QBARS - v34n2 Speakers at 1980 Annual Meeting

Speakers At 1980 Annual Meeting
Richard Brooks, Concord, MA.

The 1980 ARS Annual Meeting will feature a series of outstanding speakers from the New England area, on topics related to the convention theme, "Success with Rhododendrons: Lessons from the New England Experience .

From 1958 to 1967 John Cowles was horticulturist at the Dexter estate in Sandwich, then under the ownership of Stanley Berns. During that tenure, his goals encompassed systematic selection and propagation of superior plants on the estate, as well as a breeding program based on the Dexter material plus yakushimanum and a number of modern hybrids. Since 1967 he has been horticulturist at the Hunnewell estate and arboretum in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Heman Howard, while on the staff of the Arnold Arboretum, served between 1967 and 1979 as part-time horticultural advisor for the restoration of the Dexter estate after its acquisition by Heritage Plantation of Sandwich. From 1970 until his retirement in 1977, he was full-time horticulturist for Heritage Plantation, and now serves as Horticultural Consultant and as a member of their Advisory Board.

Author of A Guide to New England's Landscape and Southern New England: A Sierra Club Naturalist's Guide , Neil Jorgensen is a professor and Director of the Curriculum Resource Center at Wheelock College in Boston, a recognized authority on environmental education, and an avid rhododendron grower at his home in Harvard, Massachusetts.

Edmund Mezitt, president of Weston Nurseries in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, has been actively engaged for several decades in an extensive program of hybridizing rhododendrons, azaleas and kalmia, aimed at increasing the number and variety of superior plants in these genera suitable for rigorous climates. He was a charter member and first president of the Massachusetts Chapter ARS, and was honored last year by award of the American Horticultural Society's Commercial Citation.

Already familiar to most ARS members is the name of Gustav Mehlquist. Dr. Mehlquist is retired professor of Botany and Plant Breeding at the University of Connecticut, and was a charter member and first president of the Connecticut Chapter ARS. He has been growing and breeding rhododendrons for a good deal longer than twenty years (despite the title of his talk). He has participated in the Breeders Roundtable for several years, is a director of the ARS and of the Rhododendron Species Foundation, and the recipient of Gold Medal awards from the American Orchid Society, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and the ARS.

Peter Shaw Ashton was appointed Director of the prestigious Arnold Arboretum in Boston in 1978, after eleven years on the faculty at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Dr. Ashton, a graduate of Cambridge University, is also Arnold Professor of Botany and Dendrology at Harvard and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Linnaean Society of London. He has extensively studied, lectured and written on the botany. of the Asian tropics.

In the heart of New England - southern New Hampshire near the Vermont border - Kristen Fenderson has been operating a landscape design and contracting business for fifteen years. He is a past president of the New England Rock Garden Society and is currently  president of the Eastern Chapter of the American Primrose Society. Kris is also deeply into the preparation of a new American book on primroses.

Joseph Hudak, a landscape architect for twenty-six years associated with the Olmsted firm in Brookline, Massachusetts, is now in independent practice. For eighteen years he has taught plant material identification at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and has lectured extensively on design and horticultural topics. He is the author of Gardening with Perennials Month by Month and Trees for Every Purpose , the latter to be published in the spring of 1980.

H. Lincoln Foster, well known to many ARS members as the author of Rock Gardening , is a charter member and former officer of the Connecticut Chapter ARS, as well as past president of the American Rock Garden Society. He is a hybridizer of rhododendrons, as well as phlox, saxifraga and primula. Lincoln has been honored by the American Rock Garden Society (Le Piniec Award), the Garden Club of America (De Bevoise Medal), the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (Silver Medal), the ARS (Bronze Medal) and the Arthur Hoyt Scott Foundation (Garden and Horticultural Award).

Each of these authorities will have something unique to offer our group; we hope that you will take advantage of their contributions by attending all speaker sessions.