Somerville Garden Club

Marion Davis, writer, editor, communications strategist, and photographer, will present a photography tutorial to engage and inspire you to master your cell phone camera’s potential.  She will provide useful information and explain how to capture beautiful images of our own gardens using the settings of your cell phone’s camera.  No photography training needed to attend.  If time permits, she’ll also give a run-through of some great, easy natives she grows.

Marion is a writer, editor, photographer, and communications strategist who works mainly on climate change and sustainable development issues, with clients around the world. Born and raised in Costa Rica, she has loved nature and gardening since she was a child and has been growing things for most of her life. Her current garden, in East Somerville, is packed with native plants and other flowers, shrubs and vines, and a profusion of bugs and birds. She’s been taking photographs her entire adult life, including live music photography, journalistic photos, event photos she did the PR for, and nature and urban scenes photography for fun. In 2022 she started running the Somerville Garden Club’s Instagram account, filling it with pictures she takes on her daily walks through the city. She recently joined the Somerville Urban Forestry Committee and also serves on the board of Walk Massachusetts.

In-person meetings are held the at the Tufts Administration Building, (TAB), 167 Holland Street, second floor, wheelchair accessible. Parking is available for a small fee, and the building is a ten-minute walk from the Davis Square MBTA stop.

All Somerville Garden Club meetings are free and open to the public. 7-9pm. The SGC has been informed that the entry doors to the TAB will be locked at 8pm, effective immediately, including on our meeting days. Please arrange your arrival times accordingly.

Native Plant Guilds

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 introductory talk will help demystify plant selection for your own garden.

Anna Fialkoff joined Connecticut College as Arboretum Horticulturist in December 2023. There she leads student workers, volunteers and staff to steward the Arboretum plant collections and natural areas. Previously as the Ecological Programs Manager at Wild Seed Project in Maine, Anna supervised the creation of the organization’s annual guide publication, worked with partner organizations on native demonstration designs and plantings, and taught educational programs. She got her start in ecological horticulture in 2010 as an apprentice at Native Plant Trust’s botanical garden in Massachusetts. Some years later she became the Senior Horticulturist for the organization. Anna holds a BA in human ecology from College of the Atlantic and an MS in ecological design from The Conway School. Her mission is to utilize her passion for native plants and her skills in education, horticulture and landscape design to connect people to the natural world and inspire them to start gardening for biodiversity.

In-person meetings are held the at the Tufts Administration Building, (TAB), 167 Holland Street, second floor, wheelchair accessible. Parking is available for a small fee, and the building is a ten-minute walk from the Davis Square MBTA stop.

All Somerville Garden Club meetings are free and open to the public. 7-9pm. The SGC has been informed that the entry doors to the TAB will be locked at 8pm, effective immediately, including on our meeting days. Please arrange your arrival times accordingly.