container garden design. Sometimes too much color can be overpowering, but color can be expressed in many ways—through hue, tone, shape, and texture, creating wide-ranging visual appeal. Join Brent McHale, container-garden designer and Gardens Horticulturist, to learn how to create your own colorful container garden, one that achieves its effect through flowers, foliage, and seasonal succession. All planting materials will be supplied by the Gardens. The instructor will contact you to ask if you want a shade- or sun-loving plant selection. Please bring your own garden gloves and clippers.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Brent McHale
Price: $68 / $85

Nature Photography In the Gardens with Nathaniel Smalley

Join award-winning photographer Nathaniel Smalley and gain new understanding in composing and capturing the beauty of nature. In this exceptional three-day photo session, tune your creative vision in a blend of both classroom and fieldwork. An in-depth presentation on camera settings will help you maximize the photographic opportunities we’ll encounter in the Gardens, where we’ll work on capturing images of plants and flowers in both landscapes and more intimate scenes. There will be time to process your images in Lightroom or Photoshop, developing them to their full potential. Participants should have a sturdy tripod, a camera with a manual mode setting. Photographers of all skill levels are welcome, but a basic understanding of the functions of their camera’s ISO, aperture, shutter speed, light meter, and histogram is required. *Please note: This is not an introductory course on how to use your camera for the first time.

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Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Nathaniel Smalley
Price: $395 / $420

Plant ID & Ecology: Sedges and Rushes

Sedges and rushes are ubiquitous and ecologically significant elements of our natural landscapes, but lacking showy flowers, they are often overlooked. This class will introduce a number of the common sedges and rushes frequently encountered in woods, wetlands, and meadows, highlighting their subtle variety and visual appeal. Join Ted Elliman, New England botanist and field-study researcher, to learn how to identify sedges and rushes, their functions in our natural landscapes, and how they provide ornamental and ecological benefits to gardens spaces.

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Location: Bosarge Family Education Center / Oak Point Farm
Instructor: Ted Elliman
Price: $40 / $50

Native Plant Guilds Workshop

Choosing native plants for your landscape should be fun and creative, not daunting or complicated! When you consider plants in simple groupings, or guilds, it becomes a lot easier to design a landscape with appealing texture, color, and wildlife value throughout the seasons. Native plant guilds draw on inspiration from natural plant communities in habitats like coastal plains, forests, wetlands, or mountain tops. This field-study and design workshop at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens will guide students through the process of selecting plants according to companionship, seasonal performance, and environmental considerations.

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Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Anna Fialkoff
Price: $36 / $44

Make a Water-Wise Container Garden

Water-wise gardening is another way of referring to designing with water in mind, especially relevant to drought conditions. Water-wise container gardens lend themselves to an exotic and creative assortment of annuals or perennials like succulents, alpines, and plants with fuzzy leaves, leathery-glossy leaves, or those with varied color- and textural characteristics. Join Gardens Horticulturist Jen Dunlap for this creative workshop and make your own drought-tolerant container garden. Students are encouraged to bring their own clippers, apron, and garden gloves. While this class is a part of our adult education offerings, it is open to advanced younger students, ages 14 and older.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Jen Dunlap
Price: $68 / $85

Photography: The Art of Flower Portraiture (Sold Out)

Have you ever thought of flower photographs as portraits? Award-winning photographer Kathleen Clemons certainly does, and she will share the equipment and techniques she uses to create her art. Topics will include lens choice, lighting, subject selection, focus issues, aperture choices, selecting a background, and how to simplify a subject to truly capture its natural beauty.

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Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Kathleen Clemons
Price: $95 / $115

Medicinal Plants: Teas & Tinctures (Sold Out)

Join trained herbalist and horticulturist Lesley Paxson for a workshop and field-study examining some of the interesting layers of herbalism, from traditional beliefs to contemporary applications. Come enjoy a tea tasting with plants freshly harvested from the Gardens, harvest medicinal plant cuttings to take home for tea, and, since July offers an abundance of blooms, she'll also demonstrate how a flower essence is made. We’ll stroll the gardens and identify five important medicinal plants historically valuable to human well-being and understand them more intimately with a tincture tasting.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Lesley Paxson
Price: $40 / $48

Is it a Weed? ID & Management

Weeds, by casual definition, are undesired plants found in a certain location. In this class, we will discuss the perception of weeds as well as their identification, cultural management, and ecology. Learning the identity of a “weed” may change the desire to remove it from the landscape as you realize its potential benefits. While sometimes weeds are just misunderstood plants, there are times they can be invasive or toxic, so it is important to properly identify and learn how to manage for these species. Join Delany Pitman, CMBG Horticulturist, in this mixed field-study and lecture class and broaden your awareness of why, what, when, how, and where these plants live and if they can be embraced or must be eradicated from a garden or landscape.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Delaney Pitman
Price: $30 / $36

Make a Container Water Garden

Water gardens are growing in popularity for a number of reasons: to attract wildlife like birds and butterflies, to add a melodic sound feature, to contribute light reflection, to offer a place for personal respite, and to cool down a garden space. Water gardens that incorporate unique and lush plants add bold shapes, forms, colors, defined lines, and textures to a garden space. In class, students will make and take home a small water garden container filled with personally selected plants supplied by the Gardens. We'll talk about the wide variety of plant options, materials, and different kinds of water garden designs. While this class is a part of our adult education offerings, it is open to advanced younger students, ages 14 and older.

Location: Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens 105 Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Courtney Locke
Price: $68 / $85

Deconstructing the Boundaries: A Future of Land & Food Resilience

Presented by Indigo Arts Alliance in partnership with Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.
 
This program is the first symposium in a multi-year collaboration between the two organizations. Indigo Arts Alliance assembled a curated panel of thought leaders and workshop presenters to discuss how Black and Brown communities have always held spiritual, traditional, and cultural relationships to the land. Conversations, demonstrations, and interactive workshops will present experiences from multidisciplinary artists, cultural workers, and members of the local, national, and global community.
 

Through this symposium, we hope to explore and address these three key questions:

  1. How do we evolve our personal, communal, and institutional relationships with land ownership and stewardship?
  2. How do we address and heal the deep distrust that has taken root in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities?
  3. How do we acknowledge and appreciate the ways in which African, Brown, and Indigenous cultural and social systems, as well as spirituality exist outside of settler colonial paradigms?

Founded in 2018, Indigo Arts Alliance (IAA) is a Portland, ME-based, Black-led organization dedicated to professional development and amplification of Black and Brown thought-leadership, vision, and creative practice. As an organization of social practice artists, scholars, and activists, it seeks to strengthen multiracial democracy by cultivating and celebrating art as a key resource for healthy communities, connecting global and local Black and Brown artists, providing an affirming environment for the creation of artwork across disciplines, and promoting engagement through participatory events that bring artists' and activists' work into public conversation on social justice, culture, and community. IAA is the only Black-led, established arts incubator in northern New England. That being the case, they fill a critically important gap in representation lacking in other regional arts and cultural institutions.

Location: Bosarge Family Education Center Botanical Gardens Drive, Boothbay
Instructor: Indigo Arts Alliance
Price: Free