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February 10, 10am Winter Tracking with Josh Hardt (Orwell Free Library)

Learn what questions to ask to decipher your next trail, plus tips and tricks to take your tracking to the next level.

March 21, 7pm – The Many Meanings of Maple (Platt Memorial Library)

This presentation examines the many meanings of maple sugaring. Maple is enormously important to Vermont’s economy, ecology, and heritage. Champlain College professor Michael Lange will discuss sugaring ethnographically, based on over five years of research among sugarmakers all over the state, to learn from them what sugaring really means to Vermont.  Rather than discussing the practical aspects of sugaring, such as how to tap a tree or how an evaporator works, his talk focuses on how and why maple has become so important to Vermont’s identity, and how and why it helps us shape who we are as Vermonters.

April 18, 7pm Birds of Orwell and Beyond – with the Otter Creek Audubon Society

(Orwell Free Library)

“The bees are the color; everything else is black and white.” – Kirk Webster, Bridport beekeeper.

Beekeeping goes back 10,000 years, but bees have been much in the news recently as a multi-pronged scourge has devastated many of the nation’s 2.5 million colonies. Meanwhile, hobby beekeeping has grown exponentially in the country.

Bill Mares, writer, and a beekeeper for 45 years, will tell of the origins and evolution of beekeeping, sometimes referred to as “farming for intellectuals,” with a particular emphasis on his research in Vermont.

October  17, 7PM New England Impressions: Art and the Making of Regional Identity, 1885-1950 with William Hosley (Orwell Free Library)

For several generations, aspiring New England artists used our history, landscape, environment, and traditional industries as subject matter and muse–drawing inspiration from their environment and helping to shape New England’s image at home and abroad. Some were realists, others impressionists, while many were drawn to genres of daily life. What they shared was a reverence for place, past, and sesonality and ideas associated with New England’s epic heritage.

William Hosley tells the story of the painters, print-makers, and photographers who pictured our world “New Englandly.”

November 7, 7pm Historic Gardens of Ticonderoga with Stuart Lilie (Platt Memorial Library)

From soldier’s vegetable plots to whole hospital gardens, from hotel fruit delicacies to Colonial Revival splendor, examine the many stories of gardens at Fort Ticonderoga and Mount Independence. As Vice President of Public History and Operations at Fort Ticonderoga, Stuart Lilie manages the presentation and cultivation of the many gardens of the King’s Garden at Fort Ticonderoga.